Why do people (not) share guilt with others?

ABSTRACT

Do people share their feelings of guilt with others and, if so, what are the reasons for doing this or not doing this? Even though the social sharing of negative emotional experiences, such as regret, has been extensively studied, not much is known about whether people share feelings of guilt and why. We report three studies exploring these questions. In Study 1, we re-analysed data about sharing guilt experiences posted on a social website called “Yahoo Answers”, and found that people share intrapersonal as well as interpersonal guilt experiences with others online. Study 2 found that the main motivations of sharing guilt (compared with the sharing of regret) were “venting”, “clarification and meaning”, and “gaining advice”. Study 3 found that people were more likely to share experiences of interpersonal guilt and more likely to keep experiences of intrapersonal guilt to themselves. Together, these studies contribute to a further understanding of the social sharing of the emotion guilt.

KEYWORDS:

• Social sharing
• guilt
• regret
• interpersonal
• intrapersonal

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Acknowledgement

We thank Liat Levontin for sharing the data from Levontin and Yom-Tov (2017) with us.

Notes

1 Note that in the preregistration of this study, we named this motivation as to “exchange information”. We think “get reassurance” fits better with the meaning of items that we used to measure this motivation, that is why we use that term here.

2 All data and materials reported in this article can be found at the Open Science Framework, via: https://osf.io/t2×4m/?view_only = 88f9dac37ca9400abd6e97b367449075

3 Note that this is more than double of the 437 questions that were analyzed in their paper. A large number of these 1014 questions turned out not to be informative for their research.

4 The final analysis of Levontin and Yom-Tov (2017) includes cases that address other people’s guilt as well. This is why they examined more cases than we do here.

5 Note that initial sample size was larger than the requested sample size because MTurk detects when the total time participants spent on the questionnaire is much shorter than expected. In this case new participants are automatically recruited, leading to a total sample larger than the requested sample.

6 See Endnote 4 on why the sample is larger than requested.

7 This text analysis is exploratory and not preregistered.

Additional information

Funding

The first author was supported by China Scholarship Council [grant number 201706320351].