The Internet Review Corporation is pleased to share this guest-written article, which hopefully will be the first of many. Today’s piece is written by noted cognitive scientist, Dr. Barry Kort, who holds degrees from the University of Nebraska (BSEE) and Stanford University (MSEE as well as a Ph.D. in Systems Theory). His early career found him planning networks at Bell Labs, and he’s presently a visiting scientist at the MIT Media Lab. A current focus of Dr. Kort’s research is the role of emotions in learning.

Guilt, Shame, and Remorse

In a follow-up comment to an open discussion about Larry Sanger’s role in the launch of Wikipedia, Sanger wrote to Jimmy Wales, “I thought that the evidence against your claims about me would shame you into changing your behavior.”

	Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger (2006)

Sanger’s remark about the inefficacy of public shaming brings up an interesting question: What is the most appropriate way to bring about a behavior change in another person — especially a rival.

There is the Guilt and Punishment Method, where some authority figure pronounces guilt and metes out a punishment until such time as the desired behavior change occurs. This traditional approach has long been used in civil society. Fyodor Dostoevsky lampooned it in his classic novels, Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. Twentieth-century studies have confirmed Dostoevsky's insight that this regulatory model is ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst.

An alternative method, where there does not exist an authority figure empowered to employ the Guilt and Punishment Method, is the Shaming and Blaming Gambit. In this method, the objective is to rely on inducing a sufficiently overwhelming feeling of shame to produce the desired behavior change. Like the Crime and Punishment Method, the Shaming and Blaming Gambit has been shown to be similarly unreliable.

The problem with both of those methods is that Guilt and Shame are pronouncements of a judging agent, and thus elicit a built-in defense mechanism. Nowadays these ego defense mechanisms are so well known (via movies and TV dramas) that even children become adept at immunizing themselves from the unwanted feelings of shame and guilt.

So what’s left?

Salvador Dalí; Remorse or Sphinx Embedded in the Sand, 1931.

There is a naturally occurring emotional state of Remorse which generally motivates a miscreant to improve their behavior going forward. But Remorse is a fragile emotion which generally operates only in the absence of externally applied Guilt and Shame.

One rarely hears anyone speak of Sorrow, Remorse, or Lamentations these days. It’s a pity.

Image credits:

• Photo of Larry Sanger taken by Simon Bierwald, redistributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Unported.
• Remorse or Sphinx Embedded in the Sand, 1931, by Salvador Dalí. Gift of John F. Wolfram. Kresge Art Museum, Michigan State University.