Cross Cultural Communication Class 4

Guilt & Shame Culture The rules about responsibility and blame are not the same across cultures or even across different sectors of the same culture. Let’s take a look at the two principle differences.

GUILT CULTURE - The wrongly-accused person, even someone who is "framed", struggles to demonstrate innocence and be vindicated - or wrestles with his (usually "his") conscience over an undetected crime. The rules can be expressed thus:

Guilt Culture Continued: There are two parties to the process: myself and other people. The matrix is set up in terms of what we believe about my wrong-doing. In a guilt-culture I will defend my innocence even if everyone else is blaming me. My internal and individualistic judgement is what counts. But by the same token, I may be wracked with secret guilt even if the world believes me innocent. The positive aspect of guilt-culture at its best is its concern for truth and justice and the preservation of individual rights. The sense of guilt might also preserve us from engaging in wrong-doing which no-one would ever discover: but it can also be misplaced and potentially neurotic.

SHAME CULTURE: In a shame-culture (sometimes referred to as "honor-shame culture), what other people believe is much more powerful. Indeed, my principles may be derived from the desire to preserve my honor or avoid shame to the exclusion of all else. The down-side is the license it appears to give to engage in secret wrong-doing.

Shame Culture Continued: It may motivate me to ensure that I am not only innocent but am seen to be innocent: that I not only do not engage directly in criminal or antisocial behavior, but that I stay far enough away from it not to be tainted by association in any way. This is the standard the media seem to expect of politicians and other public servants, because (as quoted above) "mud sticks", and there is "no smoke without fire". On the other hand, suspicion becomes sufficient to convict in judicial terms. Moreover, in a pluralist society, culpability (I'm trying to avoid saying "guilt") may be determined by one powerful sector of society and in ignorance of the facts of the case, since there is less incentive to prove them. And in that plural society, if my particular sector or reference group think there is "nothing wrong with", say, driving after drinking alcohol or stealing from one's workplace or cheating an insurance company, it may not exert any influence on my behaviour in that respect.

Consider the following questions in groups 1. Come up with 1 question you have about Guilt or Shame Culture. 2. Imagine you are part of a guilt culture. Try to think of a moral situation and how you would handle that situation using guilt instead of shame.

Now we’re going to watch a short film from Italy and France And then answer some questions about them.

Valse triste 1. What is the story about? 2. How does it compare with what you know about Italian culture? 3. What do you think of the ending of the film?