Shame Is Worth A Try Argument Dan M Kahan

Shame as a Regulatory Tool: What Actually Works

Dan Kahan's work on shame has been circulating in legal and policy circles for a long time now. The core idea is straightforward enough: societies can use shame to enforce norms more cheaply than through formal legal sanctions alone. It sounds simple on paper, but the mechanics of when it works and when it just makes everything worse are far messier than most people admitting. I've dealt with this extensively in regulatory design work, and the short version is that shame is neither universally effective nor universally destructive. It depends entirely on who is being shamed, what the target behavior is, and whether the shaming audience actually shares the norm being enforced. Miss any of those variables and you get backlash, not compliance.

Shame Is Worth A Try Argument Dan M Kahan

Kahan's argument, which he developed alongside several collaborators across a series of papers going back to the late 1990s, centers on the idea that law and social norms operate in a feedback loop. Formal sanctions like fines or imprisonment are expensive to administer and politically costly. Social sanctions like shame are cheaper but require a pre-existing normative consensus. The insight that actually matters here is that the state can deliberately activate existing social norms through symbolic legal acts, nudging communities toward self-enforcement rather than relying on courts and jails. The most cited work in this area includes his analyses of hate crime legislation, campaign finance regulation, and the way certain legal symbols shift public attitudes without changing material incentives. Kahan argues that shaming can be a legitimate and sometimes superior regulatory tool because it works through internalized norms rather than external coercion. That distinction matters because internalized compliance tends to stick around after the threat of punishment disappears.

How It Actually Functions in Practice

Here is the part that most introductory treatments skip: shame only functions as intended when the community doing the shaming already considers the target behavior illegitimate. This is not a theoretical point. I worked on a project a few years back where a municipality tried to shame polluters by publicly posting violations. The result was exactly what you would expect if you ignore Kahan's caveat about normative consensus. The shamed parties organized counter-narratives, the community split along existing political lines, and compliance actually went down in the relevant sectors. The legal symbol had no normative purchase because the relevant communities did not share the underlying norm. The workaround I used was to identify which sub-communities already had informal norms against the behavior and start there. Instead of a blanket public shaming regime, we focused on professional associations and trade groups where deviance carried real social costs. Compliance improved within about six months in those groups. Outside those groups, nothing changed. This is a pattern Kahan's framework predicts, but you only appreciate it when you see the alternative play out in front of you.

Counter-Intuitive Findings

One thing beginners consistently miss is that public shaming can increase the very behavior it aims to suppress when the target group perceives the shaming as illegitimate or hypocritical. Kahan and others have documented this in the context of certain drug policy interventions and occupational safety enforcement. When the shamed parties view the shamer as lacking moral authority or as selectively applying norms, the response is often defiance rather than correction. A second counter-intuitive finding is that highly visible symbolic shaming can sometimes reduce the willingness of regulators to pursue more effective but less glamorous enforcement actions. There is a substitution effect. Officials get credit for the public gesture and then under-invest in the follow-through that would actually change behavior. I have seen this in environmental compliance programs where the press conference does more harm than good because it signals that the agency is satisfied with optics over outcomes.

When Shame Fails Completely

Shame is not a solution for every regulatory problem. It fails in at least three scenarios that come up regularly. First, it does not work when there is no shared normative baseline. If a community does not view the target behavior as shameful, announcing it publicly changes nothing except the visibility of the behavior. Second, it fails when the stigmatized group has strong internal cohesion and alternative value systems. Prison populations, for example, have been the subject of various shaming interventions with poor results because the relevant social sanction within those communities is different from the one the state is trying to impose. Third, it fails when the cost of shame is disproportionate to the harm being addressed. Kahan himself acknowledges this boundary condition, but practitioners routinely ignore it because the political incentive to appear tough outweighs the calibration problem. When shame is unlikely to work, the better alternative is usually a combination of targeted financial incentives and incremental norm-building through institutions that already have legitimacy. Professional licensing boards, industry certification bodies, and community-based monitoring programs can achieve similar compliance gains without the backlash risk.

Practical Takeaways

If you are considering a shaming-based intervention, the first step is mapping the normative landscape, not drafting the statute. You need to know which groups already disapprove of the behavior and which groups will interpret the shaming as an attack. This takes time that many programs do not budget for. The second step is calibrating visibility. Private reprimands to professional bodies often work better than public name-and-shame campaigns because they target the people most likely to internalize the sanction. The third step is building in an exit ramp. Shame works best when the shamed party has a clear path back to legitimacy. Without that, you are just producing resentment. The evidence from Kahan's research and the subsequent empirical work is mixed but leaning toward conditional effectiveness. Shame is worth trying in the right contexts, and it is worth avoiding in the wrong ones. The trick, which nobody seems to enjoy admitting, is knowing the difference before you invest political capital in the wrong one.