A 19th century philosophical movement called Moralism was an attempt to use shame and tribal manipulation to adjust how people behaved.
The group behind this movement wanted to imbue society with a hard-set respect for what we might call Christian-leaning, traditional values like a predefined family unit and the relegation of anything sex-related to the bedroom and only the bedroom, alongside issues that were common to a certain class of contemporary British and American socialite, like temperance, a political focus on some types of freedom and equality, and a desire to educate groups they considered to be “less-civilized.”
One of the most potent arrows in their philosophical quiver was social stigma: a term that originally referred to a literal marking, like a scar, brand, or tattoo that was forcibly applied to people who were deemed to be unsavory in some way, but who nonetheless walked among everyone else.
The idea was to ensure such people could be identified as less-than, because their behaviors, backgrounds, or some other often inherent attribute made them morally dangerous to everyone else; if their ideas or norms or physical conditions spread, it was feared that social structures would collapse and hard-won, righteous principles would vanish.
The theory of stigma has evolved over the past few hundred years, with early sociological work published in France in the late-19th century, and the concept—as a formal realm of inquiry—spreading especially throughout Europe and the United States in subsequent decades.
According to this work, part of what makes social stigma so useful is that it can help a society establish a clear Us by portraying an obvious and cleanly divisible Them: those who are stigmatized demonstrate both undesirable characteristics and the consequences of having or adopting those characteristics.
Thus, someone who is tempted to overindulge in alcohol, but who lives within a temperance-favoring society, may be nudged into alignment with those overarching ideals because they have both seen people stigmatized for that behavior, and have seen what happens to the reputations of those people.
There are social consequences to such behaviors, and those consequences bleed over into other aspects of a person’s life: their employability, their ability to attract a mate, the way they’re treated by other people who thenceforth perceive them through the lens of “Other” and/or “morally inferior person.”
In some cases stigma is the consequence of a biological disgust response, rather merely serving as a weapon against those who threatened to disrupt societal norms.
People with all kinds of deformities, handicaps, or differences have been subject to various types of social stigma throughout human history, as have people who catch diseases with overt symptoms and those who suffer from accidents or disasters that are attributed to some kind of moral failure or inherent character trait, rather than happenstance or coincidence.
The desire to not be stigmatized can incentivize our stigmatization of others.
We may actively seek out other people to outcast because doing so allows us to prove our moral purity by demonstrating our awareness of the prevailing social mores and exhibiting our alignment with them. This allows us to publicly contrast our own behavior and traits with the person we’ve accused in a favorable way.
Modern research has indicated that stigma, though favorable to some aspects of social order, can also limit societies and the people within them by artificially truncating the number of behaviors, beliefs, and perspectives that are acceptable within that society.
Quite a lot of what we would today call prejudice seems to be related to and perpetuated by stigma toward certain groups; biases that are born in one period and then passed on generationally.
One key consequence of this social and tribal inheritance is that we’re slower to incorporate other people and new ideas into our intellectual and moral frameworks, which slows many facets of development, including our own internalized sense of right and wrong, possible and impossible, and Us and Them.
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