Conversations: Cathy O'Neil

 

SYNOPSIS

 
 

Emily speaks with data scientist and author Cathy O’Neil about her book The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation, which investigates how society exploits the powerful emotion of shame.

 
 
 

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GUEST

 
 

Cathy O’Neil earned a Ph.D. in math from Harvard and worked as a math professor at Barnard College before switching over to the private sector, working as a quant for the hedge fund D.E. Shaw and as a data scientist in the New York start-up scene. She is a regular contributor to Bloomberg Opinion and in 2016 wrote the book Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. She is the CEO of ORCAA, an algorithmic auditing company, is a member of the Public Interest Tech Lab at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her new book, The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation came out in March 2022.

 
 
 

RESOURCES

 
 
 
 

CREDITS

 

Hosted by Emily Silverman

Produced by Emily Silverman and Sam Osborn

Edited and mixed by Sam Osborn

Assistant produced by Carly Besser

Original theme music by Yosef Munro with additional music by Blue Dot Sessions

The Nocturnists is made possible by the California Medical Association, and people like you who have donated through our website and Patreon page.

 
 
 

TRANSCRIPT

 

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The Nocturnists: Conversations
Emily in Conversation with Cathy O'Neil
Episode Transcript

Note: The Nocturnists is created primarily as a listening experience. The audio contains emotion, emphasis, and soundscapes that are not easily transcribed. We encourage you to listen to the episode if at all possible. Our transcripts are produced using both speech recognition software and human copy editors, and may not be 100% accurate. Thank you for consulting the audio before quoting in print.

Emily Silverman
You're listening to The Nocturnists: Conversations. I'm Emily Silverman. As you may know, The Nocturnists team has been working on an audio documentary series on the theme of “Shame in Medicine” over the last couple of years. Throughout the creative process, I've learned so much about the emotion of shame from our two shame experts: Dr. Luna Dolezal, who's a philosopher at the University of Exeter and Dr. Will Bynum who's a physician based at Duke, who studies shame experiences in medical learners. But today's guest helped me understand shame in a totally new way—How does it manifest in a larger scale in society? Her name is Cathy O'Neil. And she earned her PhD in math from Harvard, and worked as a math professor at Barnard College before switching over to the private sector working as a quant for the hedge fund D. E. Shaw and a data scientist in the New York startup scene. She's a regular contributor to Bloomberg Opinion, and in 2016 wrote the book Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. She's the CEO of ORCAA, an algorithmic auditing company, and a member of the Public Interest Tech Lab at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her new book, The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation came out in March of 2022.

This was an awesome conversation in which Cathy and I get into a bit of her personal history with shame related to weight and body type, and then talk about some really helpful frameworks for how to think about shame. When is shame appropriate? When is it inappropriate? How does shame work and when does shame work? When does shame not work? How do we recognize and manage that impulse we have inside of ourselves to shame others? That feeling of satisfaction that we get when we shame someone, whether it's face to face or on social media or the internet? How do we take that and convert it into an actual investment in someone else's learning, redemption, and belonging. Cathy's book has huge implications for business, politics, social cohesion, and self development. And I'm so excited for you to hear our conversation. But first, let's hear Cathy read a brief excerpt from her book, The Shame Machine. Here's Cathy.

Cathy O'Neil
My parents were both PhD mathematicians. Science and math were the ruling belief systems in our household. Whether it was the weather outside or human evolution, my parents believed inherently in the objectivity of facts—it was their religion.

Naturally, they followed science, as they saw it, in their meticulous approach to dieting. They kept a towering doctor's office scale in the bathroom, and updated weight charts on graph paper, noting every pound lost, every pound gained. I'd watched this process for years. Now I was joining the effort.

My goal was to lose two pounds a week. That translated into cutting my consumption by one thousand calories per day. For a young nerd like me, this was exciting. Not only was I going to lose weight, I could use my math skills in the process. We had a calorie counting book on a shelf in the kitchen. I looked up the value of everything I ate in it, and then added it all up. By subtracting this sum from my “maintenance amount,” I calculated how much more I could eat.

My father explained that if I succeeded in limiting calories, I could reward myself at the end of the week with a candy bar of my choice. If I failed, I’d lose my allowance that week. He wielded carrots and sticks to make sure I understood the urgency of the problem.

At first, I loved dieting. Each Saturday, my mom weighed me on our special scale to check on my progress and determine whether I deserved punishment or reward. The scale had two beams, the big one for increments of fifty pounds and the smaller for single pounds. I stepped up, hearing the thud of the scale as it balanced, and watched in anticipation. When I saw that my weight had gone down, the feeling of achievement was intoxicating.

After those first few successes on the scale, I became relentlessly focused on food and my future thin self. I ditched regular meals and instead ate multiple packages of hundred-calorie “fruit snacks,” as those made counting calories even easier, and the tiny, bite-sized amounts helped me to slow down my enjoyment. I felt elated, empowered—and totally in control of my body for the first time in my young life.

This dieting honeymoon didn't last. A couple of months into the process, something weird began to happen. I'd start the day strong but by the afternoon I struggled to remember what I'd eaten, or how many calories I'd already consumed. By the end of the day, I’d lost count completely, my precious numbers slipping away from me.

Many readers at this point are no doubt thinking that I was just one more failed dieter, and that I clearly lacked self control. That is the universal tenet of fat shame: Diets work; dieters fail. And believe me, I embraced this credo as fervently as anyone.

Emily Silverman
Cathy, thank you so much for that reading and for being here today.

Cathy O'Neil
Thanks for having me.

Emily Silverman
So the excerpt that you just read is from a really powerful chapter in your book, where you talk about your own personal experience with shame. And I'm wondering about how you are thinking about that experience these days, and how that inspired you to write this book.

Cathy O'Neil
I think about it a lot, I mean, shame. As you know, I didn't think about it when I was a child, but now that I have hindsight, I realize just how much shame I was willing to take on as a burden. Because I felt wrong in my body. I felt like I was to blame for my body's natural needs and shape. I think about it in the context of the, you know, the leak from the Supreme Court about abortion rights, because I think about, like, all the shame that's tied up with women around their abortions, and how much shame has been heaped on them. And so we can't really even have a conversation that's like a straightforward, factual conversation around topics like that, because we are so tied up with our feelings of worthlessness and shame. So I think about that a lot. And certainly shame in that context always made me feel like if something went wrong it was my fault, rather than the fault of the approach I was being led to take, like the diets I was on.

Emily Silverman
And tell me when this idea for the book came about.

Cathy O'Neil
Well, I was researching my previous book, which was about algorithms and how they can go bad, and how they can be given way too much power even when they're terrible. And this, sort of, one of the prime examples of that was this thing called the "teacher value-added model." So, it was a scoring system for teachers to supposedly hold teachers accountable, but it was a system that was not itself accountable. In fact, we later found out it was kind of a random number generator, and yet at the time, it was being used to fire teachers with low scores.

Now, you'd be correct in wondering how that could have happened. Like, how do we, randomly choosing numbers from zero to one hundred, just tell the teacher whether they're a good teacher? It's a really good question. And I had my suspicions about it as a mathematician. And I would ask teachers I was interviewing who had gotten fired based on the score, like, I'd ask them, like, you know, “Did you ask anyone to explain the score to you?” And they all said the same thing to me. They said, “I was told it's math, and you wouldn't understand it.” Which I was baffled by, because as a mathematician, if someone had told me, “It’s math, you would understand it,” I would just sort of laugh in their face. And I'd say, “I'm a mathematician. If you can't explain it, that's your problem, not my problem.”

But that's not what these teachers did, you know, and it wasn't just teachers, it was principals too. Like, it was a very effective way of silencing people and keeping them from asking questions, even about their own job. And I recognized it as shame. It was math shame. It was a way of provoking shame in someone in order to silence them about their experience, even though that experience was very important to them. So it was that series of interviews that keyed me into just how potent shame could be as a mechanism for silencing someone, but also how it was, sort of, very explicitly manufactured by the systems, right, like, especially around algorithms, because algorithms are so mathematical and they all seem so opaque.

I was researching bariatric surgery a couple years later, in order to try to avoid diabetes, which my dad at the time was dying from and my brother had just got diagnosed from. And my brother’s two years older than me, and he got diagnosed at the same age my dad did. And I was just, you know, I had all the risk factors for type-two diabetes. And so I was like, “I really want to avoid the fate of my dad.” And I'd read in an article that bariatric surgery was really helpful. So I wanted to do some research on that. And I was googling it and I was inundated with fat shaming advertisements. I mean, it was insane.

And, by the way, I should mention two things. First of all, I had really considered myself beyond fat shaming. Because, you know, I'd certainly had terrible experiences, like the one I read from, as a child. And I dieted throughout my teens and early twenties. But at some point I stopped, you know, I stopped and I was like, “I have a career, I have a husband, I have three beautiful children. I don't need that,” you know, “I'm fine with my body.” I really felt like that. But I was wrong. I mean, I was triggered, let's call it that. I was triggered back into that sort of real shame by the advertisements.

And the second thing I want to mention is that I was a data scientist in advertising technology. So I know exactly how those advertisements were sent to me, like, how they found me, why they found me, because I did that kind of thing. I figured out which advertisements to show which, to which people. So I know how that technology works. And yet it really worked on me. In other words, I went from wanting to learn how to save my health in a long-term way with bariatric surgery to being like, “Oh my god, I'm so fat, I'm so worthless. What product can I buy to make this feeling go away?” And that's when I really recognized it as, like, “Oh my god, they're shaming me to make me buy a product. They're shaming me to, like, provoke a certain reaction in me, because shame is so, so powerful.” That's when I wanted to write the book. When I saw those, the connection between those two things, the teachers and myself, I realized, “Oh, this is what the teachers had felt at that moment.” And, like, I didn't understand it then, but I do now. And it sucks.

Emily Silverman
In your book, you say, “Many others have written about the psychology behind shame.” And then you say, “But in this book, I focus on how shame is manufactured and mined.” And this example that you just gave is such a good example of this. And so I'm wondering if you can tell us a bit more about this manufacturing, or mining, of shame—the intentionality behind it. What is that about?

Cathy O'Neil
You know, I certainly think that there's a lot of intentionality in, sort of, what I would call the old-school shame industries, you know. And among those, like, probably the most classic old-school shame industry is cosmetics—like shaming women for having wrinkles or for growing old, and sort of making them feel unattractive and ugly—and saying, like, “Buy this product so you won't be so shameful.” So that's, like, very intentional directing people: “Don't you want to look younger? Don't you feel bad about the way you look? You should be ashamed! Buy this product and solve your problems.”

But I will say that, you know, one of the observations I made is that with, with respect to algorithms—and there's a lot of algorithms, now, that, that provoke shame, that sort of target and objectify you for purposes of shaming—none of them are as intentional as those examples I just gave. So even with the ad tech, like the ad tech world, because I worked in it, it doesn't set about itself saying like, “How do we shame this person the hardest?” That's not how it works. It uses information about different people, and it sort of optimizes to getting a click, right? But getting a click certainly doesn't sound exactly the same as shaming somebody. It just so happens that people with certain types of profiles tend to click on things that are, in fact, shame-oriented.

So let me just give you an example where, you know, if somebody has a gambling addiction, you know, they will be discovered because that's very, very profitable for gambling houses. And gambling houses have really, really involved and complex and nuanced analytics in order to exactly figure out who they could advertise to who will have no impulse control. And they will click on it, and they will get those people to come gamble. You know, they, nobody said, “Oh, we're gonna, like, expose somebody’s vulnerabilities.” it's just like, “We want to sell this advertisement. Who, who's going to click on it, you know.” And similarly, I think my experience being fat-shamed when I was trying to do research about bariatric surgery, that wasn't, like, intentionally setting out to shame me. There was nobody who built the algorithm who was, like, I'm going to shame Cathy, or for that matter, I'm going to shame anybody. They were just trying to figure out how to best to pair the advertisements with the, with a visitor to the site. So I guess what I'm saying is that intentionality isn't necessary in the modern world of advertising. Which might actually be bad news because it means shame is just like a byproduct, a manufactured byproduct of, of the current online business model.

Emily Silverman
Yeah, what I'm hearing is that shame is almost an emergent property of these systems that we've built. And I think that really speaks to the primal nature of the emotion, and how powerfully it drives behavior. And I want to dive deeper into The Shame Machine. But before we do, let's pull back first and talk about just shame more in the abstract. In the book, you say, “Shame is much like pain—its first cousin. Pain protects our bodies, teaching us to watch out for fires and blades and to run away from angry hornets. Shame represents another dimension of pain. It's administrated by a collective, whose rules and taboos are etched into our psyches. Its goal is the survival, not of the individual, but of the society.” I loved that analogy. I had never heard shame compared to pain, where, you know, pain is our physical body and then shame is like the pain of the collective body. I thought that was so brilliant! I was wondering if you could expand on that.

Cathy O'Neil
Yeah, well, I guess there's two points to make. And the first one is that shame is painful, like, painful and memorable, like a punch in the stomach. And it lingers longer than a punch in the stomach. Like, of course, a punch in the stomach, depending on why it's administered, could linger because it could be combined with shame. But yeah, I think, I think the best way of thinking about shame, though, the way I've come to, is that shame is the conflict between what we want personally and what our community needs us to do.

So in the context of famine, we want to hoard food. But it would be bad for the community for us to hoard food. So we are shamed to not do that. That's the rule that we have to abide by, even though we don't want to. So it sorts that out. And the, and the threat, if we don't follow the rules, besides shame.…shame is the precursor to the actual threat behind it, which is being expelled from the community and dying of exposure. Because we actually need the community to live, like we do not live by ourselves in the woods, right? So it's, it makes sense that shame is so painful, because it is essentially, like, “You're doing wrong by us, and we're the group you need to survive.” So that's, that explains, sort of, the existential threat of shame. And it also explains, Emily, to your earlier point, that it is pre-rational, like, it isn't rational. I mean, I've just said it's a conflict between what we want and what the community wants, right? It doesn't, there's no logical conclusion, except we have to follow the rules or else we're, you know, we're screwed. So it's not about rationality, it's about surviving. It's about surviving socially, with some kind of social standing in your community.

Emily Silverman
It's interesting to think of shame as a prosocial behavior, in a way. As you said, it's the precursor to the actual threat, which is the famine, or the starvation, or the death. And that example you gave of hoarding food and starvation reminds me a lot of COVID and the shame that people experience, either for masking or for not masking. And you get into this a bit in your book. And so I'm wondering, for our audience, tell us a bit about where you landed about COVID shame. Like, you could argue that it's good because we want to protect each other and ourselves from the virus. You know, that said, there's also a lot of threats associated with social isolation and businesses falling apart. So how does that all work or how are you putting that together?

Cathy O'Neil
I mean, if you don't mind, I'm going to, I'm going to answer, I'm going to sort of back up a little bit before answering that. Like, one of the most critical questions in my mind of writing this book was to sort out for myself—and hopefully it will be helpful for others—like, when is shame appropriate? Because there were definitely moments that I saw inappropriate, what I call “punching-down” shame—for the teachers, for fat people, for fat kids in particular. I saw lots of examples of shaming kids for not having lunch money, which was, you know, offensively awful. So that was the first question, when is shame appropriate? And then, secondarily, much closer to the COVID question—when is, when does shame work? You know, when does shame actually get people to think about the community rather than themselves? Because it's certainly not always the case that it works.

So to the first question, I worked out what I think is helpful. It's at least a lens to consider when is shame appropriate. You know, there's lots of gray areas, so I don't want to pretend it's a mathematical proof or anything like that. But I ask for people to consider the notions of choice and voice. So the first question is, does this person have a choice to conform? And it's a really tricky question to ask somebody, “Do you have a choice to conform to a norm?” because it will really depend. It's sometimes you might think they have a choice when they don't really have a choice. And sometimes you'll think they don't when they do. It's really tricky. But I'd say the average person probably exaggerates the choice, the ability for the other to choose.

So I certainly think that's true in the case of fatness, like when you're shaming someone for being fat. Very few people are, like, “I want to go get fat.” Like, very few people set out to get fat, if any. So you, you pretty much are guaranteed that that's not a choice, because they, if they had a choice, they wouldn't be fat. And so people will think that dieting solves that problem. But actually, the statistics are not good on dieting at all. So, and, of course, the statistics that you see touted by the weight loss industry will be skewed towards dieting as a success, simply because people who fail at losing weight during a diet are ashamed of themselves and don't go in for further weigh-ins. So there's like this statistical bias called, due to, selection bias.

So I'm just mentioning that choice is a tricky thing. I mean, for example, if you shame someone for smoking, you could ask, “Do you have a choice to quit smoking?” And you know, the answer is probably a lot of people do. And probably, we saw that, like, a lot of people quit smoking. But probably a lot of people have a lot more trouble quitting smoking. So we shouldn't assume it's easy as a choice. And then opioid addiction is an even less clear choice. Blaming someone for being addicted and saying, you know, “Just say no to drugs,” at that point, when they're already addicted to drugs is cruel, because, again, nobody wants to be addicted. And if they could just choose easily, they would have chosen already. So shaming someone for doing that is just layering on yet another problem to their actual problem, whatever that problem is, whether they're overweight, or they're smokers, or whatever it is. So, that's choice. I really maintain that choosing, that blaming someone where they don't really have a clear choice is unfair, unreasonable, and adds to their problems.

And then the second thing is voice, do they have the chance to defend themselves? Can they be seen improving their behavior? Do they have a chance to be redeemed, is really what I mean. So if you are shaming someone, even if they actually made a bad choice, right, let's assume they had made a bad choice. If you're shaming somebody that you'll never see again, that's not giving them the chance to be redeemed, that's not giving them a chance to actually show you that they can make a better choice. And that's almost always the case on social media. I'll just mention that most people being shamed on social media are being set up as an example of how not to do things, but they will never ever get the opportunity to redeem themselves. Because even if they did make a better choice in the future, that's not going to go viral. Right? Good behavior doesn't go viral.

But going back to your actual question, COVID, like, masking, let's start with masking. Vaccines are similar. Like, do people have choices to wear masks or to get vaccines at this point? Yes. You know, except for the very few people who are really told not to do that for particular medical problems. That is a very small minority. Most people can have a mask and can get a vaccine. Do they have the chance to defend themselves? Well, that's a, that's a contextual question. So are you talking about shaming somebody online for not doing this, then? Yeah, again, same as what I earlier said. It's probably inappropriate. If you're not going to, if you're not part of that person's life and you're not going to see them improve, like, don't bother shaming them. But if you are going to see them—what if they're in your family? What if they have plenty of time to defend themselves? Plenty of time to be seen doing better?

Then it finally gets down to that question of does shaming work? Not just is it appropriate, but does it work? And the answer is, sometimes. Even if they have choice and voice, it's not always the case that shame will work. It will work in the case where there's a shared norm that is successfully appealed to. So, like, you know, both of us live with Grandma, and Grandma, you know, is really old. And so, like, her chances of getting really, really sick with COVID are really high. And I want to protect Grandma and I know you want to protect Grandma. Like that is the kind of appeal of a common norm that is required. And even then it doesn't always work. If you're talking about someone who is, most likely, if they're, if they haven't gotten vaccinated and they're not wearing a mask, they most likely are balancing in their own head other norms that they hold really dear. Which isn't to say they don't love Grandma, it means that they value their, some notion of freedom, or they're afraid of needles, or they're afraid of the medical establishment or whatever it is. They're balancing different norms in their head. And so the question is, can you get the norm that you share to be the overriding norm? And as you can tell from my long description of when does shame work, the answer is, it sometimes works. But it looks a little bit more like persuasion than it actually looks like shame, when it does work.

Emily Silverman
And when it doesn't work, not only does it not work, but it can backfire and actually make people double down and worsen the problem.

Cathy O'Neil
And that's a really important point, Emily, and it happens for all the reasons I just said. If you're shaming someone, if you're attempting to shame someone, people know what that looks like. You know what I mean? It looks like you're attempting to punch them in the stomach. That's what shame, how shame lands. So they know that, because that’s what you were trying to do. And if you were trying to do that to them when they found it inappropriate, because either they don't agree with a norm at all, or that you were doing it in a kind of drive-by manner where you're never going to see them again and you don't really care about them but you want to sort of feel good about yourself and perform righteousness for your friends on social media, especially, then it is appalling. It is offensive, and it is outrageous.

And by the way, I just want to make it clear that I'm not trying to shame everyone who's ever done that. I want to make the point that, like, actually the big tech companies encourage us, or even downright condition us to do this. They create the perfect situation, perfect sort of ecosystem, to get us to feel righteous and to perform for our peers. And then on top of that, the algorithm surfaces the most outrageous thing that happened in the, sort of, next norm group over, so that we will get outraged, so that we will start these shaming-outrage cycles, if you will. The entire design of social media is to get us to be in these hideous and non-constructive shaming cycles, where we're not choosing well, whether shaming is appropriate, and we're also not choosing well whether shame is going to work.

Emily Silverman
Let's talk about an example of good shame. At the very beginning of the book, you mentioned the Pueblo clown society and its shaming rituals. And you use it as an example of shame that that does work or that could be constructive or that isn't damaging. So tell our audience about the Pueblo clown society.

Cathy O'Neil
The Pueblo clown society. Well, I talked to, you know, there's quite a few pueblos that have these clowns. They're kind of the entertainment between more solemn rituals in the summer festivals, and sometimes winter festivals, that can go on for a few days. And they, at least in the example that I was told about by Peter Whiteley, who's a scholar, they start out kind of like aliens from a different world, covered in white clay. They don't know the rules of Hopi, so they're making all kinds of mistakes, and they're kind of breaking all sorts of norms. They’re, like, simulating sex, they're eating poop, they're doing all sorts of things that are just totally inappropriate, to sort of explain how they are not Hopi yet. They do not know the rules. They learn the rules over the days and they get more and more conformed to society. And then by the end they're actually, kind of, they’re clowns. So they actually make fun, they publicly shame people who are not behaving with respect to the rules. So they're kind of like saying, “Oh, I just learned the rule, and you don't seem to be following it.”

The example that I was told about was a bootlegger who was selling alcohol within the village limits. And he was pulled out of the circle and sort of publicly shamed. And the idea there was to say, “Stop doing that, that's not good for us as a community, we need you to improve.” But, importantly, this was not a threat of violence, or there was nobody going to call the police, he was not going to be expelled from, from the pueblo. He was asked to be behaving better. And he was invited back. And the idea was, “Next time, we're going to be pulling somebody else out, because you will have gotten your act together.” It is public, though. So it is, it is a deep humiliation at the moment, with everyone there saying, “Okay, do better. We're watching.” It's kind of the opposite of no choice, no voice. It's sort of like, “You made a bad choice. And we are watching you. We want you to do better. We want you to be redeemed. It's up to you.” So I think of that as a kind of a healthy shame, in the sense that it is preserving the Hopi culture and community while exerting shame in a kind of light-hearted but real way.

Emily Silverman
In the book you say, “In the realm of shame, most of us are both victims and perpetrators.” And that really resonated with me because, of course, I have experienced shame myself. But since reading your book, I've also started to notice my own impulse to shame others, whether that's on social media or elsewhere. So my question is, how do we watch out for our own instincts to shame others?

Cathy O'Neil
One of the reasons I knew that there would be good moments to shame is that, I mean, every civil rights movement is based on shame, you know. But what that looks like is holding power to account. Right? It literally looks like the opposite of having no voice or no choice. It's like people with the choice to do better, and absolutely the power to do better and to defend themselves as well. I think one of my favorite illustrations of the difference between punching up—which is what I call it when you hold power to account with people with choice and voice—versus punching down, came from the Sarah Huckabee Sanders story where she was denied service at The Red Hen, which is a restaurant in Virginia.

And I actually managed to go to the restaurant a few months after that happened and talk to the owner who had denied Sarah Huckabee Sanders. And her reasoning was, you know, she's lying for the president and I do not want, you know, I don't want her in here. I don't, you know, shame on her! And, you know, I'm just like, Well, does she have a choice to lie for the president? Absolutely. You know, she could quit her job or she could just tell the truth. And number two, does she have voice? Can she defend herself? Well, as a spokesperson for the White House, absolutely! She can, right? So I was like, “Yeah, that's appropriate. I'm not saying it's gonna work. I'm not saying that everyone loves the fact that you did that, but it's certainly not inappropriate shame.”

But, in spite of that, a lot of people called it uncivil. And by the way, uncivil is like, I want people listening to remember that whenever punching-up shame happens it's called uncivil. Like Martin Luther King was called uncivil, Gandhi was called uncivil. Like, whenever people are trying to change the status quo they're called uncivil. Because yes, they are trying to change something—they think something's unjust and they're trying to change it. So it's not necessarily wrong just because it's uncivil.

But to be clear, it is probably uncivil. Like, shame doesn't feel good to people who get hit by it, because people in power are probably less used to it, if you see what I mean. They're less used to being told that they're doing something shameful. But anyway, my point of that example is that some people who were complaining about the civility problem with that Sarah Huckabee Sanders incident, actually tried to compare it to Black people being refused service in the south during Jim Crow. And I'm, I just like, I feel like if I could do anything for our discussion on shame, it would be to set that to rest as, like, a terrible comparison. Or, like, let's put it this way. It is a great comparison because it's so different. Black people don't have a choice of being Black. There's no choice there. And they don't have the voice. They didn't have a voice to argue against that rule. The Jim Crow era was by construction, like, taking power away from Black people. So my point being, like, it is nothing like that. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ example, with voice and choice, is nothing like to refuse service to Black people with no choice, no voice.

So that was a long answer to your question, like, what do I want from people? I want people to think through this lens of choice and voice before they jump on a shame train, especially in social media, but anywhere really. But especially in social media you're gonna find that people just don't have due process. They will not have the chance to defend themselves. Or you could say they will have the chance, but they will not be heard. Because what, what is constantly amplified are the negatives and not the positives. So nobody who, like, “Oh, I was wrong to call the cops and you're right to call me a Karen,” like that, nobody's going to retweet that or share that because it's not viral. It's not something that the algorithms will say, “Oh, let's supercharge this for the clicks.” So that' the answer. It's like, yes, there are moments when you absolutely should and must, in fact, you shame because that's your only tool. Like when you think about apartheid in South Africa, like, literally people had laws that were unjust. If you can't appeal to laws, then you only can appeal to shame, because that's your, the last remaining tool. That's how apartheid was broken, through basically shame tactics.

Emily Silverman
In the book, you leave us with a few recommendations about not just how to think about shame within ourselves as individuals, but how we as a collective can dismantle the shame machine. So maybe in closing, how do we dismantle the shame machine?

Cathy O'Neil
I really admire this woman named Donna Hicks, who was a, who is a peace negotiator. And what she observed in her experiences, which were all over the world, was that before you could negotiate the terms of a negotiation for peace, you actually had to deal with the dignity violations that had occurred during the war. And she had a list of ten dignity violations that she said had to be resolved before you could move on. And I think of these dignity violations as really a wonderful list of things that, sort of red flags for that kind of inappropriate shame. I know one of them is giving the benefit of the doubt to people. One of them is fairness. One of them is being held accountable yourself.

The reason I mention this is because I feel like if you looked at that list of dignity violations and you looked at the kinds of institutions that we have developed, whether it's the welfare offices or rehab, or prison, or even, dare I say, medical school, or the way we run hospitals, we will see that those are actually embedded, often, in the actual policies of these institutions. They are undignified. They are punching-down shame and they are not improving anybody's life, nor are they making the institutions better-run. It's almost like they only exist in order to alleviate the responsibility of people in power.

Just as one example: like, the assumption of fraud for every welfare recipient—so that they have to spend endless hours clearing their name for assumed fraud—is a dignity violation. And I know that kind of assumption, I know it was embedded in the process I had to go through in order to get my bariatric surgery paid for. You know, I had to prove in eight different ways in excruciating detail why I was irredeemably fat and needed the surgery. I had to have my doctor write a letter saying that she is irredeemably fat. I think that was the word he used, irretrievably, possibly—that I tried everything, every single diet under the sun, and I just couldn't make any of them work. I was a complete failure. And that was what I needed to get my surgery. And it was just, it was demeaning. And I think the reason it was put there, simply, was so that the insurance company could weed out a lot of people who weren't willing to be humiliated. I am probably one of the few people who saw it as grist for my next book, rather than an actually humiliating experience. But I also felt humiliated in doing it. And I remember just thinking, “How much better would our lives be if we removed the dignity violations that are endemic in all these institutions that we interact with all the time?” It would be a better world, and our lives would be better. But also the institutions would run better. I'm convinced of it.

Emily Silverman
Well, I know we're running out of time. My instinct is to ask you—How do we remove the dignity violations from our institutions?—but I know we're out of time. And maybe that can be something for people to learn more about in your book or for future conversations.

Cathy O'Neil
You should look at Donna Hicks' book, Leading With Dignity, because she actually does consultations with people who lead the institutions on how to remove dignity violations for everybody in that institution.

Emily Silverman
I have been speaking with Cathy O'Neil about her book, The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation. Cathy, thank you so much for coming here today to speak with me about shame. It's been a pleasure.

Cathy O'Neil
Thank you, Emily. Thanks for having me.

 
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