Making People Feel Guilty in Conversations.

Communication plays an important role in eliciting and shaping people's emotions. Yet surprisingly little empirical or conceptual work has explored how social interaction encourages or discourages various emotions. This article summarizes a series of four studies which examined how people, in conversations, go about generating one emotion—that of guilt—in others. In the first study, a typology of 12 guilt moves was inductively devised. The most common ways of making another feel guilty were: reminding the other of his or her obligation to a relationship, listing sacrifices one has made for the other, reminding the other of his or her role responsibilities, comparing the other to someone else, and questioning the other. The primary reason for using guilt in conversations was persuasion. In the second study, the typology's generalizability was confirmed. Findings also revealed that the likelihood of using guilt in conversations increases with greater relationship intimacy and that people believe others are more likely to use guilt than themselves. The 12 techniques for guilt elicitation were examined in the third study for their independence and dimensionality via multidimensional scaling. The results suggest three underlying dimensions (self-nonself, acquiescence-restrictiveness, and commission-omission) and six potential clusters. The final study conceptualized guilt elicitation and sensitivity as individual differences. A brief, multifactor scale of individuals’ tendency to use guilt, to use it with ease, and to be susceptible to guilt moves was developed. The three dimensions correlated significantly with a number of communication-focused personality variables.