What is Guilt For?
A new experiment suggests the function of guilt is both to punish the self and encourage us to make amends.
At school my good friend Dave and I used to sit together in Biology classes. One day we were there as usual trying to get our heads around the metamorphosis of tadpoles, or something similar.
We were perched on high stools next to high wooden lab benches, the kind with generations of pupil's engravings underneath the varnish. Good solid science benches.
I stood up to talk to someone behind me, not moving far from the stool on which I was sat - I knew it was right behind me. Then, when I went to sit back down, I suddenly heard myself cry out in pain. Next thing, I was sitting on the floor, something warm oozing from the back of my head. Everyone was staring at me but I had no idea what was going on.
It was only on the way to the doctor I pieced together what had obviously happened. Dave had whipped the stool away and I'd fallen backwards, catching my head a glancing blow on the bench.
A couple of stitches
It wasn't a bad injury, I had a couple of stitches; no real harm done - except to my relationship with Dave.
What was interesting was that although I told him it was no big deal, in the years following he barely spoke ten words to me. We certainly didn't sit together in Biology any more.
I always found this puzzling. It was Dave that caused the accident, I had told him we were cool so what was the problem? I never found out directly from Dave - it's possible he didn't even know himself why he was avoiding me.
The only really plausible explanation I've been able to come up with is that he simply felt so guilty he couldn't face me. If I was around it just reminded him of what he had done. And that was too much for him so he preferred to avoid me.
If my explanation is right, then it not only shows how powerful guilt can be but also how it can promote avoidant behaviour. But does guilt always encourage this kind of avoidant behaviour or is it a more sophisticated emotion with complex effects on motivation? In short: what is guilt for and what does it make us do?
Theories of guilt
Freud thought guilt served to effectively regulate social behaviour. If people didn't feel guilty, so the argument goes, they'd be much less likely to care about hurting other's feelings or damaging their property. This is all very well, but what exactly is guilt's function, what does it motivate us to do?
One theory has it that guilt is all about punishing the self, another has it that it encourages us to try to heal the social damage we've done. Still another suggests we are only motivated to act in order to make ourselves feel better about our transgression.
In a new study published in Psychological Science, Amodio & Harmon-Jones (2007) argue the first two theories are compatible. Guilt, they argue, acts both to punish the self and to help us heal the damage we've done. And they use a thorough experiment involving measuring behaviour and electrical activity in the brain to provide evidence for their view.
Inducing White guilt
Experimentally, the first problem is making people feel guilty in the lab. Here's what the authors came up with. Participants are brought in, have an EEG cap put on their head to measure electrical activity in the brain, and then they are told to watch a series of faces appearing on the screen.
Some of the faces are White, some Black and some Asian. They don't have to do anything other than look at the faces. The participants have been specifically chosen because they are themselves White but have expressed positive views of Blacks. The researchers have to avoid recruiting racists otherwise the experimental results will be difficult to interpret.
Afterwards the participants are shown bar graphs supposedly interpreting measurements of the electrical activity in their brains. These indicate that while the participants reacted positively and neutrally to White and Asian faces, they reacted negatively to Black faces. The 'results' seem to show that our liberal participants are somewhat racist - whether consciously or unconsciously.
These graphs are, of course, just made up.
Participants are then told the first experiment finished early so would they mind taking part in a different experiment. The second, apparently unrelated study, is actually still part of the first. In this participants choose which of 19 different magazine articles they find the most interesting. Three of the articles are about reducing racial prejudice.
I wish the ground would swallow me up
As you'd expect participants felt guilty about apparently being racist - this was measured in two ways. First they indicated in self-report measures they felt guilty. Second the EEG measures showed a significant reduction in left-frontal activity. This reduction in activity is associated with decreased 'approach motivation'. In other words they just wanted the ground to swallow them up.
Then when choosing the magazine article they were more likely to choose the article about reducing racial prejudice. At the same time the EEG recording showed a shift of activation onto the left side of the brain. This indicates an increase in approach behaviours. So now they were motivated by their guilty feelings to try and make amends.
Guilt is a complex social emotion
One of the reasons this study is really interesting is that it shows the complexity of the interplay between guilt and motivation. Previously psychologists have tended to see emotions in terms of having one particular purpose or effect. For example, happiness motivates people to approach others while sadness causes people to withdraw.
Guilt can, however, cause a more complex pattern of behaviours: first withdrawal, then approach. It's this dynamic model that provides a much better way of analysing how guilt affects our behaviour.
One limitation of this study, however, is that the results may only be applicable to prejudice. We will have to wait for future research to confirm if this dynamic model is seen in other guilt-inducing situations.
Dave and I
Nevertheless, applying the results of this study to what happened between Dave and I makes me wonder if it really was all about guilt. After all, he never really tried to make amends, he just hid his head in the sand. For good.
I suppose I will never know the truth.
Reference
Amodio, D.M., & Harmon-Jones, E. (2007). A Dynamic Model of Guilt: Implications for Motivation and Self-Regulation in the Context of Prejudice. Psychological Science, 18(6), 524-530
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I'd sure like to see follow ups to this study, perhaps addressing different ways of inducing guilt in the test subjects. Very interesting article!
FA
Hey Jeremy,
I discovered this blog about a month ago and have become addicted since then. So just wanted to say thanks, you're doing a great job! Your articles are always interesting, well-written, relevant, and just the right size (not too long, not too short).
THANKS :)
Fransicso, me too.
Olenka, you're welcome - that's very nice of you to say!
hello jeremy,
this is a meaningful page,I like your writing style on such topic.
the article make my recognion of the relation among of guilt ,emotion,and motivate more complicated.
I used to focus on the some side effects of guilt.For example,a wife died in a accident when she is on the road to a shop,and husband feel guilty for he should not at that time ask his wife to that shop .
now,i will prefer to treat this phenomenen as the side effect of motivation,for the guilt may be induce by the motivation of desiringt to the live with his wife again.
letiantu, thanks, and glad you enjoyed it!
hi Jeremy,
I have to say I have a problem with this sort of stuff - I read for two minutes and then I start to go blank. I googled 'new age psychology blogs' in order to try and get some traction regarding my cards, which are deeply involved with psychological issues. (www.rainringcards.com)
Ironically, just as I don't feel at home with your approach, I don't really feel at home with the psychic/card-reading fraternity either.
I'm curious to know how you - not to mention your readers - would understand the relation between what I do and what you do (some might say: Relation? What relation?)
Here's a first thought: the psychology which turns you on seems to be based on the findings of the remote observer - he or she reports on studies of people, mice etc and then uses intellectual reasoning to analyse the findings, no doubt also comparing them with similar studies by other people....
Hang on! YOU feel guilt, I feel guilt, EACH OF US feels guilt...where is the place for personal, subjective insight in all this?
Basically, as a feeling-sided person, I can't hack long dissertations based on generalities; I respond to people and their personal experiences, because these touch me, move me, therefore interest me and hold my attention (emotional attention, I have to say).
To conclude - my position I think would be to say that whilst emotional i.e. feeling-sided people certainly need to be able to think, spirit- (i.e.thinking-) sided people need to be able to feel.
Another thought: this 'scientist':'artist' great divide also seems to be tied up with extroversion and introversion. For the extrovert, the answer is out there, for the introvert, it's in here. My intuitive sense of this situation is that we all lose out -because there is this great gulf, with two mutually uncomprehending groups/factions, camped one on either side and precious little bridge between the two.
To people like yourself with this -as I view it - academic approach, my question would be: what do you want? Is psychology some hobby which gives you intellectual pleasure, or is it about fundamental personal issues such as what goals should I aspire to, what prevents me achieving those goals, and how - if at all - can I deal with those obstacles? The cards which I referred to above are, it seems to me, fundamentally different to what you are doing in at least one important respect: they are interactive - if you really work with them, they are going to challenge you not just intellectually, but emotionally and practically.
Over to you....
Peter, thanks for your comment - I've summarised a couple of points you made on this post which is also relevant to your comment. Let's address your general questions about the uses of psychology there.
When you ask about what I want from psychology, my answer is pretty simple. It's not a case of either or. Psychology gives me intellectual pleasure and it helps me think about personal issues. It would be hard for me to have one box in my brain filled with knowledge about psychology and stop it influencing all the other parts of my life.
Also, psychology studies are interactive - it's just the interactions are often with a number of people rather than just one at a time. Psychologists are generally looking for phenomena averaged over a number of people or within a particular sub-population.
My take on Peter's comments:
No offense, but one's intuition, unless it has been hone by many hours of dedicated attention such that your neural pathways have established well-developed patterns (our best guess is that it takes roughly 10,000 of dedication), is pretty much worthless in accurately assessing the social (and personal) environment. As a professor, I am quite skilled in monkeying about with my students' intuition, showing just how misleading it can be (for pedagogical reasons only, of course: I derive absolutely no enjoyment over their cries of protestation :-)
Psychology is based on systematic empiricism, a methodological approach based on repeatable measurements of observable phenomena to try to come to a conclusion as to causal relationship between the observable phenomena.
To do so, as contradictory as it may seem, we must often remove the individual from the equation. The individual is too complex to study, since there are too many variables (personality, history, etc) that comprise the human psychological organism. Our methods require us to examine people in general, and what they tend to do (and from what they do, we attempt to extrapolate what they think or feel, since cognitions and emotions are not directly observable).
The problem with your approach is that there is no systematic empiricism, and so your observations are forever grounded in your own biased perceptions of the universe (note: my perceptions of the universe are just as biased, but I use the tools of science to try to counter those).
For example, you refer to two dichotomies ("thinking:feeling", as well as "artist:scientist"): Are these real distinctions, or one of the categories we create to simplify our complex social world?
Ultimately, I view psychology as having little direct benefit to those who want to understand themselves in any specific sense. As a psychological scientist, there is next to nothing I can tell you about yourself with anything close to definitiveness. The most I can say is that we tend to use mental shortcuts, and we tend to behave in X fashion in Y situations, and it may be the result of Z reasons.
OK, as to guilt:
I have always viewed guilt as a manifestation of arrogance: The internalization of bad feelings grounded in the notion that the outcomes were based on your actions alone. There is no such thing as guilt without accepting a premise of power. Guilt is about the person feeling the guilt, and only that.
I don't think I have ever felt guilt. Of course, I can't be sure since we cannot directly measure emotions, just how they manifest (either biochemically or behaviorally).
Compare guilt to the notion of shame, the internalization of feeling bad grounded in one's relationship with others. Interestingly, there are some who suggest that shame has an evolutionary grounding.
I have felt shame many times in my life.
The difference is not just semantic here: Rather we are taking about a fundamental difference in the operation definition that has some important implications for the research.
Have you read John Knowles's novel A Separate Peace? The story about you and your friend Dave makes me think about what happens between Gene and Finny in that book.
Freudians have managed to obfuscate truth and research for years, and this body of non-work is no exception.
Any discussion of guilt is devoid of meaning without a discussion of shame and the other innate affects.
It's time for Freudians to step-down and let the real researchers take over.
What's the difference between guilt and shame? Amodio and Harmon-Jones (2007) argue that guilt is more narrowly focussed on a particular transgression and so, effectively, you can do something to 'fix' it.
On the other hand shame "implicates one's entire self-concept". The upshot being it's much more difficult to 'fix' shame.
I'll buy that until someone convinces me otherwise!
Anon #1: I haven't read A Separate Peace but I just looked it up on Amazon and having read a couple of reader reviews I can see why you picked up on that parallel. Interesting!
Anon #2: I think that's a fair criticism that different emotions probably interact with each other. It's challenging experimentally though.
I'm very interested in this article, having just been writing about guilt myself. It is a very coplex subject and I think one of the problenms is that as humans we are very subjective in the way we lable our emotions, so a lot of what is called guilt is in fact complicated by other stuff.
I find for example the distinction between guilt and shame hard to sustain. In broad, shame is more concerned with appearance, whilst guilt has to do with either 'real' guilt (ie having done wrong) or guit feelings, which may be rooted in all manner of misconceptions and issues of self-image.
And awful lot seems tied up with false expectations that we shouldn't be guilty, and these in turn with a social history of ideas around judgement, divine and otherwise, and damnation.
I think the research on withdrawal and motivation is very interesting and intuitively sounds true to life.
Incidentally if you're interested, my book, Guilt: an exploration comes out in February with O-Books
http://www.o-books.com/product_info.php?products_id=552 Thanks again - Caroline Brazier