Abstract Both guilt and competition motivate goal achievement. Guilt increases task motivation, but also enhances prosocial goals. Competition motivates individual success, but its zero-sum nature makes personal and prosocial goals mutually exclusive. This work explores the relationship between guilt, competition and goal-achievement motivation. In five experiments, guilt was associated with higher motivation to achieve individual goals, but its effect on motivation in competitive settings was negative. Unlike guilt, shame, the emotion most closely related to it, did not affect competitive motivation. The studies identify a conflict between personal and prosocial goals, both activated by guilt, as the cause for reduced competitive motivation. When outperforming others did not harm their interests, or when competitive achievement could also benefit others, the motivation of guilty competitors returned to its typical high level. The results demonstrate the power of emotions and competitive incentives on goal-directed behavior.
Last. Yaniv Shani(TAU: Tel Aviv University)H-Index: 7
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From children's schoolyard play to executives' boardroom negotiations, competitive and bargaining interactions are common to everyday life. Sometimes, the interacting parties are socially close and sometimes not. In this research, we examine how friendship influences memory for actions in such interactions. Dyads consisting of either friends or strangers played a competitive card game (Study 1) or the ultimatum game (Studies 2 and 4) and then recalled the interaction. We find that participants r...
Last. Abigail T Panter(UNC: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)H-Index: 24
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Abstract Guilt-proneness (GP) is an individual difference characterized by a tendency to feel bad about committing transgressions. We investigated how law enforcement job candidates' guilt-proneness relates to their employment suitability, history of employment and legal problems, and counterproductive tendencies. By demonstrating relationships between GP and variables important for personnel selection and organizational functioning, this work highlights the potential utility of measuring this t...
Research has demonstrated that two types of affect have an influence on judgment and decision making: incidental affect (affect unrelated to a judgment or decision such as a mood) and integral affect (affect that is part of the perceiver’s internal representation of the option or target under consideration). So far, these two lines of research have seldom crossed so that knowledge concerning their combined effects is largely missing. To fill this gap, the present review highlights differences an...
Last. Fabrizio Butera(UNIL: University of Lausanne)H-Index: 33
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Do people feel better or worse about themselves when working with someone who is better than they are? We present the first replication of the work of Stapel and Koomen (2005) who showed that being in a competitive vs. cooperative mindset moderates the effects of social comparison on self-evaluation. In Experiment 1, we present a close replication of Stapel and Koomen (2005, Study 2). Participants in competition/cooperation had to self-evaluate after receiving information about the personal char...
#1Benjamin Balas(NDSU: North Dakota State University)H-Index: 18
#2Laura E. Thomas(NDSU: North Dakota State University)H-Index: 16
People use facial appearance to predict social behavior, but can social context also influence face perception? Leveraging a link between competition and aggression, we investigated the effects of competitive interactions with confederates on participants’ performance in a face reconstruction task. Participants played a game either in competition or cooperation with confederates and were then asked to create facial portraits of these confederates by arranging their component features into their ...
Last. Yaniv Shani(TAU: Tel Aviv University)H-Index: 7
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Regret is the prototypical decision-related emotion. Most theory and research on regret comes from the United States and Europe, but recent research has suggested potential cross-cultural differences in regret. We examined generality and cultural variation in the experience of regret. A cross-cultural study compared experiences of regret with those of disappointment and guilt as reported by participants from the United States (n = 143), the Netherlands (n = 147), Israel (n = 148), and Taiwan (n ...
#1Uriel Haran(BGU: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)H-Index: 7
#2Ilana Ritov(HUJI: Hebrew University of Jerusalem)H-Index: 35
Abstract Research on pro-social behavior reports greater generosity and helping behavior toward merely identifiable persons, whose identities have been determined but not revealed, than toward unspecified, “statistical” targets. This work investigates whether identifiability can have a similar effect on behavior in competitive contexts. Data from three experiments show that providing arbitrary, non-identifying information about one's competition enhances one's goal-driven behavior: in competitiv...
#2Taya R. Cohen(CMU: Carnegie Mellon University)H-Index: 22
Five studies demonstrated that highly guilt-prone people may avoid forming interdependent partnerships with others whom they perceive to be more competent than themselves, as benefitting a partner less than the partner benefits one's self could trigger feelings of guilt. Highly guilt-prone people who lacked expertise in a domain were less willing than were those low in guilt proneness who lacked expertise in that domain to create outcome-interdependent relationships with people who possessed dom...
The capacity to experience guilt is assumed to benefit individuals, as the rewards of repeated, cooperative interactions are likely to exceed the rewards of acting selfishly. If that assumption is true, the extent to which people experience guilt over interpersonal transgressions should at least partly depend on the utility of another person for the attainment of personal goal(s) through social interaction (relational utility). Three experiments confirmed the relational utility hypothesis by sho...
Abstract null null Guilt has often been conceptualized as a moral emotion because it stimulates transgressors to restore a damaged relationship. However, not much has been investigated about when the guilt-induced relational-promoting goal conflicts with certain moral norms (for instance, honesty). In this paper, we demonstrate that guilt increases the transgressors' lying intentions in situations where honesty is anticipated to incur immediate relational harm with the victim and that this effec...
Abstract Research on guilt proneness in the workplace has flourished over the past decade. Here we attempt to refine the construct, outlining its positive psychological mechanisms and clarifying how it relates to desired employee outcomes. We present a theoretical framework that explains how guilt-prone employees react and attempt to resolve, conflicting normative expectations, generating specific predictions about the relationship between guilt proneness and various forms of conformity and devi...