Do people share their feelings of guilt with others and, if so, what are the reasons for doing or not doing this? Even though social sharing of negative emotional experiences, such as regret, has been extensively studied, not much is known on the sharing of guilt. We report three studies on the sharing of guilt. In Study 1, we re-analyzed data about sharing guilt experiences posted on a social website called “Yahoo Answers,” and found that people share intrapersonal as well as interpersonal guilt experiences with others online. Study 2 found that the main motivations of sharing guilt (compared with the sharing of regret) were “venting”, “clarification and meaning”, and “gaining advice”. Study 3 found that people were more likely to share experiences of interpersonal guilt and more likely to keep experiences of intrapersonal guilt to themselves. Together, these studies contribute to the understanding of the social sharing of the emotion guilt.

Additional documentation and metadata can be found in the files Data Report Chapter 5XLZ.pdf, Documentation of all author responsibilities.pdf, and the metadata files in the rawdata folders. This research has preregistered all materials, hypothesis and sample size through: https://aspredicted.org/blind.php?x=md5f3b (For Study 2); https://aspredicted.org/blind.php?x=ay7vk9 (For Study 3).

The present data package includes Raw data files (Raw data + metadata information, both in EXCEL), Syntax file (SPSS) and Materials (questionnaires in pdf from MTurk).