title: Moral masochism: on the connection between guilt and self-punishment.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Social Psychology and Tilburg Institute for Behavioral Economics Research, Tilburg University, The Netherlands. yinbar@uvt.nl
authors.forename: Yoel
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Inbar
authors.forename: David A
authors.initials: DA
authors.lastname: Pizarro
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Gilovich
authors.forename: Dan
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Ariely
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D003863:Depression / Q000209:etiology / Q000523:psychology; D004597:Electroshock / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D006167:Guilt; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008398:Masochism / Q000523:psychology*; D009014:Morals; D011678:Punishment / Q000523:psychology*; D055815:Young Adult