Shame Expressions Reduce the Recipient’s Insult from Outgroup Reparations

By Roger Giner-Sorolla, Emanuele Castano. 2008

87 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Despite a growing literature on the consequences of group-based guilt and shame, little work has examined how expressions of self-conscious emotions are received by targets of collective wrongdoing. Two experiments tested the hypothesis that when an outgroup member offers apologies accompanied by reparations, the recipients are likely to take insult unless the outgroup member expresses the self-abasing emotion of shame rather than guilt. Experiment 1 showed that when reparations were offered, participants were less insulted by shame than guilt expressed by an outgroup member, rather than an ingroup member. Experiment 2 improved Experiment 1 by manipulating the culprit’s action (reparation vs. withdrawal), and this experiment replicated Experiment 1’s interaction on a measure of insult, but only when reparations were offered. These interactions on insult were not explained by the emotion’s perceived intensity or surprisingness. Our results indicate a possible functional aspect of expressions of shame in an intergroup context. Self-abasement, as opposed to a mere admission of culpability and regret, can reduce the insult taken from an outgroup's reparations.

Subfields: Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0a7a98b8afe36c5d286bf86fdb770680056fecc2

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In Social Psychology

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

We are sorry: Intergroup apologies and their tenuous link with intergroup forgiveness (2013, background): “Although there have now been numerous studies looking at emotional expressions embedded within apologies (Giner-Sorolla et al., 2008; Wohl et al., 2012), all these studies have done so in the context of accidental transgressions.”