Is Shame Necessary?

by JACQUET, JENNIFER

• ISBN13: 9780307950130
• ISBN10: 0307950131
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2016-01-12
• Publisher: Vintage

Summary

An urgent, illuminating exploration of the social nature of shame and of how it might be used to promote large-scale political change and social reform.

“[Jacquet] exposes the ways shame plays into collective ideas of punishment and reward, and the social mechanisms that dictate the ways we dictate our behavior.” —The Boston Globe

Examining how we can retrofit the art of shaming for the age of social media, Jennifer Jacquet shows that we can challenge corporations and even governments to change policies and behaviors that are detrimental to the environment. Urgent and illuminating, Is Shame Necessary? offers an entirely new understanding of how shame, when applied in the right way and at the right time, has the capacity to keep us from failing our planet and, ultimately, from failing ourselves.

Author Biography

Jennifer Jacquet is an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at New York University and recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan fellowship. She works at the intersection of conservation and cooperation, focusing on the human dimensions of large-scale social dilemmas, such as overfishing and climate change. She lives in New York.