To lend money to someone and to later ask this same person to
pay the money back should be relatively unproblematic in modern,
monetized societies. Still, some people find it difficult to ask for
lent money to be paid back, even though it is in their own interest
that this happens and they have the legitimate right to ask their
money back. In this article, we examine one reason why people
might experience such difficulties: the anticipation of guilt. In Study
4.1, the majority of participants from 3 different countries indicated
that they sometimes did not ask money back because doing so
would make them feel guilty. Study 4.2 found that the more people
anticipated guilt about asking their money back, the less willing
they were to do this. Study 4.3 found that the effect of guilt
became less strong when more money was at stake. Study 4.4
found that people anticipated more guilt and were less likely to ask
money back when the other person was poor compared to rich.
Studies 4.5 and 4.6 found that the amount of harm people
anticipated by asking the money back mediated the effect. Taken
together, we interpret these studies (Ntotal = 2988) to showcase
the social nature of guilt, in that it can motivate people to sacrifice
their (financial) self-interest in order to protect relationships with
others.
Additional documentation and metadata can be found in the files Data Report Chapter 4.pdf, Documentation of all author responsibilities.pdf, Documentation of Data Exclusions.pdf, and the metadata files in the rawdata folders.
This research has preregistered all materials, hypothesis and
sample size through:
https://aspredicted.org/blind.php?x=2qa52h (for Study 3);
https://aspredicted.org/blind.php?x=fs3qj9 (For Study 4);
https://aspredicted.org/blind.php?x=7867r4 (For Study 5);
https://aspredicted.org/blind.php?x=ni3y2a (For Study 6).
The present data package includes Raw data files (Raw data+
metadata information+ Final Data, both in EXCEL), Syntax file
(SPSS) and Materials (questionnaires in pdf from MTurk). The packages are primarily organized based on the raw data, SPSS
(or R) code, and materials(questionnaires).
