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Julle-Daniere, E., Whitehouse, J. 
ORCID: 0000-0003-2607-5492, Vrij, A., Gustaffsson, E. and Waller, B. ORCID: 0000-0001-6303-7458,
2020.
The social function of the feeling and expression of guilt.
Royal Society Open Science, 7 (12): 200617.
ISSN 2054-5703
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Abstract
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.
| Item Type: | Journal article | ||||||
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| Publication Title: | Royal Society Open Science | ||||||
| Creators: | Julle-Daniere, E., Whitehouse, J., Vrij, A., Gustaffsson, E. and Waller, B. | ||||||
| Publisher: | The Royal Society Publishing | ||||||
| Date: | 9 December 2020 | ||||||
| Volume: | 7 | ||||||
| Number: | 12 | ||||||
| ISSN: | 2054-5703 | ||||||
| Identifiers: |
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| Rights: | © 2020 the authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited. | ||||||
| Divisions: | Schools > School of Social Sciences | ||||||
| Record created by: | Jonathan Gallacher | ||||||
| Date Added: | 01 Dec 2020 16:11 | ||||||
| Last Modified: | 31 May 2021 15:08 | ||||||
| URI: | https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/41737 |
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