Dataset Information

The evolution of shame and guilt.

ABSTRACT: Shame and guilt seem to be two synonymous moral emotions but actually lead to contrasting human behaviors or behavioral tendencies. Shame drives people to hide or deny their wrongdoings while guilt drives people to amend their mistakes. How shame and guilt evolved in humans is still obscure. Here we present a computer model featured with reciprocal altruism and gregarious lifestyle for studying this question. We tested ten different strategies in our model and the pairwise contests show that shame-driven-hiding strategy can dominate the other strategies such as tit-for-tat and Pavlov in more than half of parameter combinations. The mathematical analysis of our model demonstrates that shame-driven-hiding strategy is an evolutionary stable strategy within a group as long as hiding can let an individual evade the retaliations to his wrongdoings. However, the problem of hiding is that it reduces an individual's social circle, i.e. living in a smaller group. Our analysis also shows that guilt-driven-amending strategy can outperform shame-driven-denying strategy at both individual and group levels if the cooperative behavior is sustainable within a group (b/(b-c) < T/n). Thus, we propose that shame is more adaptive at the individual level while guilt is more advantageous in the context of intergroup competition.

SUBMITTER: Shen L

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6040729 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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The evolution of shame and guilt.

Shen Libing L

PloS one 20180711 7

Shame and guilt seem to be two synonymous moral emotions but actually lead to contrasting human behaviors or behavioral tendencies. Shame drives people to hide or deny their wrongdoings while guilt drives people to amend their mistakes. How shame and guilt evolved in humans is still obscure. Here we present a computer model featured with reciprocal altruism and gregarious lifestyle for studying this question. We tested ten different strategies in our model and the pairwise contests show that sha ...[more]

PMID: 29995883

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Project description:Habitual offender drivers are required to recover points lost on their driving license by attending reeducation courses, an experience that may, upon reflection of the incident in question, induce feelings of guilt or shame for the infractions they committed. A simulated driving task studied optimistic offender drivers to analyze the extent to which the controllability of the situational context influenced their use of internal and external factors in counterfactual thoughts and emotions such as guilt and shame. The study involved 160 drivers, of whom 54 were categorized as repeat offender drivers while 106 drivers attended courses for advanced professional driving licenses. The participants drove along a route in a driving simulator, which had been previously adjusted for the difficulty to generate a perception of high or low control. Based on the outcome obtained by the participants in this stage, each driver had to report which resources they required to improve their outcomes. Different factor ANOVAs were used to analyze our findings. The results indicated that optimistic offenders, unlike other groups (i.e., optimistic non-offender and pessimistic non-offender), thought that their results could have been better if external factors had been present (i.e., upward counterfactuals), both under conditions of high and low control. They believed their results would have been worse had it not been for their internal resources (i.e., downward counterfactuals), especially under conditions of low control. Concerning emotions of guilt and shame, offender optimists had the lowest values in both conditions compared with the other groups. We may contend that optimistic offender drivers thought they could have obtained better outcomes if external factors had been involved. In the low control condition, they justified that if it were not for such internal skills, their results could have been worse. When they generated such thoughts, the emotions of guilt and shame were minimal.

Dataset Information

The evolution of shame and guilt.

Publications

The evolution of shame and guilt.

Similar Datasets

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