It’s normal for you to feel upset and for your friend to feel guilty when they make a mistake, such as forgetting a birthday, cancelling plans, or failing to complete their share of the work. It’s tempting to think that their remorse will grow as your anger rises if they make a mistake again.
But things don’t work like that. According to a recent study from the University of Toronto that was published in the journal Emotion, even as your rage increases, your careless friend’s guilt level will largely remain constant.
This is because rage is elastic and rises progressively, as if someone is twisting a dial. In contrast, shame behaves like a light switch, rising up at the first error and then levelling off.
Sam Maglio, professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Toronto Scarborough and co-author of the study, notes that the findings have implications for managing personal relationships.
“People aren’t perfectly calibrated when they predict how someone else is going to feel. But knowing how emotions work helps you regulate them,
he said.
Wrong Guesses
According to Maglio, the gut sentiments we experience after a faux pas serve a purpose: they help us heal our relationship. Your rage informs your friend that they crossed a line and that they need to change their conduct; their guilt encourages them to apologize and do better.
Both emotions exist to prevent mistakes from occurring again. So what happens when your friend keeps failing?
“You might be expecting an apology because you’re overestimating their guilt. Your guess about what’s going on in their head is off and that can lead your behavior to be off,”
Maglio said.
Stuck with Guilt
It’s not that we don’t feel guilty — after our first slip-up, we’ll feel guilt at more than twice the intensity of our victim’s anger. Rather, researchers propose the pattern is partly because guilt is “prosocial,” a feeling that pushes us to be co-operative and charitable.
However, there is a limit to how severe our prosocial emotions may get, which is useful for guilt. People may lay more responsibility on us if we act too guilty, heightening the social rejection we’re predisposed to avoid.
“If I’m feeling guilty, I might not apologize because I think I’m stuck with this guilt regardless of what I do, failing to realize that my apology would go a really long way for the person feeling angry,”
said Maglio, who is cross-appointed to the Rotman School of Management.
Closeness and Apologies
Prosocial feelings can also blind us to the extent of a problem — we’ll donate the same amount of money to an oil spill cleanup whether there are 100 or 10,000 oily seagulls. And whether we offend our friend once or five times, we’ll feel the same way.
Guilt does rise in small bursts after the first mistake, but the changes are minute compared to the ramp of spikes that anger follows. Anger is a high-arousal emotion that increases easily and dissipates rapidly, and the feelings we experience from one event tend to transfer to the next.
Social closeness and apologies can dramatically how we experience anger, the study shows.
Best Friends vs. Coworkers
The researchers conducted seven experiments with hundreds of participants, each of whom was designated as a wrongdoer or victim and placed in a variety of scenarios.
In one study, participants were told that either their best friend or a coworker had made a mistake. Though wrongdoers felt equally bad regardless of who they’d offended, when it came to best friends, victims showed the least amount of wrath of any of the research.
Another scenario had participants err five times in a row by breaking a mug and repeatedly spilling liquids on their victim’s possessions. Just before the third transgression, the victim was told the wrongdoer bought them a new mug.
Despite the subsequent spills, anger decreased significantly more than guilt, and each felt less after the attempted patch-up.
Transgression Repair
The study notes that anger often makes us want to do things that make us madder, like yell or punch something. But with guilt, we simply want the feeling to go away.
“The good news is, just as sharply as that emotion intensity went up for anger, it’s ready to go back down. Your apology goes further than you think,”
concluded Maglio.
Abstract:
After an interpersonal mishap—like blowing off plans with a friend, forgetting a spouse’s birthday, or falling behind on a group project—wrongdoers typically feel guilty for their misbehavior, and victims feel angry. These emotions are believed to possess reparative functions; their expression prevents future mistakes from reiterating. However, little research has examined people’s emotional reactions to mistakes that happen more than once. In seven preregistered studies, we assessed wrongdoers’ and victims’ emotions that arise after one transgression and again after another. Following two (or more) consecutive transgressions, wrongdoers felt guiltier, and victims felt angrier. However, from one transgression to the next, increases to anger were significantly greater than increases to guilt. Likewise, after transgression repair, anger decreased more than guilt did. In short, we found that anger is more elastic than guilt, which suggests a new perspective on emotions: The sensitivity to which emotions update in response to new circumstances.
Reference:
- Polman, Evan et al. Elasticity of emotions to multiple interpersonal transgressions. Emotion (Washington, D.C.), 10.1037/emo0001286. 14 Sep. 2023, doi:10.1037/emo0001286