Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 7, no. 1, January 2012, pp. 77-85

Shame for money: Shame enhances the incentive value of economic resources

Chia-Chi Wang*   Ying-Yao Cheng*   Wen-Bin Chiou#   Chun-Chia Kung%

This article was retracted by the corresponding author, Wen-Bin Chiou, on August 9, 2013, after problems were discovered with the data.

Original abstract:

Shame leads to devaluation of the social self, and thus to a desire to improve self-esteem. Money, which is related to the notion of one’s ability, may help people demonstrate competence and gain self-esteem and respect from others. Based on the perspectives of feelings-as-information and threatened ego, we tested the hypothesis that a sense of shame heightens the desire for money, prompting self-interested behaviors as reflected by monetary donations and social value orientation. The results showed that subjects in the shame condition donated less money (Experiment 1) and exhibited more self-interested choices in the modified decomposed game (Experiment 2). The desire for money as reflected in overestimated coin sizes mediated the effect of shame on self-interested behavior. Our findings suggest that shame elicits the desire to acquire money to amend the threatened social self and improve self-esteem; however, it may induce a self-interested inclination that could harm social relationships.


Keywords: emotion, feelings-as-information, money, self-interested behaviors, shame.