Molho Catherine, Soraperra Ivan, Schulz Jonathan F, Shalvi Shaul
Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Toulouse School of Economics, University of Toulouse Capitole, Toulouse, France.
Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, Toulouse, France.
Nat Hum Behav. 2025 Aug 11. doi: 10.1038/s41562-025-02286-3.
Impersonal prosociality is considered a cornerstone of thriving civic societies and well-functioning institutions. Previous research has documented cross-societal variation in prosociality using monetary allocation tasks such as dictator games. Here we examined whether different societies may rely on distinct mechanisms-guilt and internalized norms versus shame and external reputation-to promote prosociality. We conducted a preregistered experiment with 7,978 participants across 20 culturally diverse countries. In dictator games, we manipulated guilt by varying information about the consequences of participants' decisions, and shame by varying observability. We also used individual- and country-level measures of the importance of guilt over shame. We found robust evidence for guilt-driven prosociality and wilful ignorance across countries. Prosociality was higher when individuals received information than when they could avoid it. Furthermore, more guilt-prone individuals (but not countries) were more responsive to information. In contrast, observability by strangers had negligible effects on prosociality. Our findings highlight the importance of providing information about the negative consequences of individuals' choices to encourage prosocial behaviour across cultural contexts.
非个人亲社会行为被视为繁荣的公民社会和运转良好的机构的基石。先前的研究使用独裁者博弈等货币分配任务记录了亲社会行为的跨社会差异。在这里，我们研究了不同社会是否可能依赖不同的机制——内疚和内化规范与羞耻和外部声誉——来促进亲社会行为。我们对来自20个文化多样国家的7978名参与者进行了一项预先注册的实验。在独裁者博弈中，我们通过改变关于参与者决策后果的信息来操纵内疚感，并通过改变可观察性来操纵羞耻感。我们还使用了个人层面和国家层面关于内疚比羞耻更重要的衡量标准。我们发现了各国内疚驱动的亲社会行为和故意忽视的有力证据。当个体收到信息时，亲社会行为比他们可以避免信息时更高。此外，更容易产生内疚感的个体（而非国家）对信息的反应更敏感。相比之下，陌生人的可观察性对亲社会行为的影响可以忽略不计。我们的研究结果强调了提供关于个体选择负面后果的信息以鼓励跨文化背景下亲社会行为的重要性。
