Guilt proneness is a personality trait indicative of a predisposition to experience negative feelings about personal wrongdoing, even when the wrongdoing is private. It is characterized by the anticipation of feeling bad about committing transgressions rather than by guilty feelings in a particular moment or generalized guilty feelings that occur without an eliciting event. Our research has rev...

Participants recalled instances when they felt vicariously ashamed or guilty for another’s wrongdoing and rated their appraisals of the event and resulting motivations. The study tested aspects of social association that uniquely predict vicarious shame and guilt. Results suggest that the experience of vicarious shame and vicarious guilt are distinguishable. Vicarious guilt was predicted by one...

Codes of ethics are being increasingly adopted in organizations worldwide, yet their effects on employee perceptions and behavior have not been thoroughly addressed. This study used a sample of 613 management accountants drawn from the United States to study the relationship between corporate and professional codes of ethics and employee attitudes and behaviors. The presence of corporate codes ...

Anger may be more responsive than disgust to mitigating circumstances in judgements of wrongdoing. We tested this hypothesis in two studies where we had participants envision circumstances that could serve to mitigate an otherwise wrongful act. In Study 1, participants provided moral judgements, and ratings of anger and disgust, to a number of transgressions involving either harm or bodily puri...

Intentions are seemingly ubiquitous in the criminal law. Their presence can turn reckless homicide into first-degree murder, reckless endangerment into attempted murder, violation of a security clearance into treason, and inadvertent mistake of fact into perjury. But should intentions play the pivotal role that they do in determining the categorization of crimes? Recently, there has been a live...

Introduction ........................................................................... 1830 I. Are Lay Intuitions of Justice Specific? ....................... 1832 A. Categorization Studies ......................................... 1837 B. Ranking Studies .................................................... 1838 C. Magnitude Estimation Studies ............................ 1839 D. Counterargum...

Some philosophers contend that concomitant ignorance preserves moral responsibility for wrongdoing. An agent is concomitantly ignorant with respect to wrongdoing if and only her non-culpable, but she would freely have performed the same action were not ignorant. I, however, argue excuses. I show leading accounts of imply excuses, debunk view responsibility.