The semiotics of spiking someone's drink

September 2024

Psychology

There's a UK public health poster campaign warning people that drink spiking will "ruin your future." The poster focuses almost entirely on what will happen to the person who does it — their employment prospects, their criminal record, their reputation. Victim impact is an afterthought, if mentioned at all.

This is worth talking about, because the choice of framing reveals something important about how we think about ethics in 2024.

The distinction you need is between guilt and shame. Guilt is about what you've done — it's oriented toward the victim and the act. You feel guilty because you've harmed someone. Shame is about what you are — it's oriented toward how you appear to others. You feel shame because you've been caught, or might be caught, or because your social standing is threatened.

A guilt-based deterrent says: don't spike drinks because it destroys someone's sense of safety, causes lasting psychological harm, and treats another person as an object for your convenience.

A shame-based deterrent says: don't spike drinks because it will ruin your future.

The poster is shame-based. And shame-based deterrents have a well-documented failure mode: they don't work when the probability of getting caught is low. If the only reason not to do something is the risk of being seen, then in contexts where you can't be seen, the deterrent disappears.

This isn't just a design choice on the part of the campaign creators. It reflects a broader cultural shift. The psychoanalysts Heinz Kohut and Christopher Lasch both tracked this movement across the 20th century, from what they called "Guilty Man" — a psychological type organised around internalised moral codes — to "Tragic Man," who is primarily concerned with how they are perceived and what they can achieve.

Guilty Man commits an act and feels bad about what he did. Tragic Man commits an act and feels bad about being the kind of person who would do that, or about the risk of being found out. These are completely different moral architectures.

Baby Reindeer is the best recent cultural example of this distinction. The protagonist Donny is stalked for years and does essentially nothing about it. His inaction is usually explained in terms of his complicated feelings for his stalker, or his passive nature. But the more psychoanalytically accurate reading is that Donny doesn't act because he's ashamed — of his situation, of his complicity, of what it says about him. His eventual confession comes not in private but publicly, in front of an audience. He outsources the guilt-processing to external witnesses. This is classic shame architecture. It only works when other people are watching.

The drink spiking campaign treats its audience the same way. It assumes people will only modify their behaviour based on external consequence. And when conviction rates for drink spiking remain very low — the campaign's own logic suggests — that framework is almost guaranteed to fail.

A functioning ethics requires some internalized sense that the act itself is wrong, independent of consequence. We used to call this conscience. We now design public health campaigns that explicitly avoid appealing to it, because we've apparently decided it doesn't exist.

This is a significant thing to have decided.