The Psychology of Humiliation

Embarrassment, shame, guilt, and humiliation all imply the existence of value systems. Shame and guilt arise primarily from self-appraisal, whereas embarrassment and humiliation arise from the perceived appraisal of others, even if those others exist only in imagination.

The distinction between embarrassment and humiliation is that embarrassment often results from our own social missteps, whereas humiliation is imposed upon us through the degrading actions of others.

Jamie tells his teacher that he forgot to do his homework. He feels embarrassment. The teacher reveals this to the whole class. Now he feels even greater embarrassment. The teacher makes him sit in a corner facing the wall, and the whole class laughs at him. This time, he feels humiliation. Had the teacher discreetly given Jamie a failing grade, he would have felt not humiliated but offended.

Offence arises primarily from the perception that we have been wronged, insulted, or treated contrary to our values or expectations. Humiliation, on the other hand, arises from the perception that we have been debased, degraded, or stripped of dignity in the eyes of others. Compared with embarrassment, humiliation tends to be more socially exposing and more threatening to our sense of status or self-worth.

The Latin root of ‘humiliation’ is humus, meaning ‘earth’ or ‘dirt’. Humiliation involves the abasement of honour and dignity and, with that, loss of status and standing.

We all make certain status claims, however modest they may be: ‘I am a competent doctor’, ‘I am a happily married mother’, or even ‘I am a human being’. When we are merely embarrassed, our status claims are not seriously undermined—or, if they are, they are easily recovered.

But when we are humiliated, our status claims cannot so readily be recovered because it is our very authority to make them that has been called into question. Usually, a person in the process of being humiliated is left stunned and speechless and, more than that, voiceless. When criticising people, especially people with poor self-esteem, we must find the line between disputing their claims and denying their standing to make those claims.

In short, humiliation is the public failure—or severe undermining—of our status claims. It is the experience of having our dignity, status, or standing publicly diminished, especially in a way that invites contempt, ridicule, or loss of respect. Private failures may lead to shame, grief, or painful self-realisation, but they are humiliating only insofar as we see them through the eyes of others.

Notice that humiliation need not be accompanied by shame. Jesus may have been crucified and humiliated, but he surely did not feel any shame. Secure people with the courage of their convictions rarely feel shame at their humiliation—which is, in essence, an attempt to discredit them and their claims.

The Uses of Humiliation

Still today, humiliation is a common form of punishment, abuse, and oppression. Conversely, the fear of humiliation is ordinarily thought to deter crime, and history has devised many forms of humiliating public punishment.

Pillories and stocks restrained victims in degrading positions while people gathered to taunt and torment them. The last recorded use in England of the pillory dates back to 1830, and of the stocks to 1872.

Tarring and feathering, which emerged in feudal Europe, involved covering victims with scalding pine tar and feathers before parading them on a cart or wooden rail. The intention was not merely to punish them, but to destroy their dignity and social standing before the assembled community.

In traditional societies and modern institutions, ritual humiliation can serve to enforce a particular social order or reinforce the precedence of the group over its individual members. Many tribal societies feature complex initiation rites designed to defuse the threat posed by fit, fertile, and often arrogant young men to the male gerontocracy. These rites sometimes include a painful circumcision symbolic of castration.

In more complex, hierarchical societies, elites go to great lengths to display and defend their social standing, while the lower orders submit to prescribed degrees of abasement. As a society becomes more egalitarian, such rituals are increasingly resented and resisted, which can give rise to violent outbursts and outright revolution.

Because elites live by their pride, and because they embody their people and culture, their humiliation can be especially poignant and emblematic. In 260 CE, after losing the Battle of Edessa, the Roman emperor Valerian arranged a meeting with Shapur I, the Shahanshah, or King of Kings, of the Sassanid Empire. Shapur betrayed the truce and seized Valerian, holding him captive for the rest of his life.

According to some accounts, Shapur used Valerian as a footstool when mounting his horse. After Valerian offered him a huge ransom for his release, he was flayed alive or, by another account, made to swallow molten gold. His skin was then stuffed with straw and displayed as a trophy. Even if these accounts are invented or grossly exaggerated, they were invented for a reason.

Humiliation and Human Dignity

Humiliation need not involve aggression or coercion. People can readily be humiliated through more passive means, such as being ignored or overlooked, taken for granted, or denied a right or privilege. They can also be humiliated by being rejected, abandoned, abused, betrayed, or used as a means to an end.

Immanuel Kant argued that, by virtue of their reason and free will, human beings are not means to an end but ends in themselves, with a moral dimension that invests them with dignity and the right to ethical treatment. Therefore, to humiliate people—to treat them as something less than ends in themselves—is to deny them their very humanity.

Humiliation can befall anyone at any time, and this is all the more true in the age of social media.

As British Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Chris Huhne was a credible contender for the leadership of the Liberal Democrat Party. But in February 2012, he was charged with perverting the course of justice over a 2003 speeding ticket. His former wife claimed that he had coerced her into accepting the penalty points on his behalf. Huhne resigned from the Cabinet while denying the charge.

When the trial opened in February 2013, he changed his plea to ‘guilty’, resigned as a Member of Parliament, and left the Privy Council. By the end of this sorry saga, he had traded a seat in Cabinet for a mattress in a prison cell. Every twist and turn of his downfall had been chronicled in the media, which went so far as to publish highly personal text messages between him and his then 18-year-old son that laid bare their fractious relationship.

In a video statement for the 2007 Liberal Democrat leadership election campaign, Huhne had stated: ‘Relationships, including particularly family relationships, are actually the most important things in making people happy and fulfilled.’ Although his misdemeanours had been mundane—Huhne was hardly Jack the Ripper—his humiliation could not have been more complete.

Why Humiliation Can Feel Worse Than Death

When we are humiliated, we can almost feel our heart shrivelling. For many months, sometimes years, we may be preoccupied or obsessed by our humiliation and its real or imagined perpetrators. We may respond with anger, fantasies of revenge, sadism, delinquency, or terrorism, among others.

We may also internalise the trauma, leading to emotional disturbances such as fear and anxiety, flashbacks, nightmares, sleeplessness, paranoia, social isolation, apathy, depression, and suicidal ideation.

Severe humiliation is, arguably, a fate worse than death itself, insofar as death merely destroys our life, whereas humiliation destroys our standing as well as our life—and leaves us standing, ghostlike, to survey the ruins. For this reason, prison inmates who have suffered severe humiliation are routinely placed on suicide watch.

It is in the nature of humiliation that it undermines the ability of victims to defend themselves against their aggressors. In any case, anger, violence, and revenge are ineffectual responses because they do little to reverse or repair the damage done.

Victims of humiliation have to find the strength and self-esteem to come to terms with their humiliation—or, if that proves too difficult, abandon the lives that they had made in the hope of starting anew.

I notice that, throughout this article, I have subconsciously chosen to refer to the subjects of humiliation as ‘victims’, and to the perpetrators as ‘aggressors’. This suggests that humiliation is rarely, if ever, a measured or justified response.

For more on how people protect themselves by projecting blame and shame onto others, see Why We Scapegoat—and How We Choose Our Victims.