Guilt, Shame, and Remorse -- by Dr. Barry Kort

Guest author, Dr. Barry Kort, explores some of the most ineffective means of imposed behavior modification, in contrast to the naturally occurring emotional state of Remorse.

Weirdly, there aren't any song parodies in it.

The first healthy signs of remorse.

Jon

Nice article, Moulton

Dare I point out that remorse is not naturally occuring in a sociopathic personality?

One can assume that any given instance of miscreant-like behavior is non-sociopathic and therefore subject to self-correction, but we've certainly done that before, and to our detriment.

That was a really good piece.

Moulton has been podded... Someone alert Weekly World News.

It was a short teaser, I think. It left me with wanting to know if Moulton believes remorse should/can be induced to make people act responsibly or if it is something that works if the person comes to the point of remorse without "help."

When TFA and Greg first approached me about writing a guest essay on Akahele, the challenge was to come up with a topic that I hadn't already beaten to death here, or on Wikipedia/Wikiversity, or on a blog. But Larry Sanger's remark had reminded me of something I had first written about in the early 1990s on MicroMuse, long before the World Wide Web changed the face and the tenor of Internet culture.

There is an historic discussion from around 1993, where I first raised these ideas to a group of teenagers on MicroMuse. If you scroll, to about the 2/3 mark on that page, you can find the segment where we discuss guilt, shame and remorse.


I was hoping this question would come up, because it really does go to the heart of the problem of finding best practices, where conventional practices can be seen to be failing.

A year ago, I posted (here on W-R) an anecdote (also from the MicroMuse era) where this very issue arose.

While a single historical anecdote does not suffice to establish a new paradigm that overthrows an old one, it does speak to GBG's question about whether I believe other methods are worth considering. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide if the gambit in that anecdote rises to GBG's notion of "help".

Moulton, I pray that you one day find your remorse...

Can't Sing, Mod Will Baleet Me


My sentiments exactly.

I thought it was good, too. One of the reasons being that it left me wanting to read more.

I think that shame and remorse are primary emotions, something like empathy. But the problem with primary emotions is you either have them or you don't. They're very hard to inculcate, except possibly by example. Children do learn these things by example, but it's a very tenuous thing, and usually involves having them view, close up, somebody they admire FOR OTHER REASONS behaving in a remorseful, kind, or empathetic way.

I don't know if it can even be taught to adults. Or perhaps it can a bit, but it's rather like trying to learn a foreign language after you've passed the cut-off time where brain-wiring takes place. You've heard me talk about that narrow window in which kittens must be socialized or habituated to other animals. During that window you can habituate them to anything. Miss it and you've got a problem the rest of the animal's life. Probably more things than we ever know, are like that.

The other half of the problem is not people who are missing empathy or remorse due to bad teaching or wrong teaching. The latter are the sociopaths-- kids who get brought up in the mafia or some gang or some pathological situation, but who otherwise would have turned out normally. No, here I'm talking about the other kids. The Bad Seeds. The psychopaths and narcissists. Kids who would have turned out abnormally no matter what-- because they are lacking something critical.

The metaphor here is learning to play the violin. If you don't start before a certain age, you'll never be a master. But if you're tone-deaf, you'll never be a master, either, and that includes even if somebody puts a Suzuki violin in your little hands at the age of three. It's a waste of time. And so also with some people.

If the innate capacity is there, you can do a credible job of re-education, just as just about anybody of normal intelligence can learn a foreign language at any age (albeit, most of the time, with an accent). Likewise the feral cat can be tamed if you spend enough time, though you'll never reach the plasticity of the cat who began life as a hand-raised bottle fed kitten, who thinks he's a human.

And that's the first thing you need to ask yourself when confronting somebody who is missing something in the way of empathy. Are they tone deaf? Or did they just miss the music lessons?

Milton

Silvan Tomkins (1911–1991) was a deeply insightful writer on all aspects of affects in human life. His magnum opus is the 4 volume Affect, Imagery, Consciousness that he spent 30 years writing, but there is a more accessible selection of his writings in the following book:

• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick & Adam Frank (eds.), Shame and Its Sisters : A Silvan Tomkins Reader, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 1995.

Jon

My sister sends me emails like this all the time, sometimes with pictures of kittens.


But I suppose we might consider something other than the efficacy of prayer at work. While you and your friends were busy praying you probably weren't doing certain other things, like acting really pissed off. Maybe the departure form the expected had something to do with behavior change? I doubt that this would happen literally "overnight" but then the story in the retelling, even by the honest, might compress time a bit.

The Bible is full of advice like this:



this is quoted by the very practical minded Paul in Romans 12:19-21



This brings home the psychological impact of meeting evil with kindness. It has nothing at all to do with prayer.

Bearing Accurate Witness


Does your sister listen to This American Life on NPR?

Last week, Ira Glass reprised an episode entitled "Mistakes Were Made" about remorse and apologies in the aftermath of "misadventures." The bulk of the hour featured an atrocious and heartbreaking tragedy involving cyrogenics. You can skip that part. But the 8-minute opening segment, which sets the stage for the show's theme, recalled one of the oldest and most iconic of anecdotes on the subject of inducing remorse.

If you bring up the audio archive to listen to the show's opening prologue, you might also want to skip ahead to the last 6 minutes to listen to the closing epilogue, featuring remarkable parodies of the classic apology poem, "This Is Just To Say" by William Carlos Williams. The closing musical button, "Cold As Ice" is poignantly relevant, too.


One of the features of public prayer (as opposed to private meditation) is that it telegraphs the fact that observers are aware of an issue and are bearing witness to it.

The act of bearing witness (even silent witness) is a very powerful act. Individuals or groups can bear witness via prayer vigils or by other means. There is copious evidence that when others do nothing more than bear witness, it suffices to change the behavior of those being witnessed.