Are Self-Conscious Emotions About the Self? Testing Competing Theories of Shame and Guilt Across Two Disparate Cultures

The emotions of guilt and shame play major roles in forgiveness, social exclusion, face-saving ploys, suicide, and honor killings. Understanding these emotions is thus of vital importance. The outputs of guilt and shame are already well understood: Guilt motivates amends; shame motivates evasion. However, the elicitors and functions of these emotions are disputed. According to attributional theory, guilt and shame are intrapersonal emotions elicited when negative outcomes are attributed to controllable/unstable (guilt) or uncontrollable/stable (shame) aspects of the self. By contrast, functionalist theory claims that guilt and shame are interpersonal emotions for minimizing the imposition of harm on valued others (guilt) and the cost of reputational damage on the self (shame). Although there is confirmatory evidence consistent with both theories, evidence ostensibly supporting one theory has been argued to actually support the other. To solve this problem of data interpretation, here we report contrastive critical tests of the two theories performed on online participant pools in the United States and India in 2021 (N = 853). Results in both countries support functionalist theory over attributional theory, suggesting that the intrapersonal effects reported in the emotion literature are tributary or incidental to the interpersonal functions of guilt and shame. Functionalist theory presents a promising framework for understanding the interpersonal and intrapersonal aspects of guilt, shame, and other self-conscious emotions.