If We Don ’t Feel Socially Accepted, We Get More Defensive When We’ve Done Something Wrong

By Emily Reynolds When you’ve done something wrong, big or small, it can be hard to own up to — particularly if you feel you’ve transgressed a moral or social code. Instead, you might avoid confronting the issue and become defensive. Yet defensiveness often has negative consequences anyway: it can hurt someone else’s feelings, cloud your ability to make a good decision in the moment, or prevent you from changing harmful behaviours. But why do we get defensive, and what can we do to minimise those negative consequences? A new study from Michael Wenzel and colleagues at Flinders University, published in the British Journal of Social Psychology, asks both of these questions — and finds that defensiveness could be reduced by affirming people’s moral and social worth. In the first study, 187 participants were asked to recall an incident in which they had wronged somebody else, writing a brief description of what they had done. They then rated how severe the transgression was, the importance of their relationship with the person they had wronged, how guilty they felt and how much they accepted blame (e.g. “I wasn’t the one to blame for what happened”), and how loved and accepted they felt despite any wrongdoing. Participants then took part in an implicit guilt test, a version of the (controversial) Implicit Association Test. This essentially looked at how quick participants were to categorise self-related words (e.g. “me”) when they also had ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Morality Social Source Type: blogs