A Brief Case for Stigma

Toward an optimal policy for social disapproval

When I was young, not so long ago, I heard a lot of jokes about dumb blondes, fat people, and various ethnicities. Kids played “smear the queer” and called people “retards.” We smoked candy cigarettes and teens smoked real ones - because it was cool! Taking psych meds meant you were psycho. Only teenage boys looked at pornography, and female masturbation hadn’t even been invented yet. The past is a foreign country, indeed.

Stigma has changed a lot since the 1980s, at least in regard to what is stigmatized, and the changes are mostly for the better. But I’m not sure the total sum of stigma decreased much; we just target different things. Moralizing about sex went down, replaced by moralizing on parenting, food choices, and carbon footprints. Tobacco went out and cannabis came in. We’re more tolerant of mental illness, and less tolerant of bad politics. It seems that stigma is neither created nor destroyed, only transformed.

Based on years of careful field work observing the discourse

That’s OK, though, because stigma is very useful. It’s a sort of social technology, a tool for shaping behavior at scale. The classic texts assume we devalue and exclude others to enhance our self-esteem or justify a hierarchy. But these don’t explain the persistence of certain themes across cultures or how social exclusion turns up in other animals. Some stigmas, like those against mental illness and atypical appearance, probably had an adaptive basis. These hang around but are no longer supported, like deprecated software.

Modern intuitions about stigma, in contrast, rest largely on considerations of harm. Every social change creates winners and losers,¹ but on net this is a big improvement. It no longer seems right to mock gay or disabled people because they’re not harming anyone else. But we still shun people who use derogatory language or commit intimate partner violence. The point is deterrence; we look down on cheaters because we want less cheating, and we disapprove of inappropriate jokes because we want less sexual harassment. It all feels justified when the behavior is harmful.

In other words, stigma is a lot like a Pigouvian tax. These are a special sort of tax on things like pollution and alcohol, which have negative externalities. A factory dumping chemicals in a river doesn’t pay medical bills for the towns downstream, and the market price of liquor doesn’t account for all the crime, car crashes, and cirrhosis. The people creating the social harm don’t pay for it, so the activity occurs more than it “should.” Pigouvian taxes correct this by incorporating the social cost into the price.

Taxes shift the cost curve up, reducing quantity. Society collects revenue in the form of precious sanctimony.

Stigma works similarly. It’s like a tax levied by society instead of the government, with a cost borne in shame instead of money. Pigouvian taxes work by getting the harm-producer to internalize costs, and stigma works by getting the individual to internalize shame. The point is extinguishing, or better yet preventing, the behavior.

A little bit of stigma, or tax, can have outsized impact. It depends on elasticity - how much behavior changes in response to a change in price. For example, a 10% tax on alcohol leads to 4.6% less beer and 8% less liquor consumption, with even heavy drinkers reducing use by 2.8%. But elasticity isn’t linear. Imagine society returning to the view that adults who play fantasy RPGs are huge dorks.² Just a bit of collective shaming would turn off the casuals, but only extreme persecution would make hard-core gamers give it up.

For cheap and common goods, at lower right, a small price increase substantially reduces quantity. In the upper left, where price is already high, doubling down doesn’t go far.

So shifts in attitudes can yield big or small shifts in behavior, depending on the margin. Increasing stigma past a point has little gain and is more likely to backfire.³ On the other hand, moving from “some stigma” to “no stigma” can dramatically increase the frequency of an activity. Imagine moving from point Q1 to the right end of the line above; a small drop in “price” ~doubles the quantity. This seems relevant to social trends such as cannabis use, pornography, and mental health diagnosis.

These behaviors, and many others, are fine in moderation and not so fine in excess. Arguments for reducing stigma rest on the average user (“It doesn’t hurt anyone, what’s the big deal?”), but it’s the extremes where problems arise. There’s no harm in smoking pot now and then, but the number of daily cannabis users in the U.S. increased 15x since 1992. Porn is fine, but are we sure about 17% of young men using it⁴ on a daily basis? I’ve written on the mental health epidemic. This is a general phenomenon; the number of outliers depends on the overall distribution. As the hump of a curve shifts a little, the extremes change a lot. A major benefit of deterrents like stigma is curtailing problematic outliers.

Yes, I am drawing an analogy between hurricanes and gooners.

People resent stigma for the same reasons they resent taxes. It feels bad! Shouldn’t somebody else have to do this? But everybody pays alcohol taxes, even if you only drink twice a year on holidays, and everybody benefits from fewer drunk drivers. We can’t tax or imprison⁵ people for every negative behavior, so stigma - social disapproval, censure, exclusion - might be the best recourse. Unpleasant emotions, like shame and fear and grief, exist for a reason. Despite the immediate cost, they were adaptive for our ancestors. The phenomenon of stigma isn’t going away, nor should we want it to.

1. When one group enjoys less discrimination, other groups experience this as a relative loss of status, sadly.

2. All-time top three: Baldur’s Gate 2, Chronotrigger, SW: KOTOR

3. Is there a Laffer Curve for stigma?

4. Among men aged 16–24 years, 17.2% used pornography daily or almost daily, 24.7% used pornography 3–5 d/wk and 23.7% used pornography 1–2 d/wk. Among women aged 16–24 years, the proportions were 1.2% for daily or almost daily, 3.1% for 3–5 times/wk, and 8.6% for 1–2 times/wk.

5. Societies use various strategies to shape behavior: imprisonment, corporal punishment, fines, taxes, social pressure, regulations. These add up to an overall deterrent effect. We could have less stigma on select behaviors if we “replaced” it with a higher monetary cost, keeping total deterrence constant.