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Forthcoming (August 2011) Future Science edited by Max Brockman, Vintage Press, New York. hard to keep track of who cooperates and who doesn’t, especially if it’s institutions you’re monitoring. Enron, which in 2001 filed one of the largest bankruptcies in U.S. history, hid billions of dollars in debt in hundreds of shell firms, which bought poorly performing Enron stocks so that Enron could create a fraudulent company profile and mislead its auditors. Lehman Brothers, in the years before its 2008 collapse, used a smaller firm called Hudson Castle (of which it owned 25 percent) to shift risky investments off its books so that Hudson Castle, not Lehman Brothers, could absorb “headline risk.” Which leads us to shaming’s third weakness. (3.) Shaming’s biggest drawback is its insufficiency. Some people have no shame. In the research my colleagues and I have conducted on first-year students, involving games that require cooperation, we have found that shame does not encourage cooperation among those players who are least cooperative. This suggests that a certain fraction of a given population will always behave shamelessly, like the False cleanerfish, if the payoff is high enough. The banks may have gone bankrupt, but the bankers got their bonuses. There was even speculation that publishing individual banker bonuses would lead to banker jealousy, not shame. My colleagues and I conclude that ultimately shame is not enough to catalyze major social change. Slavery did not end because abolitionists shamed slave owners into freeing their slaves. Child labor did not stop because factories were shamed into forbidding children to work. Destruction of the ozone layer did not slow because industries were ashamed to manufacture products that contained chlorofluorocarbons. This is why punishment remains imperative. Even if shaming were enough to bring the behavior of most people into line, governments need a system of punishment to protect the group from the least cooperative players. Finally, consider who belongs to the group. Today we are faced with the additional challenge of balancing human interests and the interests of nonhuman life. How can we 10 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023729