Essay Corner Blog

Shame and Guilt Culture

Posted on July 19, 2014 Updated on January 28, 2022

(1266 Words)

For this essay, the aspect of culture that will be talked about is the notion of shame and guilt. In many countries, each culture and the people within it adopt a way of dealing with wrong behavior. The emphasis here is on how an individual person reacts to an action done by them which is seen as not being right in their society. The essay will show with examples how shame and guilt work in daily life. It will focus on types of behavior, attitudes, and beliefs that are installed in culture. It is actually written specifically for individuals to think about their behavior and to think if their wrong actions belong to a guilt culture or shame culture. It is also written for each person to think more about their behavior when they commit something wrong and how they should behave.

Shame and guilt sometimes are considered to be similar feelings while within different cultures and countries they become separate entities when you can look closer at people’s behavior. For example, if a person was driving along the road and they saw a red light, they should stop, but in this case they continued through that light even though they had time to stop. How would they feel? In a shame culture, the person would (not in every case) look around to see if anyone saw them. If no-one saw them and nothing happened, they would be unperturbed and drive away thus not really having a feeling of doing anything wrong. In a guilt culture, if the same action happened, the driver would still look around, but they would feel remorse that they did something wrong thus producing a feeling of guilt. The feeling of guilt then becomes an inner feeling. It is as if they know they did wrong, and they are punishing themselves for it because they know what is right. The feeling of shame in this case, there is none, because in this situation no external force (such as police) saw the driver go through the traffic lights. There is no feeling for that person because the police did not catch them, speak to them and give them a ticket/fine.