People who are prone to this emotion feel more responsibility towards others.
People who are prone to anticipate feeling guilty are the most trustworthy, research finds.
Compared with other personality traits like openness, neuroticism and extraversion, it is guilt-proneness that best predicts people’s trustworthiness.
Anticipating guilt is key, because it means a person is considering how guilty they will feel if they do something wrong…
…and this stops them doing it.
This is different from feeling guilt after doing something wrong, which encourages people to try and make up for the transgression.
People who are prone to anticipating guilt, though, feel more responsibility towards others and are much less likely to behave exploitatively.
The results come from a series of six studies in which people played economic games that tested their behaviour.
In these games, people more prone to anticipating guilt were more likely to return money to others.
The authors write:
“Trust and trustworthiness are critical for effective relationships and effective organizations.
Individuals and institutions incur high costs when trust is misplaced, but people can mitigate these costs by engaging in relationships with individuals who are trustworthy.
Our findings extend the substantial literature on trust by deepening our understanding of trustworthiness: When deciding in whom to place trust, trust the guilt-prone.”
Dr Emma Levine, the study’s first author, said:
“Our research suggests that if you want your employees to be worthy of trust, make sure they feel personally responsible for their behavior and that they expect to feel guilty about wrongdoing.”
The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Levine et al., 2018).
