Key Takeaways
- Public accountability can serve an important purpose, particularly when documenting violence, abuse, discrimination, corruption, or other serious misconduct. But accountability can cross into vigilantism when individuals assume the authority to personally investigate, pursue, expose, or punish others.
- Researchers have identified a psychological construct called the vigilante identity, in which people see themselves as monitors and punishers of those they believe have violated social norms.
- Smartphones and social media can magnify ordinary interpersonal conflicts by allowing a brief confrontation to be recorded, stripped of context, and presented to potentially enormous audiences.
- Research on online shaming suggests that moral, emotional, behavioral, and personality factors can influence people’s willingness to participate in public punishment.
- Political polarization may intensify the problem when disagreement shifts from opposing someone’s ideas to regarding the person as morally unacceptable or threatening.
- Continuing to pursue, provoke, film, or publicly shame someone who has already peacefully disengaged can turn conflict resolution into punishment rather than accountability.
- Public shaming can damage more than its immediate target. It can encourage social surveillance, discourage open discussion, reward confrontation, reduce opportunities for forgiveness, and weaken trust between people.
- A healthier standard is proportional accountability: document genuine wrongdoing when necessary, report serious misconduct through appropriate channels, but do not treat every disagreement or offensive interaction as justification for unlimited public punishment.
Introduction
Smartphones can turn interpersonal disagreements into public confrontations, raising questions about vigilantism, online shaming, proportionality, and respect for de-escalation.
A disagreement in a restaurant, workplace, university, store, or public gathering once had a natural endpoint. People argued, separated, complained to management, or simply walked away.
The smartphone has changed that equation.
Today, a relatively minor interpersonal conflict can become an attempt at public punishment within seconds. Someone reaches for a phone, starts recording, follows the other person, threatens to expose them online, or attempts to transform an unpleasant interaction into content for an audience that was never part of the original encounter.
Sometimes recording is entirely justified. Smartphone videos have documented violence, abuse of authority, discrimination, dangerous behavior, and other matters of legitimate public interest. Recording can preserve evidence and provide accountability when institutional systems fail.
But there is another behavior that deserves scrutiny: self-appointed social punishment.
It occurs when people move beyond protecting themselves, documenting legitimate misconduct, or reporting a problem and instead assume the authority to investigate, expose, shame, pursue, or punish another person for violating their personal understanding of acceptable behavior.
Psychologists and social scientists have studied several concepts that can help us understand aspects of this phenomenon, including vigilante identity, social vigilantism, moral grandstanding, online shaming, digital vigilantism, and affective polarization.
These concepts should not be used to diagnose strangers or pretend that we know someone’s private motives after watching a brief confrontation.
They can, however, help us examine a broader social problem: what happens when moral certainty, smartphones, social media, and the desire to punish converge?
The Rise of the Self-Appointed Enforcer
One useful concept comes from research into what psychologists have called the vigilante identity.
Researchers writing in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes developed and tested a measure of this identity across multiple studies. The concept describes people who see themselves as individuals who monitor their environment for norm violations and punish perceived offenders despite lacking formal authority to do so (Chen et al., 2022).
This distinction is important.
Noticing inappropriate behavior is normal. Objecting to harmful behavior can be socially valuable. Reporting criminal activity, harassment, threats, or dangerous conduct is not inherently vigilantism.
The problem begins when someone moves from:
“I believe this behavior is wrong.”
to:
“I have the right to personally punish the person responsible.”
Those are fundamentally different positions.
Societies create rules, institutions, workplace procedures, courts, professional standards, and other systems partly because accusations and punishment require context and proportionality.
Informal vigilantism can bypass those safeguards.
The accuser can effectively become investigator, judge, and enforcer at the same time.
When Looking for Wrongdoing Becomes Part of an Identity
Related research has examined how vigilante identity connects with monitoring and punishment.
A study published in Personality and Individual Differences examined relationships among perceptions of interpersonal victimhood, vigilante identity, monitoring, and punishment of perceived norm violators.
Across four studies, stronger vigilante identity was associated with greater monitoring of the environment for wrongdoing and greater willingness to punish perceived norm violators (Chen et al., 2022).
That does not mean every person who confronts someone possesses a vigilante personality.
Nor does it mean researchers can diagnose someone based on a smartphone video or brief public interaction.
The more defensible conclusion is broader: some people appear more inclined than others to see monitoring and punishing norm violations as part of their social role.
That tendency can become problematic when the definition of a “norm violation” expands.
A genuinely dangerous act may deserve intervention.
But what happens when an offensive opinion becomes sufficient?
Or a political disagreement?
A rude comment?
An unpopular joke?
A private conversation overheard by someone nearby?
When the threshold becomes too low, ordinary disagreement can begin to look like misconduct, and misconduct can begin to look like something deserving public punishment.
The Smartphone Has Changed the Balance of Power
Smartphones did not create public shaming, but they dramatically increased its reach.
Before social media, most interpersonal confrontations had naturally limited audiences. An argument in a restaurant might be witnessed by 20 people. An unpleasant workplace exchange might be known to several colleagues. A disagreement between strangers might end when one person walked away.
Recording potentially removes those boundaries.
A video can be uploaded to an audience of thousands or millions. Viewers who know almost nothing about the original circumstances can then participate in the punishment.
They may identify the person.
They may search for an employer.
They may contact family members.
They may post negative reviews of an unrelated business.
They may distribute personal information.
They may send threatening or abusive messages.
The consequences can therefore become vastly larger than the original incident.
This is one reason researchers have become interested in digital vigilantism: digital platforms can enable ordinary citizens to participate in informal investigation, identification, exposure, and punishment outside traditional institutional processes.
The existence of a camera is not itself the problem.
The critical questions concern purpose, necessity, and proportionality.
Recording an assault to preserve evidence is very different from following someone who is peacefully leaving because the recorder wants a confrontation on camera.
Documenting misconduct is different from provoking someone in hopes of capturing an angry reaction.
The important question is therefore not simply:
“Was somebody recording?”
It is:
“Was recording necessary to document legitimate misconduct, or was the camera becoming an instrument of retaliation and humiliation?”
When Accountability Turns Into Online Shaming
Recording is only the first stage of the modern phenomenon.
The second is publication.
Once a confrontation is uploaded, an interpersonal dispute can become a spectator event.
A 2023 study published in PLOS ONE examined factors associated with intentions to participate in online shaming. The researchers studied 411 participants and considered moral grandstanding, social vigilantism, emotional factors, moral disengagement, online disinhibition, and personality characteristics.
Together, the variables in their statistical model explained approximately 39% of the variance in reported online-shaming intentions (Muir et al., 2023).
Participants also expressed differing understandings of online shaming. Some viewed it as a form of accountability, while others described it as destructive behavior, entertainment, or an increasingly normalized feature of online life.
Because the research was correlational, it cannot establish that any particular personality characteristic causes online shaming.
Nevertheless, it highlights an important point.
Public shaming is not simply a technological phenomenon.
It is connected to how people think about morality, punishment, social rules, emotion, and their own role in enforcing acceptable behavior.
Moral Certainty Does Not Guarantee Moral Behavior
Perhaps the most important lesson is also one of the oldest: believing that you are morally right does not guarantee that everything you do in pursuit of that belief is morally justified.
People can place aggressive behavior inside a moral narrative:
“I am protecting people.”
“Someone needs to expose this.”
“They deserve what happens.”
“People should know what kind of person this is.”
Sometimes public exposure may indeed be justified.
But moral certainty can also cause people to stop asking important questions.
What actually happened?
What happened before the recording began?
Was anyone genuinely threatened?
Is the accusation accurate?
Was the behavior intentional?
Is there another plausible explanation?
Has the behavior already stopped?
Has the person already left?
Is public exposure necessary?
And perhaps most importantly:
Is the punishment proportionate to the offense?
When those questions disappear, moral conviction can become permission for behavior that would otherwise be recognized as bullying, harassment, or cruelty.
Why Peacefully Walking Away Should Matter
One of the most troubling forms of escalation occurs when someone tries to end a nonviolent confrontation and is not permitted to do so peacefully.
Walking away is one of society’s most basic de-escalation mechanisms.
If two people disagree and one says “okay,” stops arguing, and leaves, the immediate conflict has largely been resolved.
If the other person then follows them, continues shouting, attempts to provoke another response, or pursues them with a camera, the purpose of the encounter has changed.
The goal can no longer simply be stopping the original unwanted behavior.
That behavior has already stopped.
This does not allow an observer to know what the pursuing person is thinking. It would be speculation to claim that the person is secretly embarrassed, experiencing a “power trip,” craving attention, or desperately trying to create viral content.
We do not need to read someone’s mind to evaluate behavior.
If society wants people to de-escalate conflicts, peaceful disengagement must be respected.
Otherwise, we create a destructive incentive.
People are told to walk away from confrontations, but walking away does not actually end the confrontation because the other person continues pursuing them.
A culture that genuinely values de-escalation should not punish people for practicing it.
Political Polarization Can Make the Problem Worse
Politics can add another layer.
Political scientists use the term affective polarization to describe negative feelings and hostility toward members of opposing political groups that extend beyond disagreement about policies.
Political disagreement itself is not a social problem.
People should be free to argue strongly about taxation, immigration, abortion, gun policy, healthcare, climate change, foreign affairs, elections, or any other political issue.
Democratic societies require disagreement.
The danger arises when disagreement over ideas becomes hostility toward people.
Research has examined relationships between affective polarization and broader social trust. A longitudinal analysis in Spain, for example, found a mutually reinforcing negative relationship between out-party affective polarization and generalized social trust (Torcal & Thomson, 2023).
This problem cannot fairly be assigned to one political ideology.
Someone on the political left can decide that a person on the right deserves humiliation because of political beliefs.
Someone on the political right can make exactly the same judgment about someone on the left.
The social failure is identical.
The political opponent stops being another citizen with different beliefs and becomes an enemy who supposedly deserves punishment.
The Damage Extends Beyond the Person Being Shamed
Public humiliation obviously affects its immediate target.
But the broader social consequences deserve just as much attention.
It Encourages Citizens to Monitor One Another
Healthy communities require some degree of informal trust.
People need room to talk, disagree, joke, make mistakes, apologize, reconsider their opinions, and occasionally say something foolish without believing that every imperfect interaction could become permanent digital evidence.
A society in which everyone becomes a potential investigator creates a different kind of public life.
People become guarded.
Private conversations become less private.
Disagreement becomes riskier.
Social trust becomes harder to maintain.
It Removes Context
A viral clip may show 20 seconds from an interaction that lasted 20 minutes.
The audience sees what the uploader selected.
They may not know what happened beforehand, what occurred afterward, whether relevant statements were omitted, or whether information outside the frame changes the meaning of the encounter.
Yet thousands of strangers may confidently pass judgment on people they have never met.
It Can Make Punishment Disproportionate
Formal systems generally attempt—however imperfectly—to match consequences to conduct.
Internet crowds have no equivalent sentencing guidelines.
A rude comment can lead to thousands of hostile messages.
A momentary mistake can become permanently searchable.
An offensive opinion can trigger attempts to contact someone’s employer or family.
Even when criticism is justified, the scale of the punishment can become disconnected from the seriousness of the original behavior.
It Rewards Escalation Instead of Resolution
Calmly resolved disagreements rarely become viral videos.
Confrontation does.
Anger does.
Humiliation does.
That creates a dangerous incentive structure.
If attention is the reward, escalating an interaction may become more socially rewarding than ending it.
It Can Make People Afraid to Admit Mistakes
A healthy society needs people to change their minds.
People need to be able to say:
“I was wrong.”
“I shouldn’t have said that.”
“I didn’t understand the issue.”
“I’ve changed my opinion.”
But admitting mistakes becomes harder when an error can be preserved indefinitely and repeatedly presented as evidence of someone’s permanent character.
A society without forgiveness does not necessarily produce better people.
It may simply produce people who become better at hiding their mistakes.
Accountability and Humiliation Are Not the Same Thing
Criticizing public shaming does not require abandoning accountability.
There are situations where recording and public disclosure serve compelling purposes.
Citizen recordings have documented violence, abuse of authority, discrimination, fraud, harassment, and dangerous conduct that otherwise might never have been acknowledged.
Whistleblowers have exposed serious institutional wrongdoing.
Victims sometimes need evidence.
The answer therefore cannot be:
“Never record anyone.”
Nor should it be:
“Never publicly expose wrongdoing.”
A better principle is proportional accountability.
Ask what outcome is actually necessary.
If someone presents an immediate danger, seek help.
If a crime occurs, preserve evidence and contact the appropriate authorities.
If an employee behaves improperly, management or another appropriate institution may be able to address it.
If someone expresses an offensive opinion but peacefully disengages, ask whether pursuing and publicly humiliating that person actually protects anyone.
Accountability should have an identifiable purpose.
Humiliation often seeks an audience.
The Online Audience Has Responsibilities Too
Public shaming cannot function without spectators.
Every viral confrontation therefore presents two ethical decisions.
The first belongs to the person recording or uploading the encounter.
The second belongs to everyone asked to participate in the punishment.
Viewers should be extremely cautious about making consequential judgments based on incomplete footage.
Before sharing someone’s face, identifying a stranger, contacting an employer, searching for family members, or joining thousands of hostile comments, people should ask a basic question:
Do I actually know what happened?
The internet has made punishment extraordinarily easy.
It has not made establishing the truth equally easy.
Refusing to participate in a digital pile-on does not mean approving of whatever behavior appears in a video.
It means recognizing that criticism and mass retaliation are not the same thing.
We Should Stop Rewarding Unnecessary Escalation
A society should not reward people simply because they display the greatest amount of moral outrage.
There is nothing inherently courageous about escalating a conflict that is already ending.
There is nothing automatically virtuous about pointing a camera at another person.
And possessing strong moral convictions does not confer authority to administer unlimited punishment.
Research on vigilante identity suggests that some individuals are especially inclined to monitor perceived norm violations and punish offenders without formal authority.
Research on online shaming suggests that moral, emotional, behavioral, and personality factors are associated with willingness to participate in public shaming.
Research on affective polarization raises additional concerns about what happens to social trust when political disagreement becomes personal hostility.
None of these findings allows us to diagnose the motives of an individual involved in a brief confrontation.
But we do not need a psychological diagnosis to establish a healthier social norm:
Once an ordinary, nonviolent conflict has ended, let it end.
Final Thoughts
Smartphones have given ordinary people an extraordinary ability to document wrongdoing.
That power has produced genuine public benefits. Evidence that once disappeared can now be preserved. Misconduct can be exposed. Victims can document what happened to them.
But every powerful tool can also be misused.
A camera can document misconduct, or it can become an instrument of intimidation.
Social media can expose serious wrongdoing, or it can transform a minor dispute into mass humiliation.
Moral conviction can motivate people to defend others, or it can convince them that their certainty gives them the right to punish strangers.
The difference often comes down to purpose, proportionality, and restraint.
Healthy societies need accountability, but they also need boundaries. They need people willing to intervene when genuine harm occurs, but also people mature enough to recognize when an argument is over.
They need room for disagreement without dehumanization, mistakes without permanent condemnation, and de-escalation without pursuit.
Most importantly, possessing a smartphone does not make someone a judge, and believing that another person is wrong does not grant unlimited authority over that person’s reputation or life.
Sometimes the most socially responsible response to a disagreement is also the simplest:
Allow people to walk away.
References
Chen, F. X., Graso, M., Aquino, K., Lin, L., Cheng, J. T., DeCelles, K., & Vadera, A. K. (2022). The vigilante identity and organizations. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 170, 104136. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2022.104136
Chen, F. X., Ok, E., & Aquino, K. (2022). Suffering saviors: Relationships between perceptions of interpersonal victimhood, the vigilante identity, and the monitoring and punishment of norm violators. Personality and Individual Differences, 197, 111794. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2022.111794
Muir, S. R., Roberts, L. D., Sheridan, L., & Coleman, A. R. (2023). Examining the role of moral, emotional, behavioural, and personality factors in predicting online shaming. PLOS ONE, 18, e0279750. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0279750
Torcal, M., & Thomson, Z. A. (2023). Social trust and affective polarization in Spain (2014–19). Electoral Studies, 81, 102582. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2023.102582
