If you do something wrong that hurts someone else, you feel
guilty. Guilt is a valuable emotion,
because it helps to maintain your ties to the people in your community. It provides a painful consequence for actions
that would weaken the groups that you belong to.
Because guilt is painful, people often find ways to soothe
their feelings by making up for their actions in some way. These repairs are also useful, because they
help to re-strengthen people’s ties to the community that they have damaged.
A paper in the May, 2012 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by Cynthia Cryder,
Stephen Springer, and Carey Morewedge explored the way that people make these
repairs. They contrasted two
possibilities. One possibility is that
when you do something wrong, you try to make it up to the specific people you
hurt. A second possibility is that a
guilty person will try to do something for other people to help them feel
better.
One set of studies explored a hypothetical situation
described by a story. In this case,
college students read that they were part of a group project. In a control condition, they were responsible
for giving a presentation about the results of the project, and they gave the
presentation. In an experimental
condition, they were responsible for giving a presentation, but overslept.
Later that day, participants read that they were having
dinner at a restaurant with a group.
Some people were told that they were having dinner with their project
team. The dinner was BYOB (bring your
own bottle), and so participants had to select how much they would pay for a
bottle of wine. They were allowed to
select from a set of wines ranging in price (and quality) from $8 to $20. In addition, they were told that after dinner
when everyone had paid what they thought they owed, the table was $9 short on
the bill. Participants were asked how
much additional money they would contribute toward the shortfall.
Participants who were made to feel guilty were willing to
pay more for a bottle of wine, and they contributed more toward the bill than
people who were not made to feel guilty.
So far, this result just indicates that guilty people want
to do something to help people. In
another condition, people made to feel guilty were told that they were having
dinner with a different group of people.
In this case, people spent about the same amount on the wine and the
bill as those in the control condition.
So, people want to make repairs specifically to the people they harmed.
Two other results from this set of studies are also
interesting.
One is that guilt is a specific emotion that is different
from just feeling bad about an action.
In another study, the researchers compared feeling guilty (using the
oversleeping scenario just described) to a case where someone cheated on the
project by using slides prepared by a group who did a similar project the
previous year. In this case, the dinner
scenario only included the need to add money to the dinner bill. Participants who felt guilty added more money
to the bill than those who cheated.
The second is that guilt also affected real decisions of
participants. In a clever study,
research participants were made to feel guilty toward another participant. They were given an elaborate description of
the experiment written in small print.
Few participants read the whole set of instructions. Then, they were given the choice of eating
either some fruit flavored jellybeans or some vomit flavored jellybeans. Unsurprisingly, most people chose the fruit
flavored jellybeans. After making their
choice, participants were told that “as they read in the description of the
study,” another participant was going to have to eat the jellybeans they did not
select. This made people feel guilty
that they made someone else eat vomit flavored jellybeans. In a control condition, participants were
told that their partner would eat the same flavor jellybeans they selected.
After eating the fruit flavored candy, participants played a
dictator game. The dictator game comes from behavioral
economics. Participants are given money
(in this case $5) and are told that they can keep as much of it as they want,
but they can choose how much they would like to give to a partner. Participants were told that their partner in
this game was the same participant who would eat the jellybeans based on their
initial selection. Participants whose
initial choice forced their partner to eat vomit flavored beans gave about
three times as much money to their partner as those whose initial choice forced
their partner to eat fruit flavored beans.
These results show the positive power that guilt can
have. Whenever you do something that
could hurt another person, you run the risk of damaging your relationship with
them. Your feelings of guilt lead you to
be more generous to that person in a way that can demonstrate clearly that your
relationship is valuable.
One thing that further research needs to explore is how
people who have been hurt by someone else react to these gestures. It would be interesting to know whether you
are more likely to forgive people who take actions to show that they value
their relationship with you.
