Interpersonal effects of strategic and spontaneous guilt communication in trust games

ABSTRACT

A social partner’s emotions communicate important information about their motives and intentions. However, people may discount emotional information that they believe their partner has regulated with the strategic intention of exerting social influence. Across two studies, we investigated interpersonal effects of communicated guilt and perceived strategic regulation in trust games. Results showed that communicated guilt (but not interest) mitigated negative effects of trust violations on interpersonal judgements and behaviour. Further, perceived strategic regulation reduced guilt’s positive effects. These findings suggest that people take emotion-regulation motives into account when responding to emotion communication.

KEYWORDS:

• Trust
• emotion
• guilt
• regulation
• decision-making
• interpersonal appraisal

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Magdalena Rychlowska for her helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Danielle M. Shore http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7290-3696

Notes

1. Pilot work suggested that participants did not always consider the possibility that communicated emotion ratings might misrepresent actual feelings. Therefore, to make this possibility more salient and increase the likelihood that participants would consider strategic regulation motives, all participants completed a short emotional honesty questionnaire alongside the demographic questions (8 items, e.g. “People always express what they truly feel” and “Most people are strategic in how they express their emotions”).

2. At the end of the procedure, we also checked for suspicion by asking participants to what extent they doubted that the other player’s behaviour was real. Adding this as a continuous independent variable to the ANOVA of investment behaviour revealed that it had no significant interactions with the manipulated independent variables in either experiment, suggesting that it did not moderate the reported effects.

3. We also asked these questions after the second round, but we do not report these data because they reflect responses to the fair outcome administered by the trustee, and do not correspond to the time-point of participants’ investment at T2. In addition, participants completed the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988), and a series of questions assessing fairness, expectations, and how much they liked the other player after each round. These measures were completed by participants in both experiments, but are not directly relevant to the main focus of this article.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported financially by the Economic and Social Research Council grant number ES/L016486/1 awarded to Brian Parkinson.