This seems like a very narrow view of shame and guilt to me.
The cognitive processes responsible for the intention to conceal what we call shame are necessarily partitioned from the ones that handle our public, pronormative personas. If someone senses enough optimization for moral concealment in their self and those around them
What about things we conceal, less because of what other people think of those behaviors but because they are inconsistent with how we see ourselves or the standards we like to hold ourselves to?
For example, a singer songwriter was up last last night, had a few drinks, they play a show the next morning which goes great. It’s a hit. Everyone loves them, everyone in the audience is convinced the singer-songwriter played great. But backstage after the show “I shouldn’t have stayed up late, I could have played so much better, this was such an average show. It should have been a great show. I was holding back, I could have sung so much better.”
What does that come under? They certainly feel ashamed, they feel guilt over what they perceive to be the cause of their only-average playing. But this is in spite suffering no social consequences and indeed exceeding the expectations of proper behavior of everyone around them.
They expect that they can call on allies to derail investigations of their bad behavior, on the fly, by instantaneous mutual recognition.
Except frequently I think people who are ashamed don’t expect this. Imagine that instead of concealing they openly admit and apologize for being only average: then what? Aren’t they still ashamed?
This seems like a very narrow view of shame and guilt to me.
What about things we conceal, less because of what other people think of those behaviors but because they are inconsistent with how we see ourselves or the standards we like to hold ourselves to?
For example, a singer songwriter was up last last night, had a few drinks, they play a show the next morning which goes great. It’s a hit. Everyone loves them, everyone in the audience is convinced the singer-songwriter played great. But backstage after the show “I shouldn’t have stayed up late, I could have played so much better, this was such an average show. It should have been a great show. I was holding back, I could have sung so much better.”
What does that come under? They certainly feel ashamed, they feel guilt over what they perceive to be the cause of their only-average playing. But this is in spite suffering no social consequences and indeed exceeding the expectations of proper behavior of everyone around them.
Except frequently I think people who are ashamed don’t expect this. Imagine that instead of concealing they openly admit and apologize for being only average: then what? Aren’t they still ashamed?