Julle-Danière Eglantine, Whitehouse Jamie, Vrij Aldert, Gustafsson Erik, Waller Bridget M
Department of Psychology, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, Hampshire PO1 2UP, UK.
Department of Psychology, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, Nottinghamshire NG1 4FQ, UK.
R Soc Open Sci. 2020 Dec 9;7(12):200617. doi: 10.1098/rsos.200617. eCollection 2020 Dec.
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.
人类具有独特的合作能力，并在个体之间形成至关重要的短期和长期社会纽带，这些纽带最终塑造了人类社会。对这种高度合作的需求可能对调节合作过程的情感和交流行为，如内疚感，施加了特别强大的选择压力。内疚是一种社会的、以他人为导向的道德情感，它促进关系修复和亲社会行为。例如，人们对表现出内疚的犯错者比对没有表现出内疚的犯错者更为宽容。在此，我们在一个新颖的实验环境中，研究了内疚感在关系质量不同的朋友对之间产生的社会后果。参与者两两配对参与一个具有共同目标的合作游戏。然后，我们让其中一名参与者产生内疚感，并告知另一名参与者其伙伴的错误行为。我们使用独裁者游戏来检验结果，看看他们如何分配共同奖励。我们发现，有内疚感的人无论友谊如何，都有动机去弥补过错。观察到他人的内疚会产生惩罚效应，而且错误行为的受害者对表现出内疚的亲密朋友的惩罚比对熟人的惩罚更严厉。因此，我们认为，在内疚感在亲密朋友之间具有更强的作用，因为关系破裂的代价更大。所以，关系背景对于道德情感的功能相关性至关重要。
