Guilt: Another Gift Nobody Wants

I believe that my dog felt guilt, because when I would come home and find he'd gotten into the garbage and strewn it around the kitchen, he would use body language very similar to that of a human who was feeling guilt. (The dog was not picking up on my emotions, because I usually hadn't seen the mess yet, and didn't know what he'd done until his body language told me.)

This body language has much in common with submissive body language, which is partly shared between canines and primates.

So ancestral "guilt" could have been "the emotion you feel after disobeying the alpha", which helps you display submission and also not do it again so you don't get beaten again. It could originally have just been a type of fear. (Perhaps it still is!)

This is compatible with Yvain's explanation - it would have the effect Yvain described; consistent guilty behavior would provide evidence that you would be likely to obey the alpha even in his/her absence. But the origin could be simpler than that.

You drew an analogy to pain as an unwanted gift: I think an even better analogy is with rage. On Steven Pinker's account, a hot-temper is a way to signal that you're unconditionally pre-committed to wreak havok if anyone harms you, even if, after having been harmed, it is no longer in your interest to do so. Temper is a signal that you have mind-control angel on your shoulder that sends you uncontrollably crazy when you are wronged, and is hence a deterrent to anyone that might harm you.

I'm currently reading I Thought It Was Me (but it isn't), a book about women and shame-- the author distinguishes between shame (the feeling of deserving to be of extremely low status because of personal defect) and guilt (the feeling that one has not lived up to one's standards and can change).

I can't remember if there's a theory about why shame exists, but the author says it never leads to useful change even though it's pervasive.

She mentions having done some research about men and shame (doesn't seem to have written any books about it) and says that the worst shame for both men and women is about not satisfying gender norms. If true, this might be a clue about why shame exists.

This is slightly off-topic (as it doesn't help distinguish between Yvian's hypothesis and T&C's) but anyway:

People who feel guilty sometimes give to charity, right?

Is the social purpose of giving (in this case) therefore to punish yourself financially rather than actually help anyone?

If we were trying to engineer a corporate entity to behave morally, we might precommit the entity (using a contract) to generous settlement terms with any whistleblowers providing even relatively minimal evidence of the appearance of unethical or antisocial behavior.

I'm not completely sure, but possibly you would also (or instead?) have to require similar precommitments of the humans (CEO? Directors? Shareholders?) who have power over the entity, so that their incentives align with the corporation's.

I find evolutionary-psychological reasoning always a bit suspect because it seems a bit too good to explain just about anything. Having said that -- sometimes dogs seem to have a sense of guilt -- does that imply they have a kind of morality too(*)? Or is it just some kind of 'act' due to co-evolution with humans?

(*) De Waal in Primates and Philosophers argues that some animals have a certain degree of morality (Robert Wright slightly disagrees with De Waal, in the same book).

So if you loved your brother dearly and everybody else knew this, you would feel less guilt if he died while you were on a hiking trip together with a group of other people?

Thinking back to how the cliff ledge where he'd been standing suddenly began to collapse, and everyone else had simply stood there, frozen, and you instantly lunged towards him, and actually managed to just just brush his finger tips... but by that time you had fallen over the edge yourself.

Then WHUMPH! an out-jutting tree broke your fall, knocking the wind out of you like the fist of a god. You hung there, bent double, bleeding and bruised, unable to draw even the shallowest breath, and could do nothing but watch in the slow motion vision of the adrenalin rush, as your twin brother and best friend in all the world fell... and struck a sharp outcropping with a sickening wet crack... and tumbled... and fell again... and hit... and rolled... and fell again... and...

Well, I'm not sure, but I think I'd feel guilty after that. "Auto-flagellation" indeed; Constant thoughts of 'If only I'd been a little faster!', even though everyone who saw the event says, 'A little faster? You can't beat yourself up for not being super-human!'

Unfortunately I have no such brother myself, so I guess I can't be sure.

My own little brother, by contrast... well, he has been diagnosed as psychotic, I'm pretty sure it would be correct to say that he hates me, and I can't honestly deny that I feel he's pretty worthless as a human being.

I don't want him to die (I don't want anyone to die), but if we were ever in a situation together, alone, where I had to decide whether to let him die or take a great risk to my own safety in exchange for a small chance of saving him... the choice is obvious.

And I wouldn't feel guilty about it, I don't think. A little sad and angry at the unfairness and cruelty of the world, but no more than I do when I think about some distant newspaper tragedy.

What do you think?

My question is:

Why is guilt often so bad a de-motivator? There are people who know they will feel guilty before the fact, do in fact feel guilt after the fact, and perhaps even continue to live with that guilt every day, but still continue the behavior. Guilt seems like it evolved exactly for the purpose of preventing people from acting in a way they consider immoral or unethical, so why does it so often seem so bad at its job?

Is guilt really a good signal?

In a precommitment case, the person takes on burdens which are imposed by purely external forces. The surety of punishment comes from the duty other people have to honor the agreement and take a pound of flesh. In showing you this agreement, bearing an appropriate seal of recognition, I demonstrate that I will suffer negative consequences for cheating.

Guilt, however, doesn't operate in that way because I can't show you my guilt function and so demonstrate my commitment. If we expand it to say that my reputation for guilt is an assurance, we're still not there since we could just as well use the old-fashioned "he upolds his bargains" reputation.

Here's an alternative: guilt is a way to avoid punishment. Since the range of punishments easily moves towards physical harm and even forms of exile (from shunning to separation) you would be well served by punishing yourself, if it might help you avoid the harshest punishments. In fact, it may be that guilt is actually socially constructed and is secretly a very old psychological technique for punishing people without physical harm. We can, after all, learn to make people feel guilty.

A positive benefit of having guilt (for the person suffering it) that seems to have been overlooked here is that we punish people less when they display signs of guilt. This is so prevalent that we even see it in court rooms. In criminal procedings prosecutors try to talk up any sigh of lack of guilt or repentance to get longer sentences and defendents claim they are alreay suffering a lot of guilt to get sentences lower. This also applies to fake guilt.

• People may be suspicious of people who come out of a disaster feeling no survivor's guilt.

How does this theory interact with the idea (untested folk theory?) that helping others when there's been a disaster results in not feeling guilty about that disaster?

Bravo, this is a nice analysis.

I think you should carry through the experiments you suggest. I'm assuming you don't want to actually kill your brother, so perhaps you could gather some test subjects, ask them to imagine being in the situations listed, and ask them to report the magnitude of their hypothetical guilt. Imperfect, but I think this kind of experiment is fairly widely accepted in the relevant journals. Then publish in a top evo-psych journal.

It doesn't look like undeserved guilt gets you anything that plain vanilla guilt doesn't. Vanilla guilt suffices to make it so that it's not in your self-interest to kill your brother, arrange for a disaster etc.

It seems to me that guilt is inherently paradoxical. In light of the misdeed, if you believe you're bad, your good. If you believe you're good, you're bad. Seems a lot like the liar's paradox.

I suspected your interpretation of C&T to be uncharitable, since they seem to be so clearly wrong [to me]. But reading at that link, you appear to have their position correct. Importantly, they characterize the recollections one has about the guilt-inspiring event, and the conscious pondering one often does about alternative ways to have approached that event, as part of the actual mechanism of the learning process for the guilt-module. That sounds unlikely to me. If the mechanism that computes the affective state change is unconscious, why would it's learning process be conscious?

I suspect it would be closer to say that the conscious mind is spinning its wheels trying to figure out why it's in the affective state it is in, while having substantial inward-looking epistemic impairments made even worse by the operation of the guilt mode. We might draw conscious conclusions but those strike me as largely independent and distinct from the operation of our guilt reflex. This might seem wasteful to have independence, but the key thing for evolution to sort out is behavior, not efficiency.

The following also shows their confusion, as they seem unaware of the possible social reasonings you provide (can they really not be aware of those?):

"These [including guilt] are emotion programs that have appeared puzzling from a functional perspective because the feelings they engender interfere with short-term utilitarian action that an active organism might be expected to engage in. "

Great post :)

Guilt does not naturally fall out of these explanations. One can imagine a mind design that although often behaving morally for the same reasons we do, sometimes decides a selfish approach is best and pursues that approach without compunction. In fact, this design would have advantages; it would remove a potentially crippling psychological burden, prevent loss of status from admission of wrongdoing, and allow more rational calculation of when moral actions are or are not advantageous. So why guilt?

You could also hypothesize that not being authentically (like you sort of did in the second section) guilty or moral could be a burden. For an example think about how people would treat somebody who isn't genuinely guilty, and seems unsympathetic. I'm not saying that's the case, but it could be a much larger defect than an advantage to lack genuine morality or feelings of guilt. You could make the assumption that guilt related mechanisms have evolved to avoid behavior which would trigger social resentment.

The big difference between Mr. Dewey and ourselves is that where Mr. Dewey has unquestionable evidence of his commitment to self punishment in the form of a very visible angel on his shoulder, for the rest of us guilt is a private mental affair and can be faked. It would seem to be a winning strategy, then, to claim a tendency to guilt while not really having one.

I think this behavior pattern could only arise when the guilt related functions are already present in the environment. You could even further - and even more unreliably - hypothesize and describe this behavior pattern as parasitic in respect to them which could in turn result to a ratio of frequencies... Or maybe that's a longshot.

Although this could theoretically be mediated by the behavioral strategies of a sufficiently intelligent and Machiavellian unconscious mind, it fits within the framework of evolutionary psychology and can also be interpreted in evolutionary terms.

I think this section could be met with similar responses as the previous quoted sections. But I would like to add also that there are people who are not genuinely sympathetic, who may or may not be empathetic.. :(

Should "all evolutionary costly" be "all evolutionarily costly"?

The second essay in Nietzsche's 'Genealogy of Morals' is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in guilt. There is an even mixture of dubious/spurious claims here and brilliant insights, which makes it an ideal text for applying rationality to, and sparring with one's own cognitive biases. Second, I hope the kind of person who reflexively/unthinkingly privileges 'analytic' philosophy over the continental kind (this seems to be a recurring theme at lesswrong.com) might think again, or at least become acquainted with a good example of their nemesis. The effuse conjectures of Nietzsche (for example) provide rich soil for more rigorous analysis, and is a lot of fun to read as well. I would love to know what lesswrongers make of it!

The essay in question can be found here: http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/nietzsche/genealogy2.htm

This post rings true for me. I have a pretty overactive guilt reaction, and I think I'm considered to be trustworthy and reliable (except when it comes to group academic projects, as per previous posts!). For example, if I make plans with somebody, even the thought of cancelling makes me feel guilty...so I don't cancel on people. Thus I have a reputation as someone who doesn't cancel. More to do with self-behaviour modification than with overt displays of guilt, and I don't think most people know that the reason why I'm reliable is because I feel guilty if I'm not.

First, guilt is just as associated with good outcomes as bad outcomes. If I kill my brother so I can inherit the throne, then even if everything goes according to plan and I become king, I may still feel guilt. But why should I recalibrate here?

In an evolutionary explanations for an emotion, the outcomes are summed over evolutionary history.

If I kill my brother so I can inherit the throne, then even if everything goes according to plan and I become king, I may still feel guilt.

I think this should be changed to clarify that essentially all human evolution occurred in the context of small bands. There was no evolution to optimize adaptations to account for such a disproportionately large gain as a monarchy with a throne. Maybe: "If I kill my brother so I can inherit more wealth and status, then..."

If you kill your brother in order to inherit the throne, you probably deserve whatever guilt you feel.

Which is probably relatively little. You don't need nearly as much in the way of guilt when you have that much power. Not to mention if daddy was overly squeamish you probably wouldn't have ended up a prince in the first place.