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Too fatigued to care: Ego depletion, guilt, and prosocial behavior

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Abstract

Although guilt feels bad to the individual, it is good for society because guilty feelings can prompt people to perform good deeds. This study tests whether fatigue decreases guilty feelings and subsequent prosocial behavior. Participants were randomly assigned to a depletion condition in which they watched a movie about butchering animals for their meat or skin and were told to express no emotions, or to a no-depletion condition in which they watched the same movie, but could express their emotions. Having participants play a game in which another person was punished for their errors induced guilt. Finally, participants played a dictator game in which they could leave money for the next participant. After the experiment, participants could also anonymously donate money to an anti-AIDS charity. The results showed that depleted participants felt less guilty than did non-depleted participants, and the less guilty participants felt the less helpful they were.

Introduction

“Successful guilt is the bane of society”

— Publilius Syrus (Roman author, 1st century B.C.)

For centuries guilt has got a “bum rap.” Guilt is an unpleasant emotional feeling that helps us know we did something wrong (Baumeister, Stillwell, & Heatherton, 1994). Although guilt feels bad to the individual, it is actually quite good for others. You would not want to have a boss, a lover, a roommate, or a business partner who had no sense of guilt. Such people are called psychopaths, and they are often a disaster to those around them (Hare, 1998). Psychopaths exploit and harm others, help themselves at the expense of others, and feel no remorse about those they harm. For example, serial killer Ted Bundy was a psychopath. Bundy said he felt no guilt after killing (at least) 30 people: “Guilt doesn't solve anything, really. It hurts you…I guess I am in the enviable position of not having to deal with guilt.” (Michaud & Aynesworth, 1989, p. 281).

Guilt is a moral emotion, and moral emotions can lead to prosocial behaviors (Tangney, Stuewig, & Mashek, 2007). When people feel guilty about something they have done, they often try harder to perform prosocial actions to wipe away the guilt (Xu, Begue, & Shankland, 2011). People who are feeling guilty may even help strangers to reduce their guilt (Carlsmith & Gross, 1969).

There are a number of factors that can reduce guilt. Individual differences in the tendency to experience guilt, such as psychopathy, are difficult if not impossible to change (Hare, 1998). However, there are theoretical reasons to believe that situational factors, which are much easier to change, can also influence feelings of guilt. Moral, self-conscious emotions such as guilt involve controlled, conscious, higher-order cognitive processing, which are energy-taxing (Baumeister et al., 1994). To experience guilt people reflect on their behavior, reexamine the decision process, and draw factual or counterfactual conclusions about the incident. The appraisal and evaluation, along with the guilt, will be stored in memory to guide future behavior (Baumeister, Vohs, DeWall, & Zhang, 2007).

According to ego depletion theory, the energy needed to perform higher-order cognitive processing is a limited resource that can be exhausted, like a muscle (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Muraven, & Tice, 1998). Once energy has been expended performing one task, there is little energy left to perform subsequent tasks. Hence, if people are depleted of energy, it should be more difficult for them to reflect on their behavior, to reexamine the decision process, to draw factual or counterfactual conclusions, and to store appraisal and evaluation information in memory. Thus, depletion should make it more difficult to experience guilt, which should, in turn, decrease prosocial behavior.

Section snippets

Overview of present research

Previous research has already shown that ego depletion reduces prosocial behavior (DeWall, Baumeister, Gailliot, & Maner, 2008). No research, however, has tested whether ego depletion can also reduce feelings of guilt. The present research fills this important gap in the literature. Moreover, the present study uses an implicit measure of guilt because people may be reluctant to admit their wrongdoings. The present research also tests whether guilt mediates the link between ego depletion and

Participants

Participants were 47 adult patrons at a French municipal library (51% female; Mage = 26.3, SD = 13.8) who were paid 10€ ($14).

Procedure

Participants were tested individually on a computer. They were told that the researchers were studying short-term memory and task performance. To measure their current perceived state of fatigue, they rated two items: (1) “Right now I have a lot of energy” (reverse scored), and (2) “Right now I feel tired” (1 = totally disagree, 5 = totally agree; Cronbach α = .89).

Next, we used

Age and sex differences

Because no effects were found for participant sex or age, these variables were excluded from the analyses.

Fatigue at baseline

As expected, fatigue scores did not differ between depleted and non-depleted participants before watching the movie, M = 5.54, SD = 1.86 and M = 4.74, SD = 1.84, respectively, F(1,45) = 2.21, p = .15. Thus, random assignment to conditions was successful.

Fatigue following movie

As expected, depleted participants felt more fatigued after watching the movie than did non-depleted participants, M = 9.17, SD = 3.17 and M = 6.48, SD = 2.27,

Discussion

The present research makes at least two significant contributions to the literature. First, it shows for the first time the negative effect of ego depletion on a moral, self-conscious emotion—guilt. Depleted participants felt less guilt compared with no-depleted participants, even with an implicit measure of guilt (i.e., IAT). This finding is important because it shows that certain moral, self-conscious emotions can be manipulated due to their dependence on the necessary cognitive resources and

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We would like to thank Andrew Hayes for his helpful comments on the analyses.

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