Shame in decision making under risk conditions: Understanding the effect of transparency

The role played by the emotion of shame in the area of decision-making in situations of risk has hardly been studied. In this article, we show how the socio-moral emotions and the anticipated feeling of shame associated with different options can determine our decisions, even overriding the cognitive choice tendency proposed by the certainty effect. To do so, we carried out an experiment with university students as participants, dividing them into four experimental conditions. Our findings suggest that people avoid making unethical decisions, both when these decisions are made public to others and when they remain in the private sphere. This result seems to indicate that the main factor in not making unethical decisions is related to the need to avoid transgressing an internal moral standard of behavior, and that the role of transparency is less relevant than expected. However, we propose that, although the effect of transparency is limited in reducing unethical economic decisions, it should continue to be taken into account in theoretical models that address the reasons people behave unethically.