Moral masochism: on the connection between guilt and self-punishment

Do people sometimes seek to atone for their transgressions by harming themselves physically? The current results suggest that they do. People who wrote about a past guilt-inducing event inflicted more intense electric shocks on themselves than did those who wrote about feeling sad or about a neutral...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inEmotion (Washington, D.C.) Vol. 13; no. 1; p. 14
Main Authors Inbar, Yoel, Pizarro, David A, Gilovich, Thomas, Ariely, Dan
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States 01.02.2013
Subjects
Adult
Depression - etiology
Depression - psychology
Electroshock - instrumentation
Electroshock - methods
Emotions - physiology
Female
Guilt
Humans
Male
Masochism - psychology
Morals
Punishment - psychology
Young Adult
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Summary:Do people sometimes seek to atone for their transgressions by harming themselves physically? The current results suggest that they do. People who wrote about a past guilt-inducing event inflicted more intense electric shocks on themselves than did those who wrote about feeling sad or about a neutral event. Moreover, the stronger the shocks that guilty participants administered to themselves, the more their feelings of guilt were alleviated. We discuss how this method of atonement relates to other methods examined in previous research.
ISSN:1931-1516
DOI:10.1037/a0029749