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Guilt drives prosociality across 20 countries

Nature Human Behaviour volume 9, pages 2199–2211 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Impersonal prosociality is considered a cornerstone of thriving civic societies and well-functioning institutions. Previous research has documented cross-societal variation in prosociality using monetary allocation tasks such as dictator games. Here we examined whether different societies may rely on distinct mechanisms—guilt and internalized norms versus shame and external reputation—to promote prosociality. We conducted a preregistered experiment with 7,978 participants across 20 culturally diverse countries. In dictator games, we manipulated guilt by varying information about the consequences of participants’ decisions, and shame by varying observability. We also used individual- and country-level measures of the importance of guilt over shame. We found robust evidence for guilt-driven prosociality and wilful ignorance across countries. Prosociality was higher when individuals received information than when they could avoid it. Furthermore, more guilt-prone individuals (but not countries) were more responsive to information. In contrast, observability by strangers had negligible effects on prosociality. Our findings highlight the importance of providing information about the negative consequences of individuals’ choices to encourage prosocial behaviour across cultural contexts.

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Fig. 1: Overview of experimental treatments.
Fig. 2: Prosociality across countries.
Fig. 3: Forest plots displaying treatment differences in prosocial choices.
Fig. 4: Predicted probability of prosocial choices as a function of Individual IGS.

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Data availability

All data underlying the analyses reported herein are openly available via the Open Science Framework (OSF) at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/U6NDA (ref. 76). We also provide the full materials for the study via the OSF at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/4T6XJ.

Code availability

The code to reproduce the analyses reported herein is available via the OSF at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/U6NDA (ref. 76).

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Acknowledgements

C.M. acknowledges funding from the French National Research Agency under the Investments for the Future (Investissements d’Avenir) programme, grant no. ANR-17-EURE-0010. This research is financially supported by grants from the European Research Council (no. ERC-CoG-865931) and the Dutch Research Council (no. Vi.Vidi.195.137) awarded to S.S. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript. We acknowledge the contributions of several experts in the field who helped with the translation, back-translation and checking of materials for this study: S. Alami, G. Bahar, A. De Oliveira, T. D. Cruz, S. Essbih, C. Figueroa, C. Graf, L. Hoenig, H. Imada, M. Inaba, S. Jin, R. Li, G. L. Pasin, S. Pelica, A. Pérez-Velilla, A. Romano, A. S. Saral, V. Shiramizu, X. Song and E. Vriens. We also thank J. Peña for helpful comments on the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Toulouse School of Economics, University of Toulouse Capitole, Toulouse, France

    Catherine Molho

  2. Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, Toulouse, France

    Catherine Molho

  3. Amsterdam School of Economics, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

    Catherine Molho, Ivan Soraperra & Shaul Shalvi

  4. Center for Humans and Machines, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany

    Ivan Soraperra

  5. Department of Economics, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

    Jonathan F. Schulz

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  1. Catherine Molho
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  2. Ivan Soraperra
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Contributions

C.M., I.S., J.F.S. and S.S. conceived the project. C.M. collected the data. I.S. analysed the data. C.M. wrote the manuscript, with input and revisions from I.S., J.F.S. and S.S.

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Correspondence to Catherine Molho.

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Nature Human Behaviour thanks Constanza Abbate and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Peer reviewer reports are available.

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Supplementary Figs. 1–27, Tables 1–22, Design information, Sample and data collection, Analyses and Measurement invariance testing.

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Molho, C., Soraperra, I., Schulz, J.F. et al. Guilt drives prosociality across 20 countries. Nat Hum Behav 9, 2199–2211 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02286-3

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