Feeling Guilty

Here's a report of an experiment (via Andrew Sullivan) purporting to show how guilt works:

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.

Well of course.

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.

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.

What I always want to know when I read about this kind of experiment is what the subjects thought afterwards, when they found out how they'd been duped. (Assuming, that is, that they were told afterwards: it wouldn't surprise me if they weren't enlightened at all, such is the implied contempt for the subjects here, but left to wander off believing the worst about themselves.) But of course that information's never included. It's of no interest whatsoever to the experimentalists, despite their being, um, psychologists.

I know what my reaction would be: I'd be angry. I'd feel my trust had been abused. It's similar - though obviously less extreme - to the Stanley Milgram and Stanford prisoner experiments: by donning the White Coat of Scientific Objectivity, psychologists in these situations seem to believe that they're absolved from the usual human moral dynamics - blame, censure....guilt. They tell themselves they're solely involved in the selfless quest for knowledge. Should their subjects feel humiliated, traumatised, abused - well, that's the price to be paid for advancing our understanding of the human psyche. That careers are advanced and reputations made thereby, well, that's a happy by-product of the scientific process.

Here's the abstract of the paper, in Psychological Science:

Guilt is widely recognized as an important self-regulatory emotion, yet alternative theoretical accounts view guilt primarily as either a punishment cue or a prosocial motivator. Integrating these views, we propose that guilt functions dynamically to first provide a negative reinforcement cue associated with reduced approach motivation, which transforms into approach-motivated behavior when an opportunity for reparation presents itself. We tested this hypothesis in the context of racial prejudice. White subjects viewed a multiracial series of faces while cortical activity was recorded using electroencephalography. Following bogus feedback indicating anti-Black responses, subjects reported elevated guilt, which was associated with changes in frontal cortical asymmetry indicating reduced approach motivation. When subjects were presented with an opportunity to engage in prejudice-reducing behavior, guilt predicted greater interest in prejudice reduction, which in turn was associated with an approach-related shift in frontal asymmetry. The results support a dynamic model in which guilt is associated with adaptive changes in motivation and behavior.

This is such a mish-mash of pompous scientistic jargon it's enough to make me wonder if the whole thing isn't an elaborate con. It may not be complete bollocks, but it's the next best thing. To translate: we lied to a bunch of subjects to make them think they were deep-down racist. These schmucks then tended to read more about how to reduce racial prejudice. This is what you'd expect if you thought for a moment about it, but if we throw in lots of stuff about approach-motivated behaviour and cortical asymmetry, maybe we can fool you into thinking this is some kind of heavyweight scientific investigation. The important thing to remember, though, is that this is a dynamic model. We've showed that guilt can change behaviour. That's one in the eye for all those who support the static model of guilt, where it doesn't do anything, never changes, and can be entirely discounted in any discussion of human motivation. So anyway, you know...can we have our PhDs yet?

The paper may not provide any insights into the dynamics of guilt, but it says a great deal about how to avoid it. In the right situation people can lie to and deceive others and end up not feeling a shred of guilt. They can even feel proud of themselves.

Comments

[tolkein]

In what moral sense do these scientists different from Mengele?

[tolkein]

I'm sorry. "different" should have read "differ".

[Dom]

I think it's interesting that in Western countries we are so concerned about white racism that we hunt it down at the synaptic level with EEGs. I wonder if anyone is doing a study like this on the Jinjaweed -- just to destroy any last vestige of hidden, subconscious, institutionalized racism.

[DaninVan]

Keep in mind, the lab coat types tilted the results by pre-screening the subjects. ie. they eliminated the candidates who likely WOULDN'T have felt any "guilt". What a crock...

[glad thereafter]

Tolkein, you the point I was going to - how come these surveys of racism are always looking at the psychopathology of Whites? And why no survey of anti-gentilism? Are non-Whites and Jews assumed to be better people?

[glad thereafter]

Here's a gloriously racist-anti-racist...

http://www.countercurrents.org/wise310507.htm

click at the foot for the comments

[James Hamilton]

This is very interesting, thanks for drawing attention to it. I've wondered for a few years now whether the prominence of fear in psychological experiments was because it's relatively simple to generate in subjects. When I was practicing therapy, I felt, subjectively, that some variants of shame and guilt were hugely important in the way people experienced life. But how do you put that to proper, repeatable, double-blind-type testing?

So, whilst I agree with your sentiments about sending people out without having told them they'd been duped,it's still an interesting development.

(Hope I've expressed that OK - not feeling very well today so not thinking clearly, and furthermore Australia are playing down the road, or at least were, as they won with plenty to spare)