Guilt emotion and decision-making under uncertainty

Emotions play a crucial role in shaping decision-making, particularly under uncertainty. They influence perceptions of risk, guide attention towards certain outcomes, and drive behavior by prioritizing emotional goals over purely rational considerations.

When facing uncertain situations, emotions like guilt or anger can significantly alter choices, pushing individuals towards decisions that align with moral or emotional objectives rather than calculated risks or rewards.

Gangemi, A., Rizzotto, C., Riggio, F., Dahò, M., & Mancini, F. (2025). Guilt emotion and decision-making under uncertainty. Frontiers in Psychology, 16, 1518752. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1518752

Key Points

• Guilt significantly influences decision-making under risk by aligning individuals’ choices with moral objectives, such as reparation and expiation.
• Anger consistently results in increased risk-taking behavior irrespective of the framing of decisions.
• Moral emotions like guilt override traditional cognitive biases, including gain-loss framing effects, when making decisions under uncertainty.
• Decisions influenced by guilt vary according to the perceived moral responsibility for outcomes, particularly whether consequences are faced by the offender or victim.
• Emotional states, particularly guilt, provide a context-specific influence on decision-making, highlighting the importance of situational factors in moral decision-making processes.

Rationale

Emotions have been shown to significantly influence decision-making processes, but limited attention has been given to the specific role of moral emotions like guilt.

Previous research indicates that while anger typically leads to risk-seeking behavior, the influence of guilt on decision-making remains ambiguous.

Given guilt’s strong connection to moral standards and responsibility, understanding its role is critical for comprehensively analyzing ethical behavior under conditions of risk and uncertainty.

Clarifying the motivational effects of guilt could enhance existing psychological theories and practical applications aimed at promoting moral accountability.

Future research should delve deeper into the cognitive and emotional mechanisms underpinning guilt’s impact on decision-making, particularly by exploring its neural correlates and evaluating these effects in real-life contexts.

Method

The research consisted of two experimental studies employing emotion induction techniques (guilt, anger, neutral conditions) combined with framing scenarios (gain or loss).

The studies specifically manipulated which party (offender or victim) would face financial consequences as a result of participants’ decisions, thus examining moral responsibility’s influence.

Procedure

Participants underwent:

• Emotion induction by recalling and describing past personal events associated with guilt, anger, or neutral emotions.
• Exposure to hypothetical decision-making scenarios involving financial penalties.
• Selection between a riskless option with a certain financial outcome and a risky option with uncertain outcomes.
• Post-decision assessments measuring emotional states, perceived fairness of penalties, and moral accountability.

Sample

• Experiment 1 included 176 undergraduate students (96 female, 80 male) aged 19–42, average age 22 years.
• Experiment 2 involved 334 undergraduate students (189 female, 145 male) aged 18–49, average age 28.8 years.

Measures

• State Guilt Inventory: Assessed participants’ immediate feelings of guilt.
• State–Trait Anger Expression Inventory: Measured immediate feelings of anger.
• Positive and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS): Evaluated the broader emotional state, distinguishing between positive and negative affect.

Statistical measures

• Logistic regression analyses were utilized to determine the predictive impact of emotional states on decision-making.
• ANOVAs assessed interaction effects between emotion, framing conditions, and responsibility roles.
• Additional interaction analyses explored emotional influences relative to decision consequences.

Results

• Guilt led individuals to consistently choose options that served moral reparative goals, whether the choice was riskless or risky, depending on whether the offender or victim faced the financial consequences.
• Participants influenced by anger consistently favored risky choices regardless of framing or responsibility conditions.
• Neutral emotional conditions reaffirmed traditional framing effects, with participants generally choosing safer outcomes when options were framed positively and riskier outcomes when options were negatively framed.
• Emotional induction (guilt and anger) effectively overrode typical gain-loss framing effects, highlighting the predominant role of moral emotions in decision-making.

Insight

This research significantly extends existing knowledge by illustrating how guilt uniquely shapes decision-making through moral motivations, contrasting with other emotions such as anger, which drives consistent risk-seeking.

These findings highlight the complexity of emotional influences in moral contexts, suggesting an interplay between emotional states and moral reasoning processes.

Future research should investigate specific cognitive mechanisms and neural underpinnings of guilt-driven decisions, potentially applying findings to real-world moral and ethical dilemmas.

Implications

Practitioners and policymakers might leverage these insights to incorporate moral emotional awareness into decision-making training programs, enhancing moral accountability and ethical standards in professional and personal settings.

Implementing strategies to stimulate moral sensitivity could foster greater ethical consistency in decision-making processes.

Challenges include effectively eliciting authentic moral emotions and carefully balancing emotional induction methods to avoid unintended psychological distress.

Strengths

This study had several methodological strengths, including:

• Robust experimental design, effectively manipulating moral emotions and decision-making contexts.
• Comprehensive use of validated measures to assess emotional and psychological states.
• Clear theoretical grounding provides strong rationale and conceptual coherence.

Limitations

This study also had several limitations, including:

• Utilization of hypothetical decision scenarios reduces ecological validity.
• Emotional self-reports subject to individual differences and potential biases.
• Sample limited to undergraduate students, limiting broader generalizability.

Socratic Questions

• How do real-life experiences of guilt differ from experimental inductions, and how might this affect decision-making?
• To what extent can these findings regarding guilt-driven decision-making generalize across different cultural contexts?
• How might individual variations in moral reasoning capacity influence guilt’s impact on decision preferences?
• Are there alternative psychological explanations for the observed distinction between guilt and anger in risk preferences?
• What ethical considerations must be addressed when integrating guilt induction into practical interventions aimed at enhancing ethical decision-making?