Abstract
Are pride and shame adaptations for promoting the benefits of being valued and limiting the costs of being devalued, respectively? Recent findings indicate that the intensities of anticipatory pride and shame regarding various potential acts and traits track the degree to which fellow community members value or disvalue those acts and traits. Thus, it is possible that pride and shame are engineered to activate in proportion to others' valuations. Here, we report the results of two preregistered replications of the original pride and shame reports (Sznycer et al. 2016 Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 113, 2625–2630. (doi:10.1073/pnas.1514699113); Sznycer et al. 2017 Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 114, 1874–1879. (doi:10.1073/pnas.1614389114)). We required the data to meet three criteria, including frequentist and Bayesian replication measures. Both replications met the three criteria. This new evidence invites a shifting of prior assumptions about pride and shame: these emotions are engineered to gain the benefits of being valued and avoid the costs of being devalued.
Highlights
Humans have a powerful need to belong [1,2,3] and, reciprocally, a powerful aversion to being devalued, excluded or ostracized [4,5,6]
One possibility is that natural selection operating on these features of the social ecology of ancestral humans could have selected for regulatory adaptations targeting the social-evaluative psychology in the brains of other individuals for the purpose of (i) inducing others to augment and maintain their positive social evaluations of the self and (ii) avoiding the likelihood and costs of being socially devalued by others
We calculated the mean pride ratings provided by participants in the pride condition, and the mean valuation ratings provided by participants in the audience condition
Summary
Humans have a powerful need to belong [1,2,3] and, reciprocally, a powerful aversion to being devalued, excluded or ostracized [4,5,6]. One possibility is that natural selection operating on these features of the social ecology of ancestral humans could have selected for regulatory adaptations targeting the social-evaluative psychology in the brains of other individuals for the purpose of (i) inducing others to augment and maintain their positive social evaluations of the self and (ii) avoiding the likelihood and costs of being socially devalued by others. This is believed to be the context in which the human emotions of pride and shame evolved [8,9,10,11,12]
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