Abstract
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.
Highlights
The field of decision-making in risk situations has been dominated by two important theories: Expected Utility Theory [1] and Prospect Theory [2]
This theory proposes the existence of a pattern of four attitudes toward risk: risk aversion for high probability gains, risk seeking for high probability losses, risk seeking for low probability gains, and risk aversion for low probability losses [4]
The results suggest that there are statistically significant differences between condition 1 and condition 2 (χ2 = 30.527, p < .01), a result that contradicts the first hypothesis (H1) and implies that the socio-moral emotional charge that imbued the unethical choices in the private situation prevailed over the certainty effect proposed by Prospect Theory
Summary
The field of decision-making in risk situations has been dominated by two important theories: Expected Utility Theory [1] and Prospect Theory [2]. In an attempt to provide an alternative view of these issues, these authors suggested the “risk as feeling hypothesis”, pointing out that decisions made in risk situations are partly the result of the direct influence of feelings From this perspective, behavior and decision-making depend on the mutual influence between the cognitive evaluation (nature and probability of outcomes) and affective information (vividness with which possible consequences can be imagined, previous experiences with the outcomes, and past conditioning). It has been suggested that socio-moral emotions such as shame can motivate people to act in an ethical way [34] Evidence for this comes from the experiment carried out by Jacquet, Hauert, Traulsen and Milinski [35], who tested their participants on the wellknown dilemma of public good game. This study offers information about the key mechanisms that allow us to explain how and to what extent transparency is capable of reducing the incidence of unethical behaviors
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