Abstract
Some studies have shown the possibility that people feel guilt not only due to interpersonal problems but also when experiencing threats to their own internal morality (e.g. Eskine et al. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 49(5), 947-950, 2013), whereas other studies have shown that guilt-induced behaviours can restore individuals’ sense of moral person (e.g. Gneezy et al. Management Science, 58(1), 179–187, 2012; Zhong et al. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46(5), 859–862, 2010). These findings suggest that guilt can strongly reflect how much individuals deviate from what they perceive to be adequate moral person. Therefore, we proposed that guilt works as an alert system that signals people about threats to their morality. We used the Implicit Association Test (Greenwald et al. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(6), 1464-1480, 1998) to investigate if an individual’s moral self decreased in the situation where that individual felt guilt. Results showed that implicit moral self in the guilt condition was lower than that in the control condition when controlling for individual variation in moral self. Our findings provide a new perspective on the function of guilt and generate new hypotheses about the relationship between guilt and behaviours.
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Notes
We picked out moral-related words used in the moral IAT in Experiment 1 from the Moral Identity Scale (Aquino and Reed 2002; Xu and Ma 2014). Additionally, we gathered synonyms and antonyms of these words, ultimately using 8 moral-related words and 8 immoral-related words. Furthermore, we used 5 self-related words and 5 other-related words from Fujii and Sawada (2014).
We used HAD (free statistical software running on Microsoft Excel; Shimizu 2016) to analyse our data.
We used Welch’s method because Levine’s test of equality of variances was significant, F(1, 52) = 19.12, p < .001.
Following Greenwald et al. (2003), we used response latencies from Blocks 3, 4, 6, and 7 to calculate D-scores. We first eliminated participants who had a response latency of less than 300 ms for more than 10% of all trials. We also removed trials with response latencies under 400 ms or over 10,000 ms. Then, we computed the average latencies of correct trials for each block. Next, we computed one pooled SD for all trials in Blocks 3 and 6 and another for all trials in Blocks 4 and 7. Error latencies were replaced with each block’s mean + 600 ms. Two differences in average latency (i.e. Block 6 minus Block 3, and Block 7 minus Block 4) were divided by the associated pooled SD. Finally, these values were averaged.
Following Egloff et al. (2005), we computed the internal consistency of the IAT measure. First, we separately subtracted response latency of each trial in the consistent blocks (Blocks 3 and 4) from that of the corresponding trials in the inconsistent blocks (Blocks 6 and 7). In other words, we subtracted first response latency in Block 3 from first response latency in Block 6, etc., yielding 60 difference scores. Then, we computed Cronbach’s alpha from these difference scores.
Because some previous studies had reported an observed order effect (e.g. Greenwald et al. 2003), we included IAT order as an independent variable to rule out such an effect.
The significant order effect of IAT showed that the case of consistent-first order (M = 0.90, SD = 0.44; i.e. moral-self pairing first) had a higher IAT D-score than the case of inconsistent-first order (M = 0.61, SD = 0.33; i.e. immoral-self pairing first).
We used Welch’s method because Levine’s test of equality of variances was significant, F(1, 98) = 37.04, p < .001.
We also conducted an analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) with the second IAT D-scores as a dependent variable, and guilt manipulation, IAT type, and IAT order as independent variables, while controlling for the first IAT D-scores. Results showed a marginally significant interaction between guilt manipulation and IAT type (F(1, 91) = 3.33, p = .071, η2p = .04). The remaining main effects and interactions were not significant (all Fs < 2.52, ps > .10) except for the first D-score (F(1, 91) = 40.97, p < .001, η2p = .31). A simple effect analysis revealed that participants in the guilt-evoking condition showed a lower moral D-score as compared to those in the control condition (t(91) = 2.02, p = .047, d = 0.59), with no difference between conditions for self-esteem D-scores (t(91) = 0.54, p = .589, d = 0.21).
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Acknowledgements
This paper was based partially on a doctoral dissertation submitted to the Hiroshima University by the first author and was supervised by the second author.
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This work was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for JSPS Fellows (17 J05039) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science to the first author.
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Furukawa, Y., Nakashima, K., Tsukawaki, R. et al. Guilt as a signal informing us of a threat to our morality. Curr Psychol 40, 2122–2132 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-019-0144-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-019-0144-4