Moral Sentiments: the old and the new. Shame and Guilt

On 26th of June on scientific seminar "Culture matters", Seger Breugelmans, Assistant Professor of Social Psychology in Tilburg University, Netherlands, made a report on following topic: "Moral Sentiments: the old and the new. Shame and Guilt". Read more...

On 26th of June on scientific seminar "Culture matters", Seger Breugelmans, Assistant Professor of Social Psychology in Tilburg University, Netherlands, made a report on following topic: "Moral Sentiments: the old and the new. Shame and Guilt".

Discussion of moral sentiments S. Breugelmans started with a big question - why do people cooperate? Fehr & Gächter called human cooperation an evolutionary puzzle. "Unlike other creatures, people frequently cooperate with genetically unrelated strangers, often in large groups, with people they will never meet again, and when reproductive gains are small or absent" (Fehr & Gächter, 2002). R. Frank understood moral emotions as commitment devices, and mentioned that people with selfish motives behave in prosocial manner in situations with choice dilemmas.

S. Breugelmans presented his own research on studying such emotions as shame and guilt. Respondents of his study were from Raramuri (native American people of Northwest Mexico), and these people don't distinguish "shame" and "guilt" in their language. How to study emotion without a word? S. Breugelmans and his colleagues used a quasi-experimental design of study, second rural group, culture-own stimuli, multiple indicators of emotion, and cross-cultural comparison of within-culture structures. Findings of this study showed clear distinction of feelings related to shame or guilt emotions.

According to Tangney & Dearing (2002) shame is worse than guilt, cause it leads to "self-destructive behaviors (hard drug use, suicide) that can be viewed as misguided attempts to dampen or escape this most punitive moral emotion". Shame is usually connected to hiding and withdrawal. However S. Breugelmans et al. found that in Javanese and Raramuri samples changing of behavior is more connected to shame than to guilt. In lab study they made a series of experiments with students feeling shame or guilt emotions. The main goal was to answer following question: what could be the function of feeling bad about the self? Results of lab study showed that shame increases prosocial behavior for proself people. That is opposite to what has been said in theory before. Guilt is more about specific behavior and leads to direct reciprocity in cooperation, while shame is more about feeling bad without making any particular harm and leads to indirect reciprocity.

  Moral Sentiments: the old and the new. Shame and Guilt

 

Anna Lipatova