Guilt Proneness and Moral Character

By T. Cohen, Abigail Panter, Nazli Turan. 2012

185 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Guilt proneness is a personality trait indicative of a predisposition to experience negative feelings about personal wrongdoing, even when the wrongdoing is private. It is characterized by the anticipation of feeling bad about committing transgressions rather than by guilty feelings in a particular moment or generalized guilty feelings that occur without an eliciting event. Our research has revealed that guilt proneness is an important character trait because knowing a person’s level of guilt proneness helps us to predict the likelihood that person will behave unethically. Web-based studies of adults across the United States have shown that people who score high on measures of guilt proneness (compared to low scorers) make fewer unethical business decisions, commit fewer delinquent behaviors, and behave more honestly when making economic decisions. In the workplace, guilt-prone employees are less likely to engage in counterproductive behaviors that harm their organization.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9e3a9e6147d42869e2572d6650b021314815c5a3

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Clinical Psychology

In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Social Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Agreement and Similarity in Self-Other Perceptions of Moral Character (2013, methodology): “The models controlled for gender and age given that prior research has shown that gender and age are correlated with moral character traits and unethical behavior (Cohen et al., 2012, 2013; Kish-Gephart et al., 2010).”
Cross-Domain Effects of Guilt on Desire for Self-Improvement Products (2015, background): “…explanation for this effect could be that participants were motivated to address their negative mood associated with guilt (vs. neutral recall) by providing help to others (Regan et al. 1972), but were also trying to avoid further transgressions against other (Cohen, Panter, and Turan 2012).”