1. Shame-prone people are more likely to punish themselves: A test of the reputation-maintenance explanation for self-punishment
- Author
-
Yohsuke Ohtsubo, Hiroki Tanaka, Ayano Yagi, Asuka Komiya, and Nobuhiro Mifune
- Subjects
Social Psychology ,Punishment ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Perspective (graphical) ,Shame ,Experimental and Cognitive Psychology ,Self perception ,Affect (psychology) ,Standard measure ,Test (assessment) ,Psychology ,Social psychology ,media_common ,Reputation - Abstract
Recent experimental studies have accumulated evidence about self-punishment. In accordance with the evolutionary perspective that shame has a reputation-maintenance function, we speculated that shame would promote self-punishment. Accordingly, we tested whether proneness to shame would predict self-punishment. In the first phase of the experiment, 98 undergraduates completed the Test of Self-Conscious Affect (TOSCA), a standard measure of proneness to shame and guilt. About 2 months later, 50 of the original participants took part in a self-punishment experiment, in which they all unintentionally made an unfair resource allocation, and then had the opportunity to inflict self-punishment by abandoning some of the money they had allocated to themselves. The amount of money the participants relinquished was significantly correlated with their shame-proneness. The intensity of posttransgression shame mediated the effect of shame-proneness on self-punishment. These results provide support for the evolutionary theorization of shame as a reputation-maintenance emotion.
- Published
- 2015
- Full Text
- View/download PDF