The Guilt Lag Paradox: How do time dynamics influence perceived responsibility in the context of decision-making?

While research has looked at the effect of manipulating time conditions on the feeling of controlling one's action, fewer authors have looked at the retrospective sentiment of experienced responsibility. This project investigates how the timing between our decisions and their consequences shapes how responsible we feel. We focus on everyday moral choices where responsibility is tightly linked to emotions like guilt or pride. The aim is to test whether introducing delays between deciding, enacting the decision, and seeing the outcome, reduce felt responsibility, and whether this depends on whether the outcome is good or bad and on how prone a person is to guilt as evaluated by a questionnaire. The study will recruit students from ULB. In the experiment, participants read short moral dilemmas, choose between two options, and then see an emotional facial expression standing for the consequence of their choice. After each trial, they either rate how responsible they feel on a 0–100 scale or assess whether the outcome is positive or negative as quickly as possible. We analyze their ratings and response times to understand how time dynamics, outcome valence and guilt proneness together shape the experience of responsibility.