from the how-does-one-get-guilt-prone-people-into-power? dept.
People in power who are guilt-prone are less likely to be corrupt:
Guilt. It's a horrible feeling that causes us to question our worth as human beings. But while it's something that induces sleepless nights and stress-related physical symptoms in individuals, for society at large, the tendency toward guilt might have some benefits.
"People who are prone to feeling guilt in their everyday lives are less likely to take bribes," said UC Santa Barbara psychology professor Hongbo Yu, who specializes in how social emotions give rise to behaviors. He is a senior author of a paper that appears in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.
In a study he conducted in collaboration with partners at East China Normal University and Zhejiang Normal University, Yu looked at guilt not as an episodic state — such as how we feel after specific instances in which we hurt someone — but rather as a personality trait, in which people tend to worry about the potential harm their actions cause.
"So I could be a person for whom it is really easy to feel guilt in my everyday life," he explained, "while others might be less likely to feel guilt, or have a higher bar for feeling that emotion."
We all can probably intuit that anticipatory guilt might make us think twice before undertaking an action with potentially bad consequences for others. But what has been less clear is how this crucial morality-related personality trait affects decision makers in situations involving temptation and incentives, balanced against potential harm to others.
[...] "You know someone's going to get hurt," Yu said. "In the paper we argue that when the victim is more salient, the association between the guilt trait and corrupt behavior becomes stronger." Concern for others' suffering, they said, might play a significant role in how guilt-proneness influences bribe-taking behaviors.
[...] Indeed, the researchers say, guilt proneness is not the only trait that might predict corrupt behaviors (or lack of them), and it's worth studying how this trait, along with other personality traits, might "serve as a reliable anti-corruption predictor in personnel selection," such as when choosing people for leadership positions or for high-stakes jobs.
"We can't claim causality, but we can leverage the association between the guilt trait and the lower likelihood of corruption to make us more confident about their integrity," Yu said. "Maybe that's something we can apply to the real world."
Journal Reference:
Hu, Y., Qiu, S., Wang, G., Liu, K., Li, W., Yu, H., & Zhou, X. (2023). Are Guilt-Prone Power-Holders Less Corrupt? Evidence From Two Online Experiments. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/19485506231168515
(Score: 3, Funny) by Revek on Friday September 15 2023, @10:36PM (1 child)
Its hard to believe we need research in to this.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 15 2023, @11:10PM
In search of a grant.. East money,babe. Obviously socio/psychopaths don't feel guilt, corruption is their life blood
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Frosty Piss on Saturday September 16 2023, @12:42AM (2 children)
People who are guilty prone are less likely to be in power.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Saturday September 16 2023, @11:02AM
Isn't it the other way round?
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Saturday September 16 2023, @09:42PM
You're not wrong, take it from a political science professor [lawsandsausagescomic.com] in the context of the founding of the USA.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by darkfeline on Saturday September 16 2023, @01:07AM (2 children)
Guilt-prone? There's a word for that: conscience. I do believe people without a conscience are more likely to be corrupt.
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(Score: 3, Informative) by helel on Saturday September 16 2023, @04:39PM (1 child)
Conscience can guide you before you act. Guild is the feeling you get after. They are closely related but not identical.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by krishnoid on Saturday September 16 2023, @10:05PM
Stretching an analogy for both of those, a good compass can tell you when you're pointed in the direction of North, or whatever your powerful magnetic (e.g., principled) reference is. Sometimes you'll drop it, sometimes you'll take your eyes off it, but when you look at it, you know whether you're oriented away, towards, or sideways from that direction. With an un/weakly-magnetized compass, you lean on other references (e.g., scripture and philosophy), other people (family, friends, YouTube people), or a combination (e.g., organized religion).
If you don't lean on those things, other things will be your navigational aids through life, and in a land of opportunity, you can probably make the best of those. If you don't pick other navigational aids, you may seek pleasure or just go with whatever you desire [youtu.be] at the moment. Your other choice is to have a good compass, recognize your reference principles, and discard or selectively point away from some of them [youtu.be]. And there you have supervillains, some of which hide in plain sight.
(Score: 3, Touché) by looorg on Saturday September 16 2023, @01:40AM (8 children)
Churches and organized religion is/are some kind of exception? A lot of them at least claim to be guilt-ridden/prone and from the historical perspective corruption wasn't far behind. But the if you just ask the big man in the sky you are forgiven, until the next time. Problem solved?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bussdriver on Saturday September 16 2023, @02:33AM (1 child)
I was raised Catholic, I am no longer; however, guilt is a huge theme in the religious culture I observed and was exposed to. Most were permanently "damaged" by it while some learned a kind of immunity to it. The immune ones because real bastards the rest maintained some level of decency and I'm sure the guilt is strongly related. Guilt plagues me to this day but I learned to NOT DO THINGS that bring it about because I dislike the feeling and it's a good negative feeling people need to have. Not lying to yourself to avoid guilt is another important factor. You can't be happy without some pain. The science is only getting stronger on these things - the "bad" stuff has good benefits beyond the moment; it's not all bad. You need contrasts.
Science very slowly building up proof of the obvious common sense is still progress; especially for those without any sense.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Sunday September 17 2023, @12:29PM
Yes, an over-developed conscience I call it. They teach you to feel guilt then say you receive forgiveness but the brain doesn't work like that -- the guilt doesn't suddenly go away just because someone briefly says it can. A little guilt can be highly motivating to do better but too much can just have a paralyzing effect which can make your behavior more damaging. Add to that the fact that society and especially employers hijack people's conscience to exploit them and anyone with a big conscience will get really chewed up if they're not extra careful.
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Saturday September 16 2023, @08:11AM (1 child)
Well, if you "know" that god is on your side, then what you do in the name of god obviously cannot be wrong. In other words, applied "correctly", religion can be a way to get rid of your guilt-feeling by just convincing yourself that what you do is what god wants you to do. After all, you can find "justification" for almost anything and its opposite in the holy texts of any religion.
Now obviously not all religious people do this, but certainly those who do abhorrent things in the name of their god.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Unixnut on Saturday September 16 2023, @10:14AM
> Now obviously not all religious people do this, but certainly those who do abhorrent things in the name of their god.
Yeah but if there was no religion, those people would use something else to justify their abhorrent things. A lot of abhorrent things were done in the name of non-religious ideologies in history.
The problem is that a minority of people who are willing to do abhorrent things, either by justifying it some way, or a smaller minority who feel no guilt about doing it at all (no justification needed).
(Score: 1) by stratified cake on Saturday September 16 2023, @08:13AM
Nah with time and size, organizations learn how to make their members feel guilt for not being corrupt - in an approved way that serves the greater good (TM).
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Saturday September 16 2023, @10:46AM (1 child)
It does depend a bit on the religion. Some religions have a lot of stuff you have to do before the big man in the sky will forgive you, and some don't have divine forgiveness as part of their model at all.
Of course, the only kinds of religion that have never been used to justify lethal violence are completely pacifist ones. And don't think atheists are off the hook either - look up what Stalin did allegedly in the name of official atheism.
And if you want to make things even worse, have a government with any kind of official religious stance, so now the state violence apparatus has the self-justification of religion to do pretty much whatever they want without restriction.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Joe Desertrat on Saturday September 16 2023, @01:20PM
I think guilt is used in religion to make the lower hierarchy members more willing to obey those that lead them. Those in the upper hierarchy feel less guilt at what they do, or they likely wouldn't be able to rise as they have done.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Saturday September 16 2023, @09:38PM
"A problem you can solve by spending money isn't a problem, it's an expense." We don't have the purchase of papal indulgences any more, but they were available once upon a time. Put those together, and, well, sort of?
(Score: 4, Informative) by mhajicek on Saturday September 16 2023, @04:18AM
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_triad [wikipedia.org]
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek