Guilt by association?

Abstract

Recent evolutionary perspectives on guilt tend to focus on how guilt functions as a means for the individual to self-regulate behavior and as a mechanism for reinforcing cooperative tendencies. While these accounts highlight important dimensions of guilt and provide important insights into its evolutionary emergence, they pay scant attention to the large empirical literature on its maladaptive effects on individuals. This paper considers the nature of guilt, explores its biological function, and provides an evolutionary perspective on whether it is an individual-level or group selected trait. After surveying philosophical and psychological analyses of guilt, we consider which psychological mechanisms underlie the capacity to experience and act from guilt and whether they point to an emergence of guilt in early humans or to guilt having a longer phylogenetic history. Because guilt is a characteristically social emotion, we then examine its contemporary role in social and legal contexts, which may provide clues to its original biological function. Finally, we provide the outlines of two evolutionary explanations for guilt. We argue that group selection may have promoted the capacity to experience guilt, but that under certain conditions there may have been a positive individual selection force as well.

Keywords:

• Emotion
• evolutionary theory
• group selection
• guilt
• shame

Acknowledgments

We thank audiences at the University of Leuven, Georgetown University, and the University of Notre Dame, where an early version of this paper was presented. We also thank Robert Audi, Andreas De Block, Trip Glazer, Stefan Linquist, Jonathan Marks, Darcia Narvaez, Cailin O’Connor, Jay Odenbaugh, Cees van Leeuwen, and two anonymous referees for their valuable comments on earlier drafts. This article was completed while one of us (Ramsey) was on a National Endowment for the Humanities-supported fellowship at at National Humanities Center. We thank the NEH and NHC for their support. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Notes

1. In giving an evolutionary account of guilt, we are not denying that the development and expression of guilt in humans is powerfully modulated by social and cultural contexts.

2. For a helpful discussion of the conceptual issues involved in developing criteria for empirically differentiating guilt and shame, see Teroni and Deonna (2008).

3. An evolutionary account of guilt also can contribute to functionalist approaches in psychology, which focus primarily on the social role played by guilt-induced behaviors (Barrett, 1995; Estrada-Hollenbeck & Heatherton, 1998; Tangney, 1996).

4. On positing similar psychological mechanisms underlying behavioral homologies across humans and other primates, see de Waal (2006). But compare Sober (1993).

5. While Frank offers two possible pathways for the evolution of social emotions like guilt, one based on reputation and the other on signaling, we focus on the latter. Frank’s reputation account holds that a reputation for not cheating could have emerged as a means for reliably identifying individuals who experience moral sentiments. However, this would not explain why guilt-proneness would have been favored specifically.

6. That the communication of information about the guilt-proneness of individuals may require advanced cognitive and linguistic capacities among humans does not entail that these same capacities would be required for communicating similar information among other primate groups. As we noted in section 3.2, the extant evidence is inconclusive as to whether a guilt-like mechanism is present in nonhuman primates, with scientists and philosophers in considerable disagreement over how to interpret that evidence. Supposing other primates have guilt-like experiences, it is possible that information about those experiences is communicable to conspecifics through nonlinguistic means, such as the submission behaviors frequently exhibited by subordinates.