Do pride and shame track the evaluative psychology of audiences? Preregistered replications of Sznycer et al. (2016, 2017)

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.