Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK.
Horizon Digital Economy Research, University Of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK.
Sci Rep. 2017 Apr 27;7:46709. doi: 10.1038/srep46709.
Sustained cooperative social interactions are key to successful outcomes in many real-world contexts (e.g., climate change and energy conservation). We explore the self-regulatory roles of anger and guilt, as well as prosocial or selfish social preferences in a repeated social dilemma game framed around shared electricity use at home. We explore the proposal that for sustained cooperation, guilty repair needs to override angry retaliation. We show that anger is damaging to cooperation as it leads to retaliation and an increase of defection, while, through guilt, cooperation is repaired resulting in higher levels of cooperation. We demonstrate a disconnect between the experience of anger and subsequent retaliation which is a function of participants' social preferences. While there is no difference in reports of anger between prosocial and selfish individuals after finding out that others use more energy from the communal resource, prosocials are less likely to act on their anger and retaliate. Selfish individuals are motivated by anger to retaliate but not motivated by guilt to repair and contribute disproportionately to the breakdown of cooperation over repeated interactions. We suggest that guilt is a key emotion to appeal to when encouraging cooperation.
持续的合作社交互动是许多现实情境中取得成功的关键（例如，气候变化和节能）。我们探讨了愤怒和内疚的自我调节作用，以及在家庭用电共享的重复社会困境游戏中，亲社会或自私的社会偏好。我们探讨了这样一种观点，即要想持续合作，内疚的修复需要克服愤怒的报复。我们表明，愤怒对合作具有破坏性，因为它会导致报复和更多的背叛，而通过内疚，合作得到修复，从而提高合作水平。我们证明了愤怒的体验与随后的报复之间存在脱节，这是参与者社会偏好的一个功能。虽然在发现其他人从公共资源中使用更多能源后，亲社会者和自私者在愤怒报告方面没有差异，但亲社会者不太可能因愤怒而报复。自私的人会因愤怒而报复，但不会因内疚而修复，并且在多次互动中，他们不成比例地破坏了合作。我们认为，当鼓励合作时，内疚是一种关键的情感诉求。
