The social function of the feeling and expression of guilt

• Main Authors: Eglantine Julle-Danière, Jamie Whitehouse, Aldert Vrij, Erik Gustafsson, Bridget M. Waller
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: The Royal Society 2020-12-01
• Series: Royal Society Open Science
• Subjects: facial expression; guilt; emotion; friendship; social consequences; morality
• Online Access: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsos.200617

Humans are uniquely cooperative and form crucial short- and long-term social bonds between individuals that ultimately shape human societies. The need for such intense cooperation may have provided a particularly powerful selection pressure on the emotional and communicative behaviours regulating cooperative processes, such as guilt. Guilt is a social, other-oriented moral emotion that promotes relationship repair and pro-sociality. For example, people can be more lenient towards wrongdoers who display guilt than towards those who do not. Here, we examined the social consequences of guilt in a novel experimental setting with pairs of friends differing in relationship quality. Pairs of participants took part in a cooperative game with a mutual goal. We then induced guilt in one of the participants and informed the other participant of their partner's wrongdoing. We examined the outcome using a dictator game to see how they split a joint reward. We found that guilty people were motivated to repair wrongdoing regardless of friendship. Observing guilt in others led to a punishment effect and a victim of wrongdoing punished close friends who appeared guilty more so than acquaintances. We suggest, therefore, that guilt has a stronger function between close friends as the costs of relationship breakdown are greater. Relationship context, therefore, is crucial to the functional relevance of moral emotions.