Moral Emotions the Day After Drinking

Abstract

Youth party practices are, despite apparent chaos, morally ordered. Moral emotions regulate social practices by linking individual morality and collectively sanctioned moral orders. An analysis of 66 qualitative interviews with young social drinkers reveals that, the day after drinking, party participants may experience the negative moral emotions of shame, guilt, and embarrassment. When party participants think back on the night before and suspect that they behaved in ways that were not morally acceptable, even within the party context, they evaluate their behavior as a moral failure and try to anticipate other people’s reactions to this behavior. Alcohol-induced amnesia may also lead to suspicions of a moral failure and may therefore precede such emotional reactions. Because these emotions are delayed reactions, their potentially appeasing display has no immediate audience, and this may lead to more intense emotions. Participants coped with these emotions socially, through storytelling and teasing, but also by insisting on the alternative normative structure of the party practice. These emotional reactions are spontaneous attempts at reconciling experiences from social contexts that were conducive to moral transgressions with the conception of oneself as a moral person. These emotional reactions also reveal an ambivalent relationship between individual party participants and transgressive party practices. Conceptualizing these reactions as moral emotions enables a fuller understanding of the social dynamics of drinking and party practices and a more precise mapping of their modified moral orders.