Guilt: An Interpersonal Approach, Psychological Bulletin, March 1999, Vol. 115, No.2, 243-267, Roy F. Baumeister, Arlene M. Stillwell, and Todd F. Heatherton
Article Summary:
In the article, Guilt: An Interpersonal Approach, by Roy F. Baumeister, Arlene M. Stillwell, and Todd F. Heatherton, the argument is made that guilt should be viewed as a fundamentally social phenomenon. The introduction argues that most occurrences of guilt are, “clearly and essentially linked to interpersonal processes”. It is also noted that the sociocultural perspective is lacking a current hypothesis that allows for the evidence of recent studies and tests. The article proposes that “guilt is something that happens between people rather than just inside them”, and argues that more research is needed to develop such a hypothesis.
There are numerous research studies and expert opinions cited in the article and it will be best if the reader does not make assumptions as to whom the ideas belong. The article is divided into eleven sections (not including the introduction or conclusion) and this summary will follow these sections sequentially.
The Interpersonal Analysis of Guilt is separated into four parts; communal relatedness, affective sources of guilt, three functions of guilt, and positive inequity and guilt. The commonalities between the sections are the interpersonal causes of guilt (infliction of harm, loss, or distress between people), the more generalized groups that are based on community or commonality, and the prediction of correlations between close relationships and stronger feelings of guilt (and vise-versa). The first part contrasts communal relationships and exchange relationships. The second suggests that there are two sources for guilt; empathic arousal and anxiety over social exclusion. To detail the idea a little more in depth; “…empathic distress in response to the suffering of others imparts a self-attributed causal responsibility for that suffering”, and also, “…the roots of guilt lie in human relatedness with basic fear of social exclusion”. The next part gives three functions of guilt that strengthens social bonds and attachments. They are: guilt motivated relationship-enhancing patterns of behavior, manipulation as a technique to allow the powerless some influence over others and as a balance factor for emotional distress in a couple (guilty feelings show caring). The last part shows some other causations of guilt, the emphasis being on positive inequity.
The fourth section, Reviews of Empirical Findings, is separated into six parts; autobiographical accounts and subjective experience, transgression compliance and altruism, transgressions: other findings, guilt without transgression, situational and contextual predictors, and personality correlates of guilt. The purpose of the section is to examine empirical knowledge about guilt from the interpersonal perspective. It starts with some autobiographical accounts dealing with solitary and/or victimless transgressions, and then touches on the idea of guilt without transgression. Guilt without transgression is the idea that one can be innocent but still feel guilty as a result of another’s perception. People making other people feel guilt is a sign of interpersonal causation and empirical evidence shows that, “guilt inducers often felt better when their partner began to feel and show guilt”. The following part continues along similar lines of thought and reasons that a sense of obligation is needed for an increase in helping from the transgressor. It suggests two possible explanations for the research showing that transgressors sometimes become helpful to someone other than their victim.
The article notes that “only publicly recognized transgressions led to a significant increase in helping”. In the third part, consequences of guilt feelings, other than helpful compliance, are shown to be important behavioral motivators. This includes the suggestive findings that guilt appears to promote a wish to regard one’s group as superior and in doing so motivates people to affirm social bonds within the group. The article separates transgressions into either relational or nonrelational; relational being direct harm to a significant other, nonrelational being violations of standards without harm to anyone. It also defines the differences between morality and guilt and proposes that guilt originates from assimilated reactions to such principles as controllability and responsibility verse accidental outcomes. The next part elaborates more on some previous ideas about guilt without wrong doing, and guilt from positive inequity, but also adds some new ideas including; survivor guilt (similar to positive inequity guilt), community and guilt vulnerability, and communal relatedness as a determinate of guilt magnitude. The fifth part of this section focuses on the interpersonal and relationship links connecting guilt with society. It contends that guilt is situation specific, that guilt is dependent on a concurrence of self-judgment and the other people’s judgment. That guilt about lying and deception are relative to a person’s expectation about proper behavior and the social expectations about that behavior. That, “Both the nature of the relationship and the specific interpersonal consequences of the transgression appear to be decisive determinants of guilt”. As somewhat of a side note, the authors mention the positive link between guilt and parental warmth and affection. The last part deals with the personality correlations of guilt. The article reviews findings and draws some conclusions about empathy, interpersonal traits, sex differences and levels of guilt in men verse women, self-esteem, feelings about self, and also general personality correlations. To be more specific; empathy is empirically correlated to a proneness of guilt, one aspect of guilt is a temporary loss of self esteem and low self esteem is associated with a high tendency to feel guilty. There is also empirical evidence of positive correlations of guilt to loneliness, shyness, resentment, suspicion, and conversely, negative correlations between social support and guilt.
The Consequences of guilt section is separated into three parts; desire for punishment, prosocial effects, and antisocial effects. It begins with some hypothesis for guilt being a desire for punishment but concludes that recent empirical evidence suggests, “…there is not much to support the idea that guilt causes a desire to suffer or be punished”. The prosocial effects of guilt are stated as being, first, a motivator to make reparations or apologize, second, a mechanism that alters behavior to conform to others’ expectations and standards, and last, the “down payment effect” which states that those who fell guilt partly compensate for their actions with the guilty feeling itself; compared to those who did not show guilt. The antisocial effects are stated as being; avoidance, the victim as a guilt cue, social awkwardness, and approach-avoidance conflict. It is noted that temporary avoidance is beneficial in the long-run.
Getting Rid of Guilt, is a declaration that guilt is an unpleasant feeling and it would seem reasonable that people would want to avoid it. It discuses the strategies used to avoid or minimize the guilt feeling, and also discuses social correlations of such strategies. These strategies include; maximizing the perception of differences within/between communities, low regard and dehumanization, breaking of social bonds, deconstruction of incident through “temporal bracketing”, and also minimizing the perception of consequences- hence reducing the severity of the transgression.
There is a Discussion of research and theories and also includes hypothesis proposed by the article itself. The topics discussed are all related to guilt, the individual psyche, interpersonal motivations, and communal relationships (especially those between significant others). It reiterates the statements that the autobiographical accounts were almost exclusively interpersonal, and that the causes and consequences of these accounts of guilt were also interpersonal. The Discussion section also delves into research and discusses some statements made previously in the article relating to guilt and interpersonal patterns and the correlations that arose.
The Assessment of interpersonal analysis proposes that the interpersonal approach to guilt offers a useful basis for interpreting many empirical results. The article takes the position that guilt is a motivator for several interpersonal patterns of behavior and proposes several interpersonal functions of guilt. These functions are as follows; guilt motivates people to adopt relationship-enhancing behavior patterns, the function of guilt is a means of influencing others equity in a relationship by allowing the less powerful person to get their way, and it can redistribute emotional distress. It is also the articles opinion that, “guilt seems well designed to regulate behavior in ways that will strengthen and preserve social relationships”. It is also stated that the largest objection to the view of guilt as rooted in close relationships is that people sometimes feel guilty towards strangers, “…this is an important reason to shift the emphasis from close to communal relationships as the main source of guilt”.
The next section, Reconciling interpersonal and intrapsychic perspectives, is an integration of both perspectives in an effort to fully understand of the concept. The authors say that the recent attempts to re-conceptualize emotions as social rather than strictly intrapsychic is consistent with the articles idea that, “[guilt is] rooted in social relationships rather than theological principles or abstract ethical concepts”. The article renounces the idea that guilt is evoked from within the self. It does so with the statement that perceiving oneself as responsible for a transgression is neither necessary nor sufficient to produce guilt feelings. Similarly, the idea of a purely intrapsychic account of guilt as being complete and accurate is also renounced. The main point of this section is that, “guilt may originate in interpersonal processes such as empathy and harming others but people’s understanding of guilt is gradually assimilated to models based on intentional violations of abstract standards”. It concludes that the feeling of guilt can be thought of as an intrapsychic result and a moderator of interpersonal processes.
The Problems and pathologies of guilt in the interpersonal view are admittedly very speculative because of the lack of data. The hypotheses that are presented are logical for the information that has been provided up to this point. It is suggested that guilt as a potentially destructive and dysfunctional emotion may have validity and that frequent guilt feelings are not a healthy sign. Inducing guilt may often breed resentment and if insecurely attached people try to induce guilt (to gain reassurance of caring) they could potentially cause a resentment response; sending back a decisively unsympathetic signal. Too much guilt may cause people to abandon a relationship simply to avoid unpleasant feelings. Also, if guilt is a method for regulating relationships, then serious relational problems could arise if the partners differ widely in their guilt proneness.
The last section, Directions for further research, concedes that more research is needed to form guidelines that can build upon the base of current empirical data and that can allow the development of a new theory. The article mentions some problems in past research and offers some questions that have been left unanswered. These questions include; what the effectiveness of guilt is, who uses it and the costs, and also emphasizes the need to explore the boundaries of guilt.
The Conclusion reiterates that a fundamentally sociocultural view of guilt should be taken and that it would be desirable for other types of research to invest in studying guilt; especially in motivational contexts. It ends with a statement on the usefulness of guilt, even as a negative emotion, in maintaining successful interpersonal relationships.
Article Critical Evaluation:
The authors of Guilt: An Interpersonal Approach, argue that guilt should be viewed as a fundamentally social phenomenon. They also acknowledge the lack of empirical evidence and the hypothesis developing problems it causes. The evidence shown was of the highest professional level and the conclusions inferred from that evidence was presented in a logic and concise manner. The authors did an excellent job of providing examples and of defining terms, leaving little room for misinterpretations or vague ideas.
Article Response:
The article has many excellent ideas and there are a plethora of practical applications for those ideas. I am in complete agreement that a large part of guilt can be attributed to sociocultural and interpersonal foundations. However, I think the authors placed their focus to much on guilt within dyads and not enough on large communities or extended communal relationships. I also think that more could be said about nonrelational guilt. This could be from the lack of research and empirical evidence so I do not believe it harms the article or the arguments.
There is a McDonalds’ billboard advertisement I saw that read, “You don’t have to feel guilty anymore”. It had a picture of a stereotypical middle-aged modern woman and was showing a new low fat or low-carb or new ‘fad-diet of the day’ double cheeseburger or something. I got to thinking about that sign in the perspective of this article and realized that guilt is definitely a motivator. I began to interpret the billboards’ slogan to read; “Now we say you don’t have to feel guilty anymore.” Whether the advertisement was appealing to an intrapsychic guilt phenomenon, or was in fact creating the guilt through social ideals is something I can not say with absolute certainty. The very fact that it is appealing to a person’s sense of guilt so as to affect their behavior indicates that it is a social occurrence. I will continue to analyze and develop this idea until I can communicate it more effectively.
Along similar lines of thought, I considered the influence of guilt as a motivator and I wonder what affect it will have on the new “world community”. As the world becomes more integrated with technology allowing people to communicate over larger distances, the community relationships become closer. If it is true that the closer (more similar) one perceives ones self to another, the stronger the feelings of empathy and guilt for transgressions will be; then theoretically the potential for war will diminish. This is assuming that people feel empathy for the tragedy of war. This is also assuming that propaganda does not continue to influence ideas that dehumanize “enemies” and that the Freedom of Speech will be resurrected (and hopefully spread throughout the world). If guilt is indeed a motivator, then to prevent it would discourage action. To prevent guilt on a large scale is relatively easy; control information. People can not feel guilty for things they don’t know about. The pen is infinitely mightier than the sword. I am getting off track, but I’m on a roll, so bear with me a little longer. There is also the possibility that social gaps will begin to form as people separate within wealth categories as opposed to the good ol’ ethnic, religious, and nationality categories.
It has been said that god is dead; I propose that along with god the next generations shall witness the death of “the nation”. I also propose that this will be a direct result of guilt’s dual social role of integration and separation. Hmmm, well… maybe these ideas need to be contemplated a lot more!
And now… for something completely different.
I apologize for the lateness of this article (because of guilt?), and I will give an excuse; I bit off way more than I could chew and by the time I realized it I couldn’t spit it out. I must admit that I did not feel any guilt about not turning the paper in on time; I did however feel apprehensive for the moment when I would turn it in late. I am curious to see if I will feel guilty, or if you will give me any looks that I might perceive as disapproval therefore possibly causing guilt. Of course now that I’ve thought about it and will be paying attention I might induce the feelings of my own accord, or conversely not feel guilt because…Oh, Nevermind. Anyway, sorry the paper is late.
No comments:
Post a Comment