Influence of social context on the relationship between guilt and prosocial behaviour

Abstract

While some previous researchers have found that guilt encourages prosocial behaviour towards a victim at the expense of other people, others have found the opposite, that is, people allocate resources at the expense of themselves. The present research used a hypothetical scenario method to determine which of these patterns would be replicated in the collectivistic context of Japanese society. In addition, we separated the cause of feelings of guilt into having caused harm and being at fault, and examined in more detail the effect of guilt on prosocial behaviour. Our results show that, in line with the second set of previous researchers, participants who were induced to feel guilt for having caused harm were more likely to allocate their resources to their victim at the expense of themselves than were individuals in the no-harm condition. This suggests that differences in social context influence the effect of guilt on prosocial behaviour in different ways.

The impact of normative appeals and affective priming on public service announcements (PSAs) – a moderating role of self-construals

“…This is because the impact of guilt is moderated by other cognitive processing factors, such as perceived difficulty in reparation (Berndsen et al, 2010), social status of the victim (Dumont and Waldzus, 2014), etc. Cultural context is seen as one of these factors (Furukawa et al, 2016). As most research has been conducted in Occidental culture (Li, 2013), this paper aims to test whether the positive effect of guilt still works in Oriental culture.…”