Members of Transgressor Groups Prefer Reparations to Come from Third Parties: An Extension of Interpersonal Findings on Moral Emotions

Interpersonal research has shown that guilt motivates perpetrators to compensate victims at the expense of a third party, indicating that the emotion’s goal involves reparative outcomes rather than self-mortification. However, this motivation has yet to be tested in an intergroup context. Based on findings about ingroup wrongdoing, compensation was expected to draw primarily on shame rather than guilt. Three experiments (total N = 617) showed that participants only allocated more to the victims versus their own group when compensation was assigned from a third party's rather than their own group's resources. There was also evidence that shame was felt, and related to compensating victims, more strongly than guilt, whether at the expense of the ingroup or the third party.