Are self-conscious emotions about the self? Testing competing theories of shame and guilt across two disparate cultures.

The emotions of guilt and shame play major roles in forgiveness, social exclusion, face-saving ploys, suicide, and honor killings. Understanding these emotions is thus of vital importance. The outputs of guilt and shame are already well understood: Guilt motivates amends; shame motivates evasion. However, the elicitors and functions of these emotions are disputed. According to attributional theory, guilt and shame are intrapersonal emotions elicited when negative outcomes are attributed to controllable/unstable (guilt) or uncontrollable/stable (shame) aspects of the self. By contrast, functionalist theory claims that guilt and shame are interpersonal emotions for minimizing the imposition of harm on valued others (guilt) and the cost of reputational damage on the self (shame). Although there is confirmatory evidence consistent with both theories, evidence ostensibly supporting one theory has been argued to actually support the other. To solve this problem of data interpretation, here we report contrastive critical tests of the two theories performed on online participant pools in the United States and India in 2021 (N = 853). Results in both countries support functionalist theory over attributional theory, suggesting that the intrapersonal effects reported in the emotion literature are tributary or incidental to the interpersonal functions of guilt and shame. Functionalist theory presents a promising framework for understanding the interpersonal and intrapersonal aspects of guilt, shame, and other self-conscious emotions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

A broader theory of cooperation can better explain "purity".

Self-control provides one cooperative explanation for "purity." Other types of cooperation provide additional explanations. For example, individuals compete for status by displaying high-value social and sexual traits, which are moralised because they reduce the mutual costs of conflict. As this theory predicts, sexually unattractive traits are perceived as morally bad, aside from self-control. Moral psychology will advance more quickly by drawing on all theories of cooperation.

The Shame System Operates With High Precision.

Previous research indicates that the anticipatory shame an individual feels at the prospect of taking a disgraceful action closely tracks the degree to which local audiences, and even foreign audiences, devalue those individuals who take that action. This supports the proposition that the shame system (a) defends the individual against the threat of being devalued, and (b) balances the competing demands of operating effectively yet efficiently. The stimuli events used in previous research were highly variable in their perceived disgracefulness, ranging in rated shame and audience devaluation from low (e.g., missing the target in a throwing game) to high (e.g., being discovered cheating on one's spouse). But how precise is the tracking of audience devaluation by the shame system? Would shame track devaluation for events that are similarly low (or high) in disgracefulness? To answer this question, we conducted a study with participants from the United States and India. Participants were assigned, between-subjects, to one of two conditions: shame or audience devaluation. Within-subjects, participants rated three low-variation sets of 25 scenarios each, adapted from Mu, Kitayama, Han, & Gelfand (2015), which convey (a) appropriateness (e.g., yelling at a rock concert), (b) mild disgracefulness (e.g., yelling on the metro), and (c) disgracefulness (e.g., yelling in the library), all presented un-blocked, in random order. Consistent with previous research, shame tracked audience devaluation across the high-variation superset of 75 scenarios, both within and between cultures. Critically, shame tracked devaluation also within each of the three sets. The shame system operates with high precision.

A moral trade-off system produces intuitive judgments that are rational and coherent and strike a balance between conflicting moral values.

How does the mind make moral judgments when the only way to satisfy one moral value is to neglect another? Moral dilemmas posed a recurrent adaptive problem for ancestral hominins, whose cooperative social life created multiple responsibilities to others. For many dilemmas, striking a balance between two conflicting values (a compromise judgment) would have promoted fitness better than neglecting one value to fully satisfy the other (an extreme judgment). We propose that natural selection favored the evolution of a cognitive system designed for making trade-offs between conflicting moral values. Its nonconscious computations respond to dilemmas by constructing "rightness functions": temporary representations specific to the situation at hand. A rightness function represents, in compact form, an ordering of all the solutions that the mind can conceive of (whether feasible or not) in terms of moral rightness. An optimizing algorithm selects, among the feasible solutions, one with the highest level of rightness. The moral trade-off system hypothesis makes various novel predictions: People make compromise judgments, judgments respond to incentives, judgments respect the axioms of rational choice, and judgments respond coherently to morally relevant variables (such as willingness, fairness, and reciprocity). We successfully tested these predictions using a new trolley-like dilemma. This dilemma has two original features: It admits both extreme and compromise judgments, and it allows incentives-in this case, the human cost of saving lives-to be varied systematically. No other existing model predicts the experimental results, which contradict an influential dual-process model.

The evolution of shame and its display.

The shame system appears to be natural selection's solution to the adaptive problem of information-triggered reputational damage. Over evolutionary time, this problem would have led to a coordinated set of adaptations - the shame system - designed to minimise the spread of negative information about the self and the likelihood and costs of being socially devalued by others. This information threat theory of shame can account for much of what we know about shame and generate precise predictions. Here, we analyse the behavioural configuration that people adopt stereotypically when ashamed - slumped posture, downward head tilt, gaze avoidance, inhibition of speech - in light of shame's hypothesised function. This behavioural configuration may have differentially favoured its own replication by (a) hampering the transfer of information (e.g. diminishing audiences' tendency to attend to or encode identifying information - shame camouflage) and/or (b) evoking less severe devaluative responses from audiences (shame display). The shame display hypothesis has received considerable attention and empirical support, whereas the shame camouflage hypothesis has to our knowledge not been advanced or tested. We elaborate on this hypothesis and suggest directions for future research on the shame pose.

Are Emotions Natural Kinds After All? Rethinking the Issue of Response Coherence.

The synchronized co-activation of multiple responses-motivational, behavioral, and physiological-has been taken as a defining feature of emotion. Such response coherence has been observed inconsistently however, and this has led some to view emotion programs as lacking biological reality. Yet, response coherence is not always expected or desirable if an emotion program is to carry out its adaptive function. Rather, the hallmark of emotion is the capacity to orchestrate multiple mechanisms adaptively-responses will co-activate in stereotypical fashion or not depending on how the emotion orchestrator interacts with the situation. Nevertheless, might responses cohere in the general case where input variables are specified minimally? Here we focus on shame as a case study. We measure participants' responses regarding each of 27 socially devalued actions and personal characteristics. We observe internal and external coherence: The intensities of felt shame and of various motivations of shame (hiding, lying, destroying evidence, and threatening witnesses) vary in proportion (i) to one another, and (ii) to the degree to which audiences devalue the disgraced individual-the threat shame defends against. These responses cohere both within and between the United States and India. Further, alternative explanations involving the low-level variable of arousal do not seem to account for these results, suggesting that coherence is imparted by a shame system. These findings indicate that coherence can be observed at multiple levels and raise the possibility that emotion programs orchestrate responses, even in those situations where coherence is low.

How pride works.

The emotion of pride appears to be a neurocognitive guidance system to capitalize on opportunities to become more highly valued and respected by others. Whereas the inputs and the outputs of pride are relatively well understood, little is known about how the pride system matches inputs to outputs. How does pride work? Here we evaluate the hypothesis that pride magnitude matches the various outputs it controls to the present activating conditions - the precise degree to which others would value the focal individual if the individual achieved a particular achievement. Operating in this manner would allow the pride system to balance the competing demands of effectiveness and economy, to avoid the dual costs of under-deploying and over-deploying its outputs. To test this hypothesis, we measured people's responses regarding each of 25 socially valued traits. We observed the predicted magnitude matchings. The intensities of the pride feeling and of various motivations of pride (communicating the achievement, demanding better treatment, investing in the valued trait and pursuing new challenges) vary in proportion: (a) to one another; and (b) to the degree to which audiences value each achievement. These patterns of magnitude matching were observed both within and between the USA and India. These findings suggest that pride works cost-effectively, promoting the pursuit of achievements and facilitating the gains from others' valuations that make those achievements worth pursuing.

Do pride and shame track the evaluative psychology of audiences? Preregistered replications of Sznycer et al. (2016, 2017).

Are pride and shame adaptations for promoting the benefits of being valued and limiting the costs of being devalued, respectively? Recent findings indicate that the intensities of anticipatory pride and shame regarding various potential acts and traits track the degree to which fellow community members value or disvalue those acts and traits. Thus, it is possible that pride and shame are engineered to activate in proportion to others' valuations. Here, we report the results of two preregistered replications of the original pride and shame reports (Sznycer et al. 2016 Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 113, 2625-2630. (doi:10.1073/pnas.1514699113); Sznycer et al. 2017 Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 114, 1874-1879. (doi:10.1073/pnas.1614389114)). We required the data to meet three criteria, including frequentist and Bayesian replication measures. Both replications met the three criteria. This new evidence invites a shifting of prior assumptions about pride and shame: these emotions are engineered to gain the benefits of being valued and avoid the costs of being devalued.

The origins of criminal law.

Laws against wrongdoing may originate in justice intuitions that are part of universal human nature, according to the adaptationist theory of the origins of criminal law. This theory proposes that laws can be traced to neurocognitive mechanisms and ancestral selection pressures. According to this theory, laypeople can intuitively recreate the laws of familiar and unfamiliar cultures, even when they lack the relevant explicit knowledge. Here, to evaluate this prediction, we conduct experiments with Chinese and Sumerian laws that are millennia old; stimuli that preserve in fossil-like form the legal thinking of ancient lawmakers. We show that laypeople's justice intuitions closely match the logic and content of those archaic laws. We also show covariation across different types of justice intuitions: interpersonal devaluation of offenders, judgements of moral wrongness, mock-legislated punishments and perpetrator shame-suggesting that multiple justice intuitions may be regulated by a common social-evaluative psychology. Although alternative explanations of these findings are possible, we argue that they are consistent with the assumption that the origin of criminal law is a cognitively sophisticated human nature.

Forms and Functions of the Self-Conscious Emotions.

Pride, shame, and guilt color our highest and lowest personal moments. Recent evidence suggests that these self-conscious emotions are neurocognitive adaptations crafted by natural selection. Specifically, self-conscious emotions solve adaptive problems of social valuation by promoting the achievement of valued actions and characteristics to increase others' valuations of the individual (pride); limiting information-triggered devaluation (shame); and remedying events where one put insufficient weight on the welfare of a valuable other (guilt). This adaptationist perspective predicts a form-function fit: a correspondence between the adaptive function of a self-conscious emotion and its information-processing structure. This framework can parsimoniously explain known facts about self-conscious emotions, make sense of puzzling findings, generate novel hypotheses, and explain why self-conscious emotions have their characteristic self-reflexive phenomenology.

Cross-cultural invariances in the architecture of shame.

Human foragers are obligately group-living, and their high dependence on mutual aid is believed to have characterized our species' social evolution. It was therefore a central adaptive problem for our ancestors to avoid damaging the willingness of other group members to render them assistance. Cognitively, this requires a predictive map of the degree to which others would devalue the individual based on each of various possible acts. With such a map, an individual can avoid socially costly behaviors by anticipating how much audience devaluation a potential action (e.g., stealing) would cause and weigh this against the action's direct payoff (e.g., acquiring). The shame system manifests all of the functional properties required to solve this adaptive problem, with the aversive intensity of shame encoding the social cost. Previous data from three Western(ized) societies indicated that the shame evoked when the individual anticipates committing various acts closely tracks the magnitude of devaluation expressed by audiences in response to those acts. Here we report data supporting the broader claim that shame is a basic part of human biology. We conducted an experiment among 899 participants in 15 small-scale communities scattered around the world. Despite widely varying languages, cultures, and subsistence modes, shame in each community closely tracked the devaluation of local audiences (mean r = +0.84). The fact that the same pattern is encountered in such mutually remote communities suggests that shame's match to audience devaluation is a design feature crafted by selection and not a product of cultural contact or convergent cultural evolution.

Invariances in the architecture of pride across small-scale societies.

Becoming valuable to fellow group members so that one would attract assistance in times of need is a major adaptive problem. To solve it, the individual needs a predictive map of the degree to which others value different acts so that, in choosing how to act, the payoff arising from others' valuation of a potential action (e.g., showing bandmates that one is a skilled forager by pursuing a hard-to-acquire prey item) can be added to the direct payoff of the action (e.g., gaining the nutrients of the prey captured). The pride system seems to incorporate all of the elements necessary to solve this adaptive problem. Importantly, data from western(-ized), educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) societies indicate close quantitative correspondences between pride and the valuations of audiences. Do those results generalize beyond industrial mass societies? To find out, we conducted an experiment among 567 participants in 10 small-scale societies scattered across Central and South America, Africa, and Asia: (i) Bosawás Reserve, Nicaragua; (ii) Cotopaxi, Ecuador; (iii) Drâa-Tafilalet, Morocco; (iv) Enugu, Nigeria; (v) Le Morne, Mauritius; (vi) La Gaulette, Mauritius; (vii) Tuva, Russia; (viii) Shaanxi and Henan, China; (ix) farming communities in Japan; and (x) fishing communities in Japan. Despite widely varying languages, cultures, and subsistence modes, pride in each community closely tracked the valuation of audiences locally (mean r = +0.66) and even across communities (mean r = +0.29). This suggests that the pride system not only develops the same functional architecture everywhere but also operates with a substantial degree of universality in its content.

Why do people think that others should earn this or that?

Some questions, such as when a statistical distribution of incomes becomes too unequal, seem highly attention-grabbing, inferentially productive, and morally vexing. Yet many other questions that are crucial to the functioning of a modern economy seem uninteresting non-issues. An evolutionary-psychological framework to study folk-economic beliefs has the potential to illuminate this puzzle.

The grammar of anger: Mapping the computational architecture of a recalibrational emotion.

According to the recalibrational theory of anger, anger is a computationally complex cognitive system that evolved to bargain for better treatment. Anger coordinates facial expressions, vocal changes, verbal arguments, the withholding of benefits, the deployment of aggression, and a suite of other cognitive and physiological variables in the service of leveraging bargaining position into better outcomes. The prototypical trigger of anger is an indication that the offender places too little weight on the angry individual's welfare when making decisions, i.e. the offender has too low a welfare tradeoff ratio (WTR) toward the angry individual. Twenty-three experiments in six cultures, including a group of foragers in the Ecuadorian Amazon, tested six predictions about the computational structure of anger derived from the recalibrational theory. Subjects judged that anger would intensify when: (i) the cost was large, (ii) the benefit the offender received from imposing the cost was small, or (iii) the offender imposed the cost despite knowing that the angered individual was the person to be harmed. Additionally, anger-based arguments conformed to a conceptual grammar of anger, such that offenders were inclined to argue that they held a high WTR toward the victim, e.g., "the cost I imposed on you was small", "the benefit I gained was large", or "I didn't know it was you I was harming." These results replicated across all six tested cultures: the US, Australia, Turkey, Romania, India, and Shuar hunter-horticulturalists in Ecuador. Results contradict key predictions about anger based on equity theory and social constructivism.

Support for redistribution is shaped by compassion, envy, and self-interest, but not a taste for fairness.

Why do people support economic redistribution? Hypotheses include inequity aversion, a moral sense that inequality is intrinsically unfair, and cultural explanations such as exposure to and assimilation of culturally transmitted ideologies. However, humans have been interacting with worse-off and better-off individuals over evolutionary time, and our motivational systems may have been naturally selected to navigate the opportunities and challenges posed by such recurrent interactions. We hypothesize that modern redistribution is perceived as an ancestral scene involving three notional players: the needy other, the better-off other, and the actor herself. We explore how three motivational systems-compassion, self-interest, and envy-guide responses to the needy other and the better-off other, and how they pattern responses to redistribution. Data from the United States, the United Kingdom, India, and Israel support this model. Endorsement of redistribution is independently predicted by dispositional compassion, dispositional envy, and the expectation of personal gain from redistribution. By contrast, a taste for fairness, in the sense of (i) universality in the application of laws and standards, or (ii) low variance in group-level payoffs, fails to predict attitudes about redistribution.

Cross-cultural regularities in the cognitive architecture of pride.

Pride occurs in every known culture, appears early in development, is reliably triggered by achievements and formidability, and causes a characteristic display that is recognized everywhere. Here, we evaluate the theory that pride evolved to guide decisions relevant to pursuing actions that enhance valuation and respect for a person in the minds of others. By hypothesis, pride is a neurocomputational program tailored by selection to orchestrate cognition and behavior in the service of: (i) motivating the cost-effective pursuit of courses of action that would increase others' valuations and respect of the individual, (ii) motivating the advertisement of acts or characteristics whose recognition by others would lead them to enhance their evaluations of the individual, and (iii) mobilizing the individual to take advantage of the resulting enhanced social landscape. To modulate how much to invest in actions that might lead to enhanced evaluations by others, the pride system must forecast the magnitude of the evaluations the action would evoke in the audience and calibrate its activation proportionally. We tested this prediction in 16 countries across 4 continents (n = 2,085), for 25 acts and traits. As predicted, the pride intensity for a given act or trait closely tracks the valuations of audiences, local (mean r = +0.82) and foreign (mean r = +0.75). This relationship is specific to pride and does not generalize to other positive emotions that coactivate with pride but lack its audience-recalibrating function.

Coresidence duration and cues of maternal investment regulate sibling altruism across cultures.

Genetic relatedness is a fundamental determinant of social behavior across species. Over the last few decades, researchers have been investigating the proximate psychological mechanisms that enable humans to assess their genetic relatedness to others. Much of this work has focused on identifying cues that predicted relatedness in ancestral environments and examining how they regulate kin-directed behaviors. Despite progress, many basic questions remain unanswered. Here we address three of these questions. First, we examine the replicability of the effect of two association-based cues to relatedness-maternal perinatal association (MPA) and coresidence duration-on sibling-directed altruism. MPA, the observation of a newborn being cared for by one's mother, strongly signals relatedness, but is only available to the older sibling in a sib-pair. Younger siblings, to whom the MPA cue is not available, appear to fall back on the duration of their coresidence with an older sibling. Second, we determine whether the effects of MPA and coresidence duration on sibling-directed altruism obtain across cultures. Last, we explore whether paternal perinatal association (PPA) informs sibship. Data from six studies conducted in California, Hawaii, Dominica, Belgium, and Argentina support past findings regarding the role of MPA and coresidence duration as cues to siblingship. By contrast, PPA had no effect on altruism. We report on levels of altruism toward full, half, and step siblings, and discuss the role alternate cues might play in discriminating among these types of siblings. (PsycINFO Database Record

Shame closely tracks the threat of devaluation by others, even across cultures.

We test the theory that shame evolved as a defense against being devalued by others. By hypothesis, shame is a neurocomputational program tailored by selection to orchestrate cognition, motivation, physiology, and behavior in the service of: (i) deterring the individual from making choices where the prospective costs of devaluation exceed the benefits, (ii) preventing negative information about the self from reaching others, and (iii) minimizing the adverse effects of devaluation when it occurs. Because the unnecessary activation of a defense is costly, the shame system should estimate the magnitude of the devaluative threat and use those estimates to cost-effectively calibrate its activation: Traits or actions that elicit more negative evaluations from others should elicit more shame. As predicted, shame closely tracks the threat of devaluation in the United States (r = .69), India (r = .79), and Israel (r = .67). Moreover, shame in each country strongly tracks devaluation in the others, suggesting that shame and devaluation are informed by a common species-wide logic of social valuation. The shame-devaluation link is also specific: Sadness and anxiety-emotions that coactivate with shame-fail to track devaluation. To our knowledge, this constitutes the first empirical demonstration of a close, specific match between shame and devaluation within and across cultures.