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No Place to Hide: When Shame Causes Proselfs to Cooperate a
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Carolyn Henriette Declerck , Christophe Boone & Toko Kiyonari a
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University of Antwerp
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Aoyama Gakuin University Accepted author version posted online: 21 Oct 2013.Published online: 13 Dec 2013.
To cite this article: Carolyn Henriette Declerck , Christophe Boone & Toko Kiyonari (2014) No Place to Hide: When Shame Causes Proselfs to Cooperate, The Journal of Social Psychology, 154:1, 74-88, DOI: 10.1080/00224545.2013.855158 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00224545.2013.855158
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The Journal of Social Psychology, 154: 74–88, 2014 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0022-4545 print / 1940-1183 online DOI: 10.1080/00224545.2013.855158
No Place to Hide: When Shame Causes Proselfs to Cooperate
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CAROLYN HENRIETTE DECLERCK CHRISTOPHE BOONE University of Antwerp
TOKO KIYONARI Aoyama Gakuin University
ABSTRACT. Shame is considered a social emotion with action tendencies that elicit socially beneficial behavior. Yet, unlike other social emotions, prior experimental studies do not indicate that incidental shame boosts prosocial behavior. Based on the affect as information theory, we hypothesize that incidental feelings of shame can increase cooperation, but only for self-interested individuals, and only in a context where shame is relevant with regards to its action tendency. To test this hypothesis, cooperation levels are compared between a simultaneous prisoner’s dilemma (where “defect” may result from multiple motives) and a sequential prisoner’s dilemma (where “second player defect” is the result of intentional greediness). As hypothesized, shame positively affected proselfs in a sequential prisoner’s dilemma. Hence ashamed proselfs become inclined to cooperate when they believe they have no way to hide their greediness, and not necessarily because they want to make up for earlier wrong-doing. Keywords: cooperation, prisoner’s dilemma, shame, social dilemma, social emotions, social value orientation
EMOTIONS HAVE BEEN STUDIED EXTENSIVELY in social interaction to understand why people cooperate under uncertainty, or help others when there are no apparent benefits involved, and why they sometimes even do so at a cost to themselves (De Waal, 1996; Frank, 1988; Tangney, Stuewig, & Mashek, 2007). Shaped by natural selection, social emotions, such as guilt, pride and shame, may play an important role in maintaining cooperation, as they underwrite adherence to social norms and thereby facilitate group functions (Bowles & Gintis, 2002). Social emotions motivate cooperative decision-making by eliciting action tendencies that benefit interpersonal relationships, and bypass the explicit cognitive deliberation process that analyzes cost/benefit ratios (Frijda, 1986; Frijda & Mesquita, 1994; Haidt, 2003). Prosocial behavior elicited by social emotions have been shown to be an effective way to remove or avoid the negative feelings associated with norm transgression, even in young children (Baumeister, Stilwell, Address correspondence to Carolyn Henriette Declerck, University of Antwerp, Department of Applied Economics, Prinsstraat 13, 2000 Antwerpen, Belgium. E-mail: [email protected]
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& Heatherton, 1994; Cialdini, Darby, & Vincent, 1973; Frank, 1988; Gummerum et al., 2010). This study further explores specifically how shame affects cooperative decision making in social dilemmas. Shame refers to the “feeling of discomfort at having done something wrong not only by one’s own norms, but also in the eyes of those whose opinions matter to you” (Bowles & Gintis, 2002, p. 3). It occurs from an overt act or a private thought of publically exposing one-self (Tangney, Stuewig, & Mashek, 2007). Darwin (1965) already alluded to the public aspect of shame when he described how blushing is caused by “thinking about others thinking of us” (p. 325). Other authors have considered shame as one of the most genuine self-referential emotions by which the self is evaluated according to feedback from the social environment (Zinck, 2008). At least two different action tendencies following shame have been described: hiding or withdrawing from further social interaction to avoid public condemnation (Tangney, Stuewig, & Mashek, 2007) and repairing damage done to one’s self-image (de Hooge, Breugelmans, & Zeelenberg, 2008; Frijda, Kuipers, & Ter Schure, 1989). How we think others will view our amends is important when we are ashamed, and there is some field evidence that the relation between experiencing shame and wanting to repair the harm done from wrongdoing is mediated by a desire to improve one’s reputation (Brown et al., 2008). If shame spurs prosocial behavior, it is likely related to the second action tendency and meant to restore a positive public image. There are two fundamental ways by which emotions can affect decision-making (Lerner & Keltner, 2000). First, integral emotional influences occur when the emotion-causing event is causally related to the goal pursuit. If one has been caught violating a social norm in context A, then the resulting shame is likely to boost prosocial behavior in order to restore one’s reputation in that same context A. Such integral effects of shame are the presumed explanatory mechanism for the results obtained in the classic field study with the title, “a fine is a price” (Gneezy & Rustichini, 2000). These researchers found that the punctuality of parents picking up their children from daycare dropped drastically when a fine was imposed. Apparently, parents gladly paid the fine to rid themselves of shame, but at the same time reduced their efforts to abide by day care hours. Under the normal, no-fine condition, the anticipated shame of being late is believed to influence the parents’ decision to be on time (Gneezy & Rustichini, 2000). Second, incidental emotional influences may occur when the emotion-causing event is not causally related to goal pursuit. Thus, spill-over effects from the emotion experienced in context A are expected to affect behavior in context B. An abundance of studies has revealed that moods caused by watching movies, sunny weather, or stressful exams, may infuse judgment in unrelated topics (reviewed in Forgas, 1995). So far previous research has convincingly shown that shame can enhance cooperative behavior, but only when the shame is integral to goal pursuit, and not when it is incidental to the decision at hand. In a first study (comparing guilt and shame), de Hooge, Zeelenberg and Breugelmans (2007) found no effect of incidental shame on cooperative behavior. Reflecting on shameful events that occurred in the past did not affect cooperation in an (unrelated) social dilemma game. In a follow-up study these authors compared the incidental and integral effects of shame on cooperative decision-making. While their experiments successfully demonstrated the integral effects of shame, they again found no support for incidental effects. Specifically, they manipulated the saliency of shame by either informing the game partner about the shameful event or not. Cooperation levels in a one-shot, dyadic social dilemma game rose only when the partner in the game knew about a previously shameful event (and therefore shame was causally related to the
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subsequent decision). Cooperation was unaffected if the partner had no clue about the player’s feelings of shame (de Hooge et al., 2008). In the latter case, shame loses its saliency because the event that caused it is unrelated to the goal pursuit in the subsequent game. The purpose of the current study is to further investigate if and when incidental shame can boost prosocial behavior. Based on the affect-as-information model (Schwartz & Clore, 1983), we propose that incidental shame can still affect cooperative behavior to the extent that it is relevant with regards to its action tendency of preventing reputation losses. However, in a social dilemma, shame can only be relevant when the intentions of the norm violator would be clearly visible. We hypothesize that, when bad intentions behind a decision are clear, individuals who are concerned about not appearing selfish in public will be influenced by incidental shame in order to hide their greediness. Before presenting the experiment, we clarify this hypothesis. Shame Infusion in the Prisoner’s Dilemma Game Affect infusion occurs when the forces that normally lead to decisions are overridden by incidental emotions. This typically happens during heuristic processing, when affective states induced by emotions in one context are used as information to influence decision-making in a different context (Forgas, 1995). The mechanism for this infusion is summarized by the affect-as-information model (Schwartz & Clore, 1983), which predicts that people rely on present feelings to make complex judgments, as long as the experienced feeling is still perceived to be relevant for the decision.1 They ask themselves: “how do I feel about this decision?” and then let themselves be guided by that feeling. Translating this to the effect of shame in a social dilemma game, the bad feelings from incidental shame inform the decision-maker heuristically about consequences of (non)-cooperation, and bias the decision accordingly. Because people do not like being labeled greedy, their decision under the influence of shame would become less selfish and more cooperative, provided that the decision context is one that would reveal their greedy intent. To investigate if shame can infuse decision-making, we chose a decision-context in which we can manipulate the relevance of shame with respect to the goal pursuit of avoiding a bad reputation. We compare the effect of incidental shame on cooperation in two versions of a oneshot prisoners’ dilemma game (PD), a prototypical paradigm in cooperation research (e.g., Boone, Declerck, & Kiyonari, 2010; Pruitt & Kimmel, 1977; Van Lange, Joireman, Parks, & Van Dijk, 2013). The pay-off structure for the actual PD game used in this experiment is shown in Figure 1. Two players choose between a mutually beneficial, but risky cooperative option, (choosing option L) or a more lucrative but collectively deficient defect option (choosing option S).2 When both players decide simultaneously, defect is the dominant response, because, irrespective of the strategy of the other person, a rational decision-maker can always increase his or her pay-off by choosing to defect. While a rational, self-interested person defects out of greed, a rational cooperative person may also defect out of fear of betrayal. In this game, incidental shame may not be relevant to a decision-maker, because the mixed motives make it unclear whether non-cooperative behavior was due to greed (and hence a norm violation), or due to fear. A noncooperative decision can always be considered a cautious decision. In a PD game, being cautious means taking on a risk-averse stance (see also Boone et al., 2010). There is no reason to believe, and (as far we know) no evidence that indicates that risk aversion in a one-time interaction with a stranger would be related to feelings of shame.3 If risk aversion is unrelated to shame, we do not
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FIGURE 1 Pay-offmatrices for the prisoner’s dilemma. The letters L and K represent the cooperative choice for the player and the partner respectively. S and P represent the defect choices.
expect that shame will positively influence cooperative behavior in the simultaneously played, anonymous PD. Uncooperative people can always hide their underlying greedy motive beneath caution. This is a possible reason why incidental shame was not found to elicit cooperative behavior of proselfs in the studies by de Hooge et al. (2007, 2008). When, on the other hand, the PD is played sequentially, the decision of the first player is revealed to the second player before she makes her decision. This removes the risk of betrayal for the second player, whose decision now becomes one of reciprocation. To a self-interested player who typically defects, the feeling of shame becomes relevant in the position of the second-player in the sequential PD. Not reciprocating a cooperative offer hurts the first player and is a visible sign of intentional greed. Shame may trigger the idea of social disapproval when one’s greedy intentions are revealed. Thus we hypothesize that in the sequential PD, incidental shame will enter the decision-making process of selfish players to help them reach a decision that will avoid reputation losses. The affect as information model further specifies that affect infusion occurs subconsciously during heuristic processing. Conscious knowledge of the source of an incidental emotion tends to remove its infusion potential (Forgas, 1995). If the decision to cooperate or defect is associated with real reputation losses, cognitive deliberation will override heuristic processing, and the effect of incidental shame vanishes. The relevance of shame as information is that it subconsciously activates schemata of losing face in public, so that it can be misattributed to other, even anonymous, interactions. An anonymous exchange is then treated as if it were public (Haley & Fessler, 2005). When one’s reputation is really at stake, integral shame overrides any of the effects of incidental shame. Thus, selfish people might cooperate when their behavior is public (to avoid reputation losses) but revert to defecting in anonymous situations, unless there are incidental emotional effects that subconsciously influence their cooperative choices, even under anonymity.
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The Moderating Influence of Social Value Orientation The personality construct social value orientation (SVO) captures the idea that there are stable individual differences in cooperative strategies among people that have opposing social preferences. People can be classified according to a number of orientations, of which the proself and prosocial ones are probably the most commonly studied (Van Lange, 2000). Proselfs view social dilemmas as win-lose situations and will strive to fulfill their own individualistic goals, or maximize their own gain relative to others. Prosocials seek win-win situations and strive for equality in outcome. They are naturally inclined to cooperate, even in one-shot dilemma games. An abundance of research has shown that SVO is temporally stable and has much predictive value with respect to cooperative motives, strategies, and choice behavior (reviewed in Bogaert et al., 2008). In line with previous reports (de Hooge et al., 2007, 2008; Ketelaar & Au, 2003; Nelissen et al., 2007), we hypothesize that SVO moderates the effect of shame on cooperation. Proselfs cooperate strategically and respond positively to reputation incentives: they cooperate when their reputation is at stake, and defect when opportunities for reputation gains are absent. In addition, proselfs tend to discount other’s cooperative acts whenever they occur in public (Simpson & Willer, 2008). Because shame elicits reputation concerns, we hypothesize that negative affect will enter the utility function of proselfs and heuristically bias decision-making towards avoiding reputation losses. Thus, we predict that incidental shame will especially induce proselfs to cooperate when they cannot cover up a selfish decision. Prosocials, in contrast have internalized the cooperative norm and cooperation is a chronically activated goal. For them, losing face is less of an issue in a social dilemma because their cooperative behavior depends more on the expectation of reciprocity (Boone et al., 2010) and less on the presence of reputational losses or benefits (Simpson & Willer, 2008). Cooperation is their default strategy. Defect is usually their response to an non-cooperative partner and hence not a shameful act that they associate with losing face in public. Therefore, it is not immediately clear how the incidental affective state of shame will inform prosocials’ decision-making. With respect to shame’s action tendency of restoring a positive image (de Hooge et al., 2008), we expect no influence on cooperative behavior. To summarize the intent of the study, we compare the effect of incidental shame on cooperation in an anonymous, one-shot, simultaneous and sequential PD game (referred to as simPD and seqPD from here on). In the seqPD, we only consider the decision of the second player, who already knows what the first player decided. The choices of a player in the simPD and the second player in the seqPD differ in two respects: first, the simPD imposes a risk of betrayal, while the seqPD removes this risk for the second person, who now can reciprocate or betray. We expect that this difference will lead prosocials to increase, and proselfs to decrease their level of cooperation in the seqPD relative to the simPD. Second, the seqPD reveals the (greedy) intent of decision-making, while the simPD allows hiding one’s non-cooperative motives. Accordingly, the affect-as-information theory predicts that, only for the second player in the seqPD, reputation concerns associated with shame will enter the decision-making process and reduce non-cooperative decisions. We further expect that, due to proself’s greater concern for reputation in this setting, the differential effect of shame will apply especially, or only, to them.
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METHODS Design We conducted a 2×2×2 experiment with type of game as within factor (simPD vs. seqPD), emotion induction (shame versus control) and SVO (prosocial versus proself) as between factors. The dependent variable is a bivariate indicating whether the participant cooperates or defects.
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Population and Setting Participants,117 students (51 males, average age = 22, SD = 4), were recruited from different departments via web mail and signed up for one of 3 sessions (with a minimum of 36 and a maximum of 44 participants per session). Full anonymity was guaranteed at all times, and monetary incentives were emphasized. Note that anonymity was necessary to test if the induced emotion of shame serves as information for subsequent decision-making (as explained in the section “Shame infusion in the prisoner’s dilemma” in the introduction). Public interactions by themselves would already be a sufficient trigger for cooperation for proselfs individuals (Simpson & Willer, 2008) and overwhelm any effect of shame. Procedures Upon arrival for the experiment, participants were randomly assigned to one of four rooms (maximum 11 to a room). They signed a consent form stating that they would participate in a study comprising three parts: a personality assessment, a memory test, and an interactive economic game. To guarantee anonymity, no personal names were used. Instead, participants composed their own personal ID code, which they used throughout all parts of the experiment. This personal ID code consisted of a string of letters and digits composed of their birth order, number of siblings, initials of their mothers first and maiden name, their mother’s birthday, and the zip code of their home address. SVO was assessed first using the nine-item, triple dominance decomposed measure. This measure consists of 9 items that all contain three alternative outcome distributions of points allocated to oneself and to an anonymous other. The three possible outcome distributions represent a particular orientation: cooperative, individualistic, and competitive. Respondents are classified into one of these three orientations if six out of the nine choices they make are consistent with one orientation (Van Lange et al., 1997). The cooperative choices correspond to the prosocial orientation. Following standard practice the individualistic and competitive orientations are combined to form the proself orientation (Au & Kwong, 2004; Bogaert et al., 2008). Typically, around 10–15 % of the participants in experiments remain unclassified using the triple dominance decomposed measure. While information loss is a drawback of this method, most research in this domain uses the bivariate SVO variable rather than a continuous measure (see Bogaert et al., 2008 for a review and discussion of the reliability and validity of the nine item decomposed measure). Furthermore, previous research has compared analyses using either a bivariate or a continuous SVO measure, and found no statistically significant differences (Declerck & Bogaert, 2008; Sheldon, 1999). Next the memory test was conducted which was in fact the emotion induction for the experiment. Following the procedures of Nelissen and colleagues (2007), participants were asked to
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write in 15 minutes an essay about a true event, including as much detail as they could possibly remember. In the shame condition, the topic of the essay was to describe one or more recent incidences that made them feel very much ashamed. In the control condition, the topic was to describe a recent, ordinary day. Participants then received the instructions of the interactive games, which explained that they were to make a number of decisions for which real money could be earned. For each decision, they were pre-matched with a different partner in another room, and they would never find out who this was. The outcome would depend on their decision as well as on the decision of their matched partner. To ensure that all participants adequately understood the monetary pay-offs, the instructions also included eight questions that had to be answered correctly before continuing with the actual experiment. The answers were checked by the room supervisor, who was blind to the purpose of the experiment. The actual decisions were made with paper and pencil in booklets. Each participant played the two games consecutively with pay-offs as shown in Figure 1.4 The simPD, was always played before the seqPD, and separate answering booklets depicting the game matrices were used for each game. For the simPD each player chose between option “L” (cooperate) and option “S” (defect). The corresponding choices of the partner were denoted “K” and “P,” but these were left unmarked in the booklet, as the choice of the partner remained unknown in the simPD. The answering booklets of the simPD were collected by the room supervisor and the pay-off was computed based on actual partner matching. For this, participant’s ID codes had been randomly combined in pairs prior to playing the games. In the seqPD, we were only interested in how the participant (the second player) reciprocated a cooperative decision, hence everyone responded to a pre-determined decision indicating that the first player had cooperated. Participants waited 10 minutes before receiving the seqPD answering booklet in which the supposed choice of the first player had been marked as “K” (cooperate). Again, participants marked their choice in the answering booklet which was subsequently collected by the room supervisor to compute pay-offs. The simPD was always played before the seqPD, and no feedback about the partner’s decision in simPD was given, so that the outcome of the simPD could not have influenced the decision in the seqPD. During the time between games (10 minutes), participants were asked to reread and edit their essay. This way both games were primed equally by the induced emotions. Essays were collected at the end of the experiment. During the entire time participants were not allowed to converse with each other. The supervisor, who was blind with respect to the purpose of the experiment, stayed in the room the entire time. Upon conclusion participants were paid in truth their actual earnings. Participants earned anywhere between 18 and 30 euros for a one-and-a-half hour experiment. Debriefing occurred by sending each participant an e-mail referring them to a website with a full description of the intent, procedures, and results of the experiment.
RESULTS Emotion Induction The shame condition included 59 participants, the control condition 58. To check the adequacy of the shame manipulation, two judges who were blind with respect to the hypothesis independently
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read the essays. The two judges showed 100% agreement that none of the control essays, and all of the experimental essays described shameful events. Furthermore, following Nelissen and colleagues (2007), the essays were evaluated on the strength of the described emotion, the level of detail, and the recentness of the described event(s). These corresponded to the three criteria in the instructions on how to write the essay. In the shame condition, both judges rated all the essays as having at least sufficient detail and anywhere from a “moderate” to “very intense” level of shame. For the level of detail, the inter-rater reliability r = .36 (p < .01). For the emotional strength of shame, the inter-rater reliability r = .82 (p < .01). Both raters noted that six essays did not describe recent, but childhood events. However, we decided not to exclude them because of their high level of detail and because the authors of these particular essays explicitly mentioned that they still felt ashamed today thinking back to the event. To avoid the possibility that prosocials and proselfs would differ in their baseline levels of shame (which might act as a confound with respect to testing the hypothesis that induced shame affects cooperation depending on SVO), we also compared the emotional strength of shame expressed in their essays. A linear regression with emotional strength as the dependent variable and SVO as the independent variable showed no difference in the expressed level of shame between prosocials and proselfs (B = .0071, SE = .35, p = .98).
Descriptive Statistics Fifteen subjects could not be classified as prosocial or proself, and are therefore omitted from further analyses (leaving n = 102). The proportion of cooperative/defect decisions did not vary between the two types of games: 42.2% cooperated in the simPD, 50.0% in the seqPD (χ 2 (1, 204) = 1.3, p = .26). Neither did it vary between the shame and the control condition, with 42.4% cooperation in the shame condition and 50.0% in the control condition (χ 2 (1, 204) = 1.2, p = .28). As expected, cooperation differed significantly between prosocials (59.2% cooperation) and proselfs (27.4 % cooperation, χ 2 (1, 204) = 20.1, p < .001). Figures 2A and 2B report the percent cooperation of prosocials and proself with and without shame induction in the simPD and seqPD, respectively. Visual inspection of Figure 2 reveals that, in the control condition (dark bars in Figures 2A and 2B), prosocials and proselfs adapt their behavior to the seqPD in opposing ways: as expected, prosocials increase, proselfs decrease their level of cooperation. We test these interactions statistically in the next section.
Tests of Hypotheses The main hypothesis of this study predicts that the effect of shame on cooperation depends on both SVO and the type of game. We perform logistic regressions separately for the simPD and the seqPD (n = 102, 42 proselfs, and 60 prosocials) and subsequently report the three-way interaction. Age and sex are added as control variables, because previous studies have indicated that they may significantly affect cooperative behavior. People tend to become more prosocial with age (see for example, Boone et al., 2010; Van Lange et al., 1997). A large body of work has identified gender differences in cooperation and social preferences, but with contradictory results: sometimes men are more altruistic, while other times women are more other-regarding and cooperative. A literature review by Croson and Gneezy (2009) suggests that these inconsistencies
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SimPD
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A 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0
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FIGURE 2 Percent cooperative decisions made by prosocials and proselfs in the simPD (Figure 2A) and the seqPD (Figure 2B). Error bars depict standard errors of percentages.
result because women’s behavior in economic games appears to be more sensitive (compared to men) to experimental cues, and they adapt their choices more often depending on the context.5 First we estimate in models 1 and 3 the main effects of SVO, emotion condition, and the above mentioned control variables for the simPD and seqPD respectively. In both games, there is a main effect of SVO, with prosocials cooperating significantly more than proselfs (B = 1.31, SE = .46, p < .004, (two-tailed) for the simPD; B = 1.57, SE = .45, p < .001 (two-tailed) for the seqPD. Shame induction, on the other hand, proves to have no main effect in either game (B = –.63, SE = .43, p = .15 (two-tailed) for the simPD (model 1); B = –.036, SE = .44, p = .93 (two-tailed), for the seqPD . Because the decision to cooperate in the simPD might not be independent from the decision in the seqPD, we computed their association. Twenty-seven percent of the participants cooperated in both games, while 35 % consistently defected (χ 2 (1, 102) = 6.79, p < .01). We next added the decision that an individual made in the simPD as an additional control variable in model 4. While we believe the association between decisions in simPD and seqPD is mostly due to the fact that individuals have stable preferences (as expressed in their SVO), adding this variable to the regression model for the seqPD allowed us to show that the choice in the simPD does not
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significantly affect cooperation in the seqPD above and beyond the effect of SVO (B = .76, SE = .46, p = .10, two-tailed). In models 2 and 4 we add the interaction term of shame and SVO to test whether SVO moderates the effect of shame in each game. The interaction between shame and SVO is not significant in the simPD (B = .083, SE = .91, p = .93, two-tailed). In this game, 60.7 % of the prosocials cooperated in the control condition and 46.9% in the shame condition (χ 2 ( 1, 60) = 1.1, p = .21). These percentages amount to 33.3% and 19.1% for proselfs, respectively (χ 2 (1, 42) = 1.1, p = .24). (See Figure 2A). However, as predicted, the interaction between shame and SVO is significant in the seqPD (B = –2.27, SE = .99, p < .021, two-tailed). While prosocials tend to decrease their cooperation levels from 75% in the control condition to 56.3 % in the shame condition (χ 2 (1, 60) = 2.3, p = .11), proselfs tend to increase their cooperation levels from 19.1 % in the control to 38.1 % in the shame condition (χ 2 (1, 42) = 1.9, p = .15). (See Figure 2B). Finally, in models 6 and 7 we test the three-way interaction between game type, shame, and SVO by pooling the data from both games. Two decisions are made by each individual, yielding n = 204 observations which are clustered per individual in the logistic regressions. Robust standard errors are reported. We first compute the main effects (model 6), then the interactions (model 7). Table 1 shows that the interaction term of interest, shame × svo × game, has a marginally significant effect on cooperative decisions (B = 2.06, SE = 1.18, p < .082, two tailed). If we accept the less stringent one-tailed test (given that the results are in the hypothesized direction) this interactive effect becomes significant at the more commonly accepted cut-off of p
The Journal of Social Psychology Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vsoc20
No Place to Hide: When Shame Causes Proselfs to Cooperate a
a
Carolyn Henriette Declerck , Christophe Boone & Toko Kiyonari a
b
University of Antwerp
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Aoyama Gakuin University Accepted author version posted online: 21 Oct 2013.Published online: 13 Dec 2013.
To cite this article: Carolyn Henriette Declerck , Christophe Boone & Toko Kiyonari (2014) No Place to Hide: When Shame Causes Proselfs to Cooperate, The Journal of Social Psychology, 154:1, 74-88, DOI: 10.1080/00224545.2013.855158 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00224545.2013.855158
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The Journal of Social Psychology, 154: 74–88, 2014 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0022-4545 print / 1940-1183 online DOI: 10.1080/00224545.2013.855158
No Place to Hide: When Shame Causes Proselfs to Cooperate
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CAROLYN HENRIETTE DECLERCK CHRISTOPHE BOONE University of Antwerp
TOKO KIYONARI Aoyama Gakuin University
ABSTRACT. Shame is considered a social emotion with action tendencies that elicit socially beneficial behavior. Yet, unlike other social emotions, prior experimental studies do not indicate that incidental shame boosts prosocial behavior. Based on the affect as information theory, we hypothesize that incidental feelings of shame can increase cooperation, but only for self-interested individuals, and only in a context where shame is relevant with regards to its action tendency. To test this hypothesis, cooperation levels are compared between a simultaneous prisoner’s dilemma (where “defect” may result from multiple motives) and a sequential prisoner’s dilemma (where “second player defect” is the result of intentional greediness). As hypothesized, shame positively affected proselfs in a sequential prisoner’s dilemma. Hence ashamed proselfs become inclined to cooperate when they believe they have no way to hide their greediness, and not necessarily because they want to make up for earlier wrong-doing. Keywords: cooperation, prisoner’s dilemma, shame, social dilemma, social emotions, social value orientation
EMOTIONS HAVE BEEN STUDIED EXTENSIVELY in social interaction to understand why people cooperate under uncertainty, or help others when there are no apparent benefits involved, and why they sometimes even do so at a cost to themselves (De Waal, 1996; Frank, 1988; Tangney, Stuewig, & Mashek, 2007). Shaped by natural selection, social emotions, such as guilt, pride and shame, may play an important role in maintaining cooperation, as they underwrite adherence to social norms and thereby facilitate group functions (Bowles & Gintis, 2002). Social emotions motivate cooperative decision-making by eliciting action tendencies that benefit interpersonal relationships, and bypass the explicit cognitive deliberation process that analyzes cost/benefit ratios (Frijda, 1986; Frijda & Mesquita, 1994; Haidt, 2003). Prosocial behavior elicited by social emotions have been shown to be an effective way to remove or avoid the negative feelings associated with norm transgression, even in young children (Baumeister, Stilwell, Address correspondence to Carolyn Henriette Declerck, University of Antwerp, Department of Applied Economics, Prinsstraat 13, 2000 Antwerpen, Belgium. E-mail: [email protected]
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& Heatherton, 1994; Cialdini, Darby, & Vincent, 1973; Frank, 1988; Gummerum et al., 2010). This study further explores specifically how shame affects cooperative decision making in social dilemmas. Shame refers to the “feeling of discomfort at having done something wrong not only by one’s own norms, but also in the eyes of those whose opinions matter to you” (Bowles & Gintis, 2002, p. 3). It occurs from an overt act or a private thought of publically exposing one-self (Tangney, Stuewig, & Mashek, 2007). Darwin (1965) already alluded to the public aspect of shame when he described how blushing is caused by “thinking about others thinking of us” (p. 325). Other authors have considered shame as one of the most genuine self-referential emotions by which the self is evaluated according to feedback from the social environment (Zinck, 2008). At least two different action tendencies following shame have been described: hiding or withdrawing from further social interaction to avoid public condemnation (Tangney, Stuewig, & Mashek, 2007) and repairing damage done to one’s self-image (de Hooge, Breugelmans, & Zeelenberg, 2008; Frijda, Kuipers, & Ter Schure, 1989). How we think others will view our amends is important when we are ashamed, and there is some field evidence that the relation between experiencing shame and wanting to repair the harm done from wrongdoing is mediated by a desire to improve one’s reputation (Brown et al., 2008). If shame spurs prosocial behavior, it is likely related to the second action tendency and meant to restore a positive public image. There are two fundamental ways by which emotions can affect decision-making (Lerner & Keltner, 2000). First, integral emotional influences occur when the emotion-causing event is causally related to the goal pursuit. If one has been caught violating a social norm in context A, then the resulting shame is likely to boost prosocial behavior in order to restore one’s reputation in that same context A. Such integral effects of shame are the presumed explanatory mechanism for the results obtained in the classic field study with the title, “a fine is a price” (Gneezy & Rustichini, 2000). These researchers found that the punctuality of parents picking up their children from daycare dropped drastically when a fine was imposed. Apparently, parents gladly paid the fine to rid themselves of shame, but at the same time reduced their efforts to abide by day care hours. Under the normal, no-fine condition, the anticipated shame of being late is believed to influence the parents’ decision to be on time (Gneezy & Rustichini, 2000). Second, incidental emotional influences may occur when the emotion-causing event is not causally related to goal pursuit. Thus, spill-over effects from the emotion experienced in context A are expected to affect behavior in context B. An abundance of studies has revealed that moods caused by watching movies, sunny weather, or stressful exams, may infuse judgment in unrelated topics (reviewed in Forgas, 1995). So far previous research has convincingly shown that shame can enhance cooperative behavior, but only when the shame is integral to goal pursuit, and not when it is incidental to the decision at hand. In a first study (comparing guilt and shame), de Hooge, Zeelenberg and Breugelmans (2007) found no effect of incidental shame on cooperative behavior. Reflecting on shameful events that occurred in the past did not affect cooperation in an (unrelated) social dilemma game. In a follow-up study these authors compared the incidental and integral effects of shame on cooperative decision-making. While their experiments successfully demonstrated the integral effects of shame, they again found no support for incidental effects. Specifically, they manipulated the saliency of shame by either informing the game partner about the shameful event or not. Cooperation levels in a one-shot, dyadic social dilemma game rose only when the partner in the game knew about a previously shameful event (and therefore shame was causally related to the
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subsequent decision). Cooperation was unaffected if the partner had no clue about the player’s feelings of shame (de Hooge et al., 2008). In the latter case, shame loses its saliency because the event that caused it is unrelated to the goal pursuit in the subsequent game. The purpose of the current study is to further investigate if and when incidental shame can boost prosocial behavior. Based on the affect-as-information model (Schwartz & Clore, 1983), we propose that incidental shame can still affect cooperative behavior to the extent that it is relevant with regards to its action tendency of preventing reputation losses. However, in a social dilemma, shame can only be relevant when the intentions of the norm violator would be clearly visible. We hypothesize that, when bad intentions behind a decision are clear, individuals who are concerned about not appearing selfish in public will be influenced by incidental shame in order to hide their greediness. Before presenting the experiment, we clarify this hypothesis. Shame Infusion in the Prisoner’s Dilemma Game Affect infusion occurs when the forces that normally lead to decisions are overridden by incidental emotions. This typically happens during heuristic processing, when affective states induced by emotions in one context are used as information to influence decision-making in a different context (Forgas, 1995). The mechanism for this infusion is summarized by the affect-as-information model (Schwartz & Clore, 1983), which predicts that people rely on present feelings to make complex judgments, as long as the experienced feeling is still perceived to be relevant for the decision.1 They ask themselves: “how do I feel about this decision?” and then let themselves be guided by that feeling. Translating this to the effect of shame in a social dilemma game, the bad feelings from incidental shame inform the decision-maker heuristically about consequences of (non)-cooperation, and bias the decision accordingly. Because people do not like being labeled greedy, their decision under the influence of shame would become less selfish and more cooperative, provided that the decision context is one that would reveal their greedy intent. To investigate if shame can infuse decision-making, we chose a decision-context in which we can manipulate the relevance of shame with respect to the goal pursuit of avoiding a bad reputation. We compare the effect of incidental shame on cooperation in two versions of a oneshot prisoners’ dilemma game (PD), a prototypical paradigm in cooperation research (e.g., Boone, Declerck, & Kiyonari, 2010; Pruitt & Kimmel, 1977; Van Lange, Joireman, Parks, & Van Dijk, 2013). The pay-off structure for the actual PD game used in this experiment is shown in Figure 1. Two players choose between a mutually beneficial, but risky cooperative option, (choosing option L) or a more lucrative but collectively deficient defect option (choosing option S).2 When both players decide simultaneously, defect is the dominant response, because, irrespective of the strategy of the other person, a rational decision-maker can always increase his or her pay-off by choosing to defect. While a rational, self-interested person defects out of greed, a rational cooperative person may also defect out of fear of betrayal. In this game, incidental shame may not be relevant to a decision-maker, because the mixed motives make it unclear whether non-cooperative behavior was due to greed (and hence a norm violation), or due to fear. A noncooperative decision can always be considered a cautious decision. In a PD game, being cautious means taking on a risk-averse stance (see also Boone et al., 2010). There is no reason to believe, and (as far we know) no evidence that indicates that risk aversion in a one-time interaction with a stranger would be related to feelings of shame.3 If risk aversion is unrelated to shame, we do not
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FIGURE 1 Pay-offmatrices for the prisoner’s dilemma. The letters L and K represent the cooperative choice for the player and the partner respectively. S and P represent the defect choices.
expect that shame will positively influence cooperative behavior in the simultaneously played, anonymous PD. Uncooperative people can always hide their underlying greedy motive beneath caution. This is a possible reason why incidental shame was not found to elicit cooperative behavior of proselfs in the studies by de Hooge et al. (2007, 2008). When, on the other hand, the PD is played sequentially, the decision of the first player is revealed to the second player before she makes her decision. This removes the risk of betrayal for the second player, whose decision now becomes one of reciprocation. To a self-interested player who typically defects, the feeling of shame becomes relevant in the position of the second-player in the sequential PD. Not reciprocating a cooperative offer hurts the first player and is a visible sign of intentional greed. Shame may trigger the idea of social disapproval when one’s greedy intentions are revealed. Thus we hypothesize that in the sequential PD, incidental shame will enter the decision-making process of selfish players to help them reach a decision that will avoid reputation losses. The affect as information model further specifies that affect infusion occurs subconsciously during heuristic processing. Conscious knowledge of the source of an incidental emotion tends to remove its infusion potential (Forgas, 1995). If the decision to cooperate or defect is associated with real reputation losses, cognitive deliberation will override heuristic processing, and the effect of incidental shame vanishes. The relevance of shame as information is that it subconsciously activates schemata of losing face in public, so that it can be misattributed to other, even anonymous, interactions. An anonymous exchange is then treated as if it were public (Haley & Fessler, 2005). When one’s reputation is really at stake, integral shame overrides any of the effects of incidental shame. Thus, selfish people might cooperate when their behavior is public (to avoid reputation losses) but revert to defecting in anonymous situations, unless there are incidental emotional effects that subconsciously influence their cooperative choices, even under anonymity.
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The Moderating Influence of Social Value Orientation The personality construct social value orientation (SVO) captures the idea that there are stable individual differences in cooperative strategies among people that have opposing social preferences. People can be classified according to a number of orientations, of which the proself and prosocial ones are probably the most commonly studied (Van Lange, 2000). Proselfs view social dilemmas as win-lose situations and will strive to fulfill their own individualistic goals, or maximize their own gain relative to others. Prosocials seek win-win situations and strive for equality in outcome. They are naturally inclined to cooperate, even in one-shot dilemma games. An abundance of research has shown that SVO is temporally stable and has much predictive value with respect to cooperative motives, strategies, and choice behavior (reviewed in Bogaert et al., 2008). In line with previous reports (de Hooge et al., 2007, 2008; Ketelaar & Au, 2003; Nelissen et al., 2007), we hypothesize that SVO moderates the effect of shame on cooperation. Proselfs cooperate strategically and respond positively to reputation incentives: they cooperate when their reputation is at stake, and defect when opportunities for reputation gains are absent. In addition, proselfs tend to discount other’s cooperative acts whenever they occur in public (Simpson & Willer, 2008). Because shame elicits reputation concerns, we hypothesize that negative affect will enter the utility function of proselfs and heuristically bias decision-making towards avoiding reputation losses. Thus, we predict that incidental shame will especially induce proselfs to cooperate when they cannot cover up a selfish decision. Prosocials, in contrast have internalized the cooperative norm and cooperation is a chronically activated goal. For them, losing face is less of an issue in a social dilemma because their cooperative behavior depends more on the expectation of reciprocity (Boone et al., 2010) and less on the presence of reputational losses or benefits (Simpson & Willer, 2008). Cooperation is their default strategy. Defect is usually their response to an non-cooperative partner and hence not a shameful act that they associate with losing face in public. Therefore, it is not immediately clear how the incidental affective state of shame will inform prosocials’ decision-making. With respect to shame’s action tendency of restoring a positive image (de Hooge et al., 2008), we expect no influence on cooperative behavior. To summarize the intent of the study, we compare the effect of incidental shame on cooperation in an anonymous, one-shot, simultaneous and sequential PD game (referred to as simPD and seqPD from here on). In the seqPD, we only consider the decision of the second player, who already knows what the first player decided. The choices of a player in the simPD and the second player in the seqPD differ in two respects: first, the simPD imposes a risk of betrayal, while the seqPD removes this risk for the second person, who now can reciprocate or betray. We expect that this difference will lead prosocials to increase, and proselfs to decrease their level of cooperation in the seqPD relative to the simPD. Second, the seqPD reveals the (greedy) intent of decision-making, while the simPD allows hiding one’s non-cooperative motives. Accordingly, the affect-as-information theory predicts that, only for the second player in the seqPD, reputation concerns associated with shame will enter the decision-making process and reduce non-cooperative decisions. We further expect that, due to proself’s greater concern for reputation in this setting, the differential effect of shame will apply especially, or only, to them.
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METHODS Design We conducted a 2×2×2 experiment with type of game as within factor (simPD vs. seqPD), emotion induction (shame versus control) and SVO (prosocial versus proself) as between factors. The dependent variable is a bivariate indicating whether the participant cooperates or defects.
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Population and Setting Participants,117 students (51 males, average age = 22, SD = 4), were recruited from different departments via web mail and signed up for one of 3 sessions (with a minimum of 36 and a maximum of 44 participants per session). Full anonymity was guaranteed at all times, and monetary incentives were emphasized. Note that anonymity was necessary to test if the induced emotion of shame serves as information for subsequent decision-making (as explained in the section “Shame infusion in the prisoner’s dilemma” in the introduction). Public interactions by themselves would already be a sufficient trigger for cooperation for proselfs individuals (Simpson & Willer, 2008) and overwhelm any effect of shame. Procedures Upon arrival for the experiment, participants were randomly assigned to one of four rooms (maximum 11 to a room). They signed a consent form stating that they would participate in a study comprising three parts: a personality assessment, a memory test, and an interactive economic game. To guarantee anonymity, no personal names were used. Instead, participants composed their own personal ID code, which they used throughout all parts of the experiment. This personal ID code consisted of a string of letters and digits composed of their birth order, number of siblings, initials of their mothers first and maiden name, their mother’s birthday, and the zip code of their home address. SVO was assessed first using the nine-item, triple dominance decomposed measure. This measure consists of 9 items that all contain three alternative outcome distributions of points allocated to oneself and to an anonymous other. The three possible outcome distributions represent a particular orientation: cooperative, individualistic, and competitive. Respondents are classified into one of these three orientations if six out of the nine choices they make are consistent with one orientation (Van Lange et al., 1997). The cooperative choices correspond to the prosocial orientation. Following standard practice the individualistic and competitive orientations are combined to form the proself orientation (Au & Kwong, 2004; Bogaert et al., 2008). Typically, around 10–15 % of the participants in experiments remain unclassified using the triple dominance decomposed measure. While information loss is a drawback of this method, most research in this domain uses the bivariate SVO variable rather than a continuous measure (see Bogaert et al., 2008 for a review and discussion of the reliability and validity of the nine item decomposed measure). Furthermore, previous research has compared analyses using either a bivariate or a continuous SVO measure, and found no statistically significant differences (Declerck & Bogaert, 2008; Sheldon, 1999). Next the memory test was conducted which was in fact the emotion induction for the experiment. Following the procedures of Nelissen and colleagues (2007), participants were asked to
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write in 15 minutes an essay about a true event, including as much detail as they could possibly remember. In the shame condition, the topic of the essay was to describe one or more recent incidences that made them feel very much ashamed. In the control condition, the topic was to describe a recent, ordinary day. Participants then received the instructions of the interactive games, which explained that they were to make a number of decisions for which real money could be earned. For each decision, they were pre-matched with a different partner in another room, and they would never find out who this was. The outcome would depend on their decision as well as on the decision of their matched partner. To ensure that all participants adequately understood the monetary pay-offs, the instructions also included eight questions that had to be answered correctly before continuing with the actual experiment. The answers were checked by the room supervisor, who was blind to the purpose of the experiment. The actual decisions were made with paper and pencil in booklets. Each participant played the two games consecutively with pay-offs as shown in Figure 1.4 The simPD, was always played before the seqPD, and separate answering booklets depicting the game matrices were used for each game. For the simPD each player chose between option “L” (cooperate) and option “S” (defect). The corresponding choices of the partner were denoted “K” and “P,” but these were left unmarked in the booklet, as the choice of the partner remained unknown in the simPD. The answering booklets of the simPD were collected by the room supervisor and the pay-off was computed based on actual partner matching. For this, participant’s ID codes had been randomly combined in pairs prior to playing the games. In the seqPD, we were only interested in how the participant (the second player) reciprocated a cooperative decision, hence everyone responded to a pre-determined decision indicating that the first player had cooperated. Participants waited 10 minutes before receiving the seqPD answering booklet in which the supposed choice of the first player had been marked as “K” (cooperate). Again, participants marked their choice in the answering booklet which was subsequently collected by the room supervisor to compute pay-offs. The simPD was always played before the seqPD, and no feedback about the partner’s decision in simPD was given, so that the outcome of the simPD could not have influenced the decision in the seqPD. During the time between games (10 minutes), participants were asked to reread and edit their essay. This way both games were primed equally by the induced emotions. Essays were collected at the end of the experiment. During the entire time participants were not allowed to converse with each other. The supervisor, who was blind with respect to the purpose of the experiment, stayed in the room the entire time. Upon conclusion participants were paid in truth their actual earnings. Participants earned anywhere between 18 and 30 euros for a one-and-a-half hour experiment. Debriefing occurred by sending each participant an e-mail referring them to a website with a full description of the intent, procedures, and results of the experiment.
RESULTS Emotion Induction The shame condition included 59 participants, the control condition 58. To check the adequacy of the shame manipulation, two judges who were blind with respect to the hypothesis independently
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read the essays. The two judges showed 100% agreement that none of the control essays, and all of the experimental essays described shameful events. Furthermore, following Nelissen and colleagues (2007), the essays were evaluated on the strength of the described emotion, the level of detail, and the recentness of the described event(s). These corresponded to the three criteria in the instructions on how to write the essay. In the shame condition, both judges rated all the essays as having at least sufficient detail and anywhere from a “moderate” to “very intense” level of shame. For the level of detail, the inter-rater reliability r = .36 (p < .01). For the emotional strength of shame, the inter-rater reliability r = .82 (p < .01). Both raters noted that six essays did not describe recent, but childhood events. However, we decided not to exclude them because of their high level of detail and because the authors of these particular essays explicitly mentioned that they still felt ashamed today thinking back to the event. To avoid the possibility that prosocials and proselfs would differ in their baseline levels of shame (which might act as a confound with respect to testing the hypothesis that induced shame affects cooperation depending on SVO), we also compared the emotional strength of shame expressed in their essays. A linear regression with emotional strength as the dependent variable and SVO as the independent variable showed no difference in the expressed level of shame between prosocials and proselfs (B = .0071, SE = .35, p = .98).
Descriptive Statistics Fifteen subjects could not be classified as prosocial or proself, and are therefore omitted from further analyses (leaving n = 102). The proportion of cooperative/defect decisions did not vary between the two types of games: 42.2% cooperated in the simPD, 50.0% in the seqPD (χ 2 (1, 204) = 1.3, p = .26). Neither did it vary between the shame and the control condition, with 42.4% cooperation in the shame condition and 50.0% in the control condition (χ 2 (1, 204) = 1.2, p = .28). As expected, cooperation differed significantly between prosocials (59.2% cooperation) and proselfs (27.4 % cooperation, χ 2 (1, 204) = 20.1, p < .001). Figures 2A and 2B report the percent cooperation of prosocials and proself with and without shame induction in the simPD and seqPD, respectively. Visual inspection of Figure 2 reveals that, in the control condition (dark bars in Figures 2A and 2B), prosocials and proselfs adapt their behavior to the seqPD in opposing ways: as expected, prosocials increase, proselfs decrease their level of cooperation. We test these interactions statistically in the next section.
Tests of Hypotheses The main hypothesis of this study predicts that the effect of shame on cooperation depends on both SVO and the type of game. We perform logistic regressions separately for the simPD and the seqPD (n = 102, 42 proselfs, and 60 prosocials) and subsequently report the three-way interaction. Age and sex are added as control variables, because previous studies have indicated that they may significantly affect cooperative behavior. People tend to become more prosocial with age (see for example, Boone et al., 2010; Van Lange et al., 1997). A large body of work has identified gender differences in cooperation and social preferences, but with contradictory results: sometimes men are more altruistic, while other times women are more other-regarding and cooperative. A literature review by Croson and Gneezy (2009) suggests that these inconsistencies
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SimPD
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FIGURE 2 Percent cooperative decisions made by prosocials and proselfs in the simPD (Figure 2A) and the seqPD (Figure 2B). Error bars depict standard errors of percentages.
result because women’s behavior in economic games appears to be more sensitive (compared to men) to experimental cues, and they adapt their choices more often depending on the context.5 First we estimate in models 1 and 3 the main effects of SVO, emotion condition, and the above mentioned control variables for the simPD and seqPD respectively. In both games, there is a main effect of SVO, with prosocials cooperating significantly more than proselfs (B = 1.31, SE = .46, p < .004, (two-tailed) for the simPD; B = 1.57, SE = .45, p < .001 (two-tailed) for the seqPD. Shame induction, on the other hand, proves to have no main effect in either game (B = –.63, SE = .43, p = .15 (two-tailed) for the simPD (model 1); B = –.036, SE = .44, p = .93 (two-tailed), for the seqPD . Because the decision to cooperate in the simPD might not be independent from the decision in the seqPD, we computed their association. Twenty-seven percent of the participants cooperated in both games, while 35 % consistently defected (χ 2 (1, 102) = 6.79, p < .01). We next added the decision that an individual made in the simPD as an additional control variable in model 4. While we believe the association between decisions in simPD and seqPD is mostly due to the fact that individuals have stable preferences (as expressed in their SVO), adding this variable to the regression model for the seqPD allowed us to show that the choice in the simPD does not
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significantly affect cooperation in the seqPD above and beyond the effect of SVO (B = .76, SE = .46, p = .10, two-tailed). In models 2 and 4 we add the interaction term of shame and SVO to test whether SVO moderates the effect of shame in each game. The interaction between shame and SVO is not significant in the simPD (B = .083, SE = .91, p = .93, two-tailed). In this game, 60.7 % of the prosocials cooperated in the control condition and 46.9% in the shame condition (χ 2 ( 1, 60) = 1.1, p = .21). These percentages amount to 33.3% and 19.1% for proselfs, respectively (χ 2 (1, 42) = 1.1, p = .24). (See Figure 2A). However, as predicted, the interaction between shame and SVO is significant in the seqPD (B = –2.27, SE = .99, p < .021, two-tailed). While prosocials tend to decrease their cooperation levels from 75% in the control condition to 56.3 % in the shame condition (χ 2 (1, 60) = 2.3, p = .11), proselfs tend to increase their cooperation levels from 19.1 % in the control to 38.1 % in the shame condition (χ 2 (1, 42) = 1.9, p = .15). (See Figure 2B). Finally, in models 6 and 7 we test the three-way interaction between game type, shame, and SVO by pooling the data from both games. Two decisions are made by each individual, yielding n = 204 observations which are clustered per individual in the logistic regressions. Robust standard errors are reported. We first compute the main effects (model 6), then the interactions (model 7). Table 1 shows that the interaction term of interest, shame × svo × game, has a marginally significant effect on cooperative decisions (B = 2.06, SE = 1.18, p < .082, two tailed). If we accept the less stringent one-tailed test (given that the results are in the hypothesized direction) this interactive effect becomes significant at the more commonly accepted cut-off of p
