139: Professor Taya Cohen on Guilt Versus Shame

Meikles & Dimes

Taya Cohen is a Professor Organizational Behavior and Business Ethics at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research focuses on honesty, moral character, negotiation, and conflict management. Taya is frequently featured in prominent media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Financial Times, BBC, NPR, and TIME magazine.

In 2020, Taya was recognized as one of the Best 40 Under 40 MBA Professors by Poets & Quants, and she is a Past-President of the International Association for Conflict Management.

Taya earned a B.A. in Psychology from Pennsylvania State University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to joining the faculty at Carnegie Mellon, Taya spent two years as a postdoc at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management.

In this episode, we discuss the following:

• When we do something wrong, we can feel guilt for the bad behavior, or we can feel shame for being a bad person. If we feel guilt, we can apologize and try to be better in the future, which can give us hope. But feeling shame, feeling like we’re fundamentally flawed, can make us feel less optimistic about the future and can be much harder to deal with.
• When we provide feedback to others, it’s generally more effective to focus on people’s behaviors as opposed to more generalized statements about who they are as a person.
• Guilt tends to be a much more healthy, positive emotion than shame.

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