The Selfish and Caring of Sharing: Exploring the Reasons and Personal Outcomes of Public-Shaming

Public-shaming is defined as an informal punishment of an individual or a group that deviated socially or criminally, by informing the public about their actions or conduct, accompanied by criticism and expression of disapproval towards them. In recent years the spreading, availability and popularity of online social networks has given to any person the ability to initiate and take part in online shaming against any person, usually including the broadcasting of personally identifiable information about the shamed individual.

The proposed research will focus on public-shaming that runs through social networks, and that is activated against a target that allegedly acts in an immoral, unacceptable, violent or selfish way. We will focus on the reasons and personal outcomes of the 'shamers' – the people that take part in public-shaming. We emphasize the dual meaning attached to public-shaming of doing "the right thing" for society but on the same time having the potential of hurting the wrongdoer. We acknowledge the pivotal role morality plays in motivating people to take social responsibility; nevertheless, due to the duality of public-shaming, we predict that morality is not sufficient in explaining such behavior. We plan to explore the linkage between the execution of public-shaming and self-image perceptions; as well as the role of public-shaming as a self-expressive mechanism. Specifically, we hypothesize that: (1) vulnerability to one's self-image will increase the likelihood of joining active shaming, especially when the wrongdoer is perceived to be similar to the 'shamer'; (2) self-image perceptions will increase after taking part in online shaming; (3) shaming will be more likely to occur when its goal leans toward expressing the 'shamer's identity rather than toward fulfilling functional needs; (4) morality will drive public-shaming when the wrongdoer is non-identified rather than identified. We have already conducted two pilot online experiments. The next step is to extend the understanding of the proposed effects both in the lab and in a framed field setting that involves real decisions and execution of allegedly online public-shaming.

We plan to better understand each of the factors that may drive and be a consequence of public shaming. In all studies, participants will be offered to join public-shaming, using either real or fictional cases. We also include measures related to social norms, morality, self-expressiveness and superiority as possible process indicators. The dependent measures will include the willingness to take part in public-shaming, as well as post shaming self-perceptions. The independent measures will differ on the following aspects: (a) usage of shaming cases of identified or un-identified wrongdoer; (b) presenting a similar or different wrongdoer; (c) manipulating the naive beliefs regarding the social norms for public-shaming; (d) inducing and (e) measuring self-image perceptions; (f) presenting a shaming case with an ambiguous vs. clear moral meaning; (g) using a company vs. a person, as the wrongdoer.

Part of the studies will be conducted in the lab, enabling to measure and manipulate self-perceptions in physical ways (such as: tall/short chairs, GSR measures). We will also run studies online both on Israeli and US populations.

In order to better understand the dynamics of public shaming, we plan to identify dissemination processes of public shaming on a highly popular large scale network (Twitter). We plan to crawl the network and its structure (i.e., nodes and ties) and use text mining in order to harvest the personal comments individuals add, run a sentiment analysis to estimate the emotional involvement and perhaps even self-esteem, if the text will be sufficiently rich.

In the future, after we will have enough knowledge about the phenomenon, we are planning to conduct a framed field experimented, which will measure actual public-shaming behaviors in a private social network.