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People in Power Who Are Guilt-Prone Are Less Likely to be Corrupt
People in power who are guilt-prone are less likely to be corrupt [ucsb.edu]:
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 [ucsb.edu], who specializes in how social emotions give rise to behaviors. He is a senior author of a paper [sagepub.com] 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 [doi.org]
