ABSTRACT
The world would say that China was able to keep 11 million people in Wuhan under total lockdown without any social unrest in 2020 following the Covid-19 outbreak because they have an authoritarian Government. There is one underlying and obscure factor in China’s favour: the important element of social cohesion arising from a strong sense of public shame amongst the people there. A healthy sense of anticipatory and vicarious shame will facilitate prosocial behaviour when people strongly feel the shame for violating what is accepted by society as the norm and actively sanction anything that is deemed by them as shameful or shameless. In particular, there are at least three broad trends that will auger for the rise of shamelessness in the future with consequent sociological problems in society. An interesting fact is that human beings have an inbuilt system for adhering to social and moral norms through healthy shame, but this natural system is underdeveloped due to our preoccupation with the maladaptive form of unhealthy shame. In fact, children could be socialized to healthy shame since their childhood. Hence, a long-term integrated approach to enhance healthy shame and mitigate a foreseeable rise in shamelessness in society is recommended.
