Inducing Guilt: A Literature Review

AbstractGuilt is perceived as a self-conscious, social and a moral emotion, which favors prosocial behaviour [1,2]. Recently, this widely accepted view has been questioned [3]. Considering these contradictory results, our purpose is to investigate the strategies used to manipulate guilt in laboratory studies. After searching multiple data-bases, we found that there are only seven studies that investigate the involvement of guilt in the moral domain by inducing the emotion, and not by checking the manipulation of guilt using hypothetical moral dilemmas. Future implications of the strategies used to induce guilt are discussed