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Key points
- Embarrassment, guilt, and shame often feel similar.
- They are all emotions you experience after you feel like you have done something wrong.
- Shame and guilt are stronger than embarrassment.
- Shame often involves aspects of self, while guilt often involves aspects of behavior.
When you feel bad about something you did, there are a variety of emotions you might experience. You might experience embarrassment for making a mistake during a performance. You might feel guilty for making someone else feel bad by making a rude remark. You might be ashamed after drinking too much at a party and saying something rude.
These three emotions—guilt, shame, and embarrassment—are often discussed in similar situations. If you think back to the times that you experienced these emotions, you probably remember similar physical feelings as well.
How are these emotions different?
Many researchers have explored this question using a variety of different methods. I want to focus on two interrelated sets of studies.
The first set of studies was reported in a paper by June Tangney, Rowland Miller, Laura Flicker, and Deborah Barlow in a 1996 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. This paper contrasted the three emotions of shame, guilt, and embarrassment.
In this study, participants wrote about a personal experience in which they experienced shame, guilt, or embarrassment. The aim was to provide as many details about the experience as possible, focusing on what caused the event to lead to the emotion, why it happened, and anything they could remember about the event, what it felt like, and what they were thinking.
Afterward, participants answered several questions about the different emotions they might have been feeling, the strength of those emotions, how they thought about themselves, and how they thought other people were thinking about them.
A central finding is that guilt and shame are more similar to each other than either of them is to embarrassment. When people feel embarrassed, there are often more people around than when they feel either guilt or shame. Indeed, embarrassment is rarely experienced alone. But 10% of guilt experiences and 18% of shame experiences that people described happened when a person was alone.
Embarrassment was also more likely to involve situations when someone was around acquaintances and strangers and less likely to involve close friends and loved ones than guilt or shame. Embarrassment was also judged to be less intense than guilt and shame and the feeling did not last as long. Finally, embarrassment involves a sense of having some flaw or foible exposed to others. In some cases, the event was almost amusing in the retelling, while shame and guilt events were never amusing.
How is shame distinct from guilt? This difference can be seen clearly in the results of studies by Paula Niedenthal, June Tangney, and Igor Gavanski described in a 1994 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
These authors contrasted guilt and shame explicitly. In one study, participants described a situation that caused them to feel either guilt or shame. After describing the scenario in detail, participants listed four things that could have been different about the situation so that it would not have come out as it did.
In general, people focused on changes in their behavior that would have led to a different outcome. However, participants describing a shame scenario were much more likely than those describing a guilt scenario to also focus on some aspect of themselves that led to the problem. The rest of the studies in this paper used other methods to support a similar conclusion. Guilt seems to reflect situations in which a person did an action that led to a bad outcome, while shame is more likely to reflect situations in which a characteristic of a person led to a bad outcome.
These emotions may benefit people by influencing the information they pay attention to after a bad outcome occurs. Embarrassment leads you to pay attention to the social situation. That can help you to be aware of how your action has affected others. If you need to make amends, you can do that. If it drives you to be more self-aware of some of your behavior, that is also a benefit.
Shame and guilt are likely to involve more solitary time, even if you initially experience them around others. As you think about these events, the emotions guide your attention. Guilt is likely to lead you to think about changes in behavior that might enable you to avoid bad outcomes in the future. Shame may give you insight into things you need to work on to change deeper aspects of your motivation that drive you to do things that lead to bad outcomes.
Finally, one problem with guilt and shame is that the behaviors and personal characteristics underlying these emotions may seem so significant that you feel that you cannot change them. You may find yourself replaying scenarios in your head, unable to get beyond the difficulties you caused. When that happens, you should work with a good therapist who can give you strategies to help get beyond this cycle of thoughts and find ways to move forward productively.
References
Tangney, J.P., Miller, R.S., Flicker, L.B. &, Hill, D. (1996). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70(6), 1256-1269.
Niedenthal, P. M., Tangney, J. P., & Gavanski, I. (1994). "If only I weren't" versus "If only I hadn't": Distinguishing shame and guilt in conterfactual thinking. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(4), 585–595. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.67.4.585
