Anger, guilt, and repeated cooperation in social dilemmas

A consistent finding in behavioral economics is that in social dilemma situations in which individuals must decide between individual and group welfare, cooperation declines over time eventually resulting in noncooperation. Extant theorizing addressing phenomena such as adaptive belief-learning focus solely on cognitive explanations. Based on the appraisal-tendency framework, we propose and show that the development of cooperation has a strong emotional component. Others' actual cooperative behavior compared to their expected cooperative behavior does not only result in adapting beliefs (cognition) but also gives rise to feelings of anger and guilt. These, in turn, drive individuals' subsequent cooperative behavior. Whereas experienced anger exacerbates the decline of cooperation, experienced guilt has a cushioning effect, potentially countering the progression toward noncooperation. Results also show differences in the emotional experience and resulting emotionally driven cooperation behavior between cooperative types. Particularly free riders tend to act on anger but not on guilt, shedding additional light on the emotionally driven role of free riders in the development of noncooperation. Finally, we find evidence for emotional carryover. Emotionally driven cooperation behavior is not limited to individuals causing the emotions, but is also transferred to individuals who are not directly responsible. Overall, the study provides further evidence for the appraisal and action tendency of anger and guilt and highlights the importance of emotions in repeated cooperative interactions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).