Brené Brown - Shame vs. Guilt

I had to share this recent post from Brené Brown's (Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead and The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are among other books) Ordinary Courage blog on shame versus guilt.

She explicates the basic point I have been making here for years - guilt is the sense that I have done something wrong, and it can help us change and grow, it's adaptive (as Brown says below); shame is the sense that I am wrong, and it keeps us stuck in suffering, it's crippling.

shame v. guilt

monday, january 14, 2013

 

Based on my research and the research of other shame researchers, I believe that there is a profound difference between shame and guilt. I believe that guilt is adaptive and helpful - it's holding something we've done or failed to do up against our values and feeling psychological discomfort.

I define shame as the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging - something we've experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection.

I don't believe shame is helpful or productive. In fact, I think shame is much more likely to be the source of destructive, hurtful behavior than the solution or cure. I think the fear of disconnection can make us dangerous.

From Daring Greatly:

I believe the differences between shame and guilt are critical in informing everything from the way we parent and engage in relationships, to the way we give feedback at work and school.

From Daring Greatly

A couple of weeks ago Steve McCready (a friend on Twitter) sent me a link to a fascinating blog post from researcher Dan Ariely. I love Dan's work and highly recommend his book, The (Honest) Truth about Dishonestly.

In a set of experiments, the researchers investigate a very subtle difference in language and labeling. They don't look at it through the shame/guilt lens so we may be evaluating different constructs, but I think it's very interesting (although counter to what I've found and believe).

"In a series of three experiments, participants were given a chance to claim unearned money at the expense of the researchers. There were two conditions in each experiment, and the only difference between them was in the wording of the instructions. In the first condition participants were told that researchers were interested in “how common cheating is on college campuses,” while in the second, they wondered “how common cheaters are on college campuses.

This is a subtle but, as it turned out, significant difference. Participants in the “cheating” condition claimed significantly more cash than those in the “cheater” condition, who, similar to when we tempted people who had sworn on the bible, did not cheat at all. This was true in both face-to-face and online interactions, indicating that relative anonymity cannot displace the implications of self-identifying as a cheater. People may allow themselves to cheat sometimes, but not if it involves identifying themselves as Cheaters."

I believe that if we want meaningful, lasting change we need to get clear on the differences between shame and guilt and call for an end to shame as tool for change. That also means moving away from labeling.

What do y'all think? What's been your experience? Could Dan's research tell us how to motivate better behavior while the findings about shame and guilt point to the danger of labeling in the process of changing behavior? Lots of good questions! I heart my job (and my grad students who push me).

Court Rules Woman Technically Not Raped Due to an Arcane Law (1872)

This is so effed up it's almost impossible to comprehend. In a situation such as this there needs to be some mechanism through which the judges can throw out the old and outdated law and rule on the facts of the case.

This may be one of those rare instances where justice might be outside the legal system.

Court Rules Woman Technically Not Raped Because of Marital Status

Posted Jan 4, 2013

A California appeals court has decided that an 18-year-old woman technically wasn’t raped by a man who had sex with her while she was asleep because he was pretending to be her boyfriend. But if he had been her husband? The court acknowledged the outcome would have been different.

Wait, what?!

Here’s the reason: a ridiculous and arcane law from 1872 that says it would be considered rape only if the woman had been married and the man had been impersonating her husband.

“A man enters the dark bedroom of an unmarried woman after seeing her boyfriend leave late at night, and has sexual intercourse with the woman while pretending to be the boyfriend,” the court decision read. “Has the man committed rape? Because of historical anomalies in the law and the statutory definition of rape, the answer is no, even though, if the woman had been married and the man had impersonated her husband, the answer would be yes.”

Yeah, that’s all kinds of messed up.

And because it’s unclear whether the court convicted Julio Morales for having sex with a sleeping woman (which would be considered rape), or for deceiving her into thinking he was her boyfriend (which is not considered rape because the woman is not married), the 2nd District Court of Appeal in Los Angeles overturned the conviction of Morales and ruled he must be retried.

“Today’s news is such bullshit that it’s hard to process even with that in mind,” Jezebel’s Katie J.M. Baker writes Friday. “Sleeping with someone while they are sleeping is rape. Tricking someone into sleeping with you is also rape, to say the least of what that is. The definition of rape should depend on the act itself, not on the identity of the person you are impersonating. Maybe that didn’t go without saying in the Victorian Era, but it sure should now.”

Exactly.

—Posted by Tracy Bloom.

Steve Fleming - Neuroscience and Criminality

This excellent article from Steve Fleming appeared at AEON, a very cool web magazine for those who are not familiar with it. Fleming, who blogs at The Elusive Self, takes an interesting look at how our increasing understanding of the neuroscientific foundations of human behavior are changing or will change our notions of guilt and criminality.

Was it really me?

Neuroscience is changing the meaning of criminal guilt. That might make us more, not less, responsible for our actions

Steve Fleming | 26 September 2012

 

Illustration by Matt Murphy

Steve Fleming is a cognitive neuroscientist. He is a postdoctoral fellow at New York University and a blogger at The Elusive Self.

In the summer of 2008, police arrived at a caravan in the seaside town of Aberporth, west Wales, to arrest Brian Thomas for the murder of his wife. The night before, in a vivid nightmare, Thomas believed he was fighting off an intruder in the caravan – perhaps one of the kids who had been disturbing his sleep by revving motorbikes outside. Instead, he was gradually strangling his wife to death. When he awoke, he made a 999 call, telling the operator he was stunned and horrified by what had happened, and unaware of having committed murder.

Crimes committed by sleeping individuals are mercifully rare. Yet they provide striking examples of the unnerving potential of the human unconscious. In turn, they illuminate how an emerging science of consciousness is poised to have a deep impact upon concepts of responsibility that are central to today’s legal system.

After a short trial, the prosecution withdrew the case against Thomas. Expert witnesses agreed that he suffered from a sleep disorder known as pavor nocturnus, or night terrors, which affects around one per cent of adults and six per cent of children. His nightmares led him to do the unthinkable. We feel a natural sympathy towards Thomas, and jurors at his trial wept at his tragic situation. There is a clear sense in which this action was not the fault of an awake, thinking, sentient individual. But why do we feel this? What is it exactly that makes us think of Thomas not as a murderer but as an innocent man who has lost his wife in terrible circumstances?

Our sympathy can be understood with reference to laws that demarcate a separation between mind and body. A central tenet of the Western legal system is the concept of mens rea, or guilty mind. A necessary element to criminal responsibility is the guilty act — the actus reus. However, it is not enough simply to act: one must also be mentally responsible for acting in a particular way. The common law allows for those who are unable to conform to its requirements due to mental illness: the defence of insanity. It also allows for ‘diminished capacity’ in situations where the individual is deemed unable to form the required intent, or mens rea. Those people are understood to have control of their actions, without intending the criminal outcome. In these cases, the defendant may be found guilty of a lesser crime than murder, such as manslaughter.

In the case of Brian Thomas, the court was persuaded that his sleep disorder amounted to ‘automatism’, a comprehensive defence that denies there was even a guilty act. Automatism is the ultimate negation of both mens rea and actus reus. A successful defence of automatism implies that the accused person had neither awareness of what he was doing, nor any control over his actions. That he was so far removed from conscious awareness that he acted like a runaway machine.

The problem is how to establish if someone lacks a crucial aspect of consciousness when he commits a crime. In Thomas’s case, sleep experts provided evidence that his nightmares were responsible for his wife’s death. But in other cases, establishing lack of awareness has proved more elusive.
It is commonplace to drive a car for long periods without paying much attention to steering or changing gear. According to Jonathan Schooler, professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, ‘we are often startled by the discovery that our minds have wandered away from the situation at hand’. But if I am unconscious of my actions when I zone out, to what degree is it really ‘me’ doing the driving?

This question takes on a more urgent note when the lives of others are at stake. In April 1990, a heavy-goods driver was steering his lorry towards Liverpool in the early evening. Having driven all day without mishap, he began to veer on to the hard shoulder of the motorway. He continued along the verge for around half a mile before he crashed into a roadside assistance van and killed two men. The driver appeared in Worcester Crown Court on charges of causing death by reckless driving. For the defence, a psychologist described to the court that ‘driving without awareness’ might occur following long, monotonous periods at the wheel. The jury was sufficiently convinced of his lack of conscious control to acquit on the basis of automatism.

The argument for a lack of consciousness here is much less straightforward than for someone who is asleep. In fact, the Court of Appeal said that the defence of automatism should not have been on the table in the first place, because a driver without ‘awareness’ still retains some control of the car. None the less, the grey area between being in control and aware on the one hand, and in control and unaware on the other, is clearly crucial for a legal notion of voluntary action.

If we accept automatism then we reduce the conscious individual to an unconscious machine. However, we should remember that all acts, whether consciously thought-out or reflexive and automatic, are the product of neural mechanisms. For centuries, scientists and inventors have been captivated by this notion of the mind as a machine. In the 18th century, Henri Maillardet, a Swiss clockmaker, built a remarkable apparatus that he christened the Automaton. An intricate array of brass cams connected to a clockwork motor made a doll produce beautiful drawings of ships and pastoral scenes on sheets of paper, as if by magic. This spookily humanoid machine, now on display at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, reflects the Enlightenment’s fascination with taming and understanding the mechanisms of life.

Modern neuroscience takes up where Maillardet left off. From the pattern of chemical and electrical signaling between around 85 billion brain cells, each of us experiences the world, makes decisions, daydreams, and forms friendships. The mental and the physical are two sides of the same coin. The unsettling implication is that, by revealing a physical correlate of a conscious state, we begin to treat the individual not as a person but as a machine. Perhaps we are all ‘automata’, and our notions of free choice and taking responsibility for our actions are simply illusions. There is no ghost in the machine.

In his book Incognito (2011), David Eagleman argues that society is poised to slide down the following slippery slope. Measurable brain defects already buy leniency for the defendant. As the science improves, more and more criminals will be let off the hook thanks to a fine-grained analysis of their neurobiology. ‘Currently,’ Eagleman writes, ‘we can detect only large brain tumours, but in 100 years we will be able to detect patterns at unimaginably small levels of the microcircuitry that correlate with behavioral problems.’ On this view, responsibility has no place in the courtroom. It is no longer meaningful to lock people up on the basis of their actions, because their actions can always be tied to brain function.

While it is inevitable that defence teams will look towards neuroscientific evidence to shift the balance in favour of a mechanistic, rather than a personal, interpretation of criminal acts. But we should be wary of attempts to do so. If every behaviour and mental state has a neural correlate (as surely it must), then everything we do is an artifact of our brains. A link between brain and behaviour is not enough to push responsibility out of the courtroom. Instead we need new ways of thinking about responsibility, and new ways to conceptualise a decision-making self.

Responsibility does not entail a rational, choosing self that floats free from physical processes. That is a fiction. Even so, demonstrating a link between criminal behaviour and conscious (or unconscious) states of the brain changes the legal landscape. Consciousness is, after all, central to the legal definition of intent.

In the early ’70s, the psychologist Lawrence Weiskrantz and the neuropsychologist Elizabeth Warrington discovered a remarkable patient at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London. This patient, known as DB, had sustained damage to the occipital lobes (towards the rear of the brain), resulting in blindness in half of his visual field. Remarkably, DB was able to guess the position and orientation of lines in his ‘blind’ hemifield. Subsequent studies on similar patients with ‘blindsight’ confirmed that these responses relied on a neural pathway quite separate from the one that usually passes through the occipital lobes. So it appears that visual consciousness is selectively deleted in blindsight. At some level, the person can ‘see’ but is not aware of doing so.

Awareness and control, then, are curious things, and we cannot understand them without grappling with consciousness itself. What do we know about how normal, waking consciousness works? Hints are emerging. Studies by Stanislas Dehaene, professor of experimental cognitive psychology at the Collège de France in Paris, have revealed that a key difference between conscious and unconscious vision is activity in the prefrontal cortex (the front of the brain, particularly well-developed in humans). Other research implies that consciousness emerges when there is the right balance of connectivity between brain regions, known as the ‘information integration’ theory. It has been suggested that anesthesia can induce unconsciousness by disrupting the communication between brain regions.

Just as there are different levels of intent in law, there are different levels of awareness that can be identified in the lab. Despite being awake and functioning, one’s mind might be elsewhere, such as when a driver zones out or when a reader becomes engrossed. A series of innovative experiments have begun to systematically investigate mind-wandering. When participants zone out during a repetitive task, activity increases in the ‘default network’, a set of brain regions previously linked to a focus on internal thoughts rather than the external environment. Under the influence of alcohol, people become more likely to daydream and less likely to catch themselves doing so. These studies are beginning to catalogue the influences and mechanisms involved in zoning out from the external world. With their help we can refine the current legal taxonomy of mens rea and put legal ideas such as recklessness, negligence, knowledge and intent on a more scientific footing.

An increased scientific understanding of consciousness might one day help us to determine the level of intent behind particular crimes and to navigate the blurred boundary between conscious decisions and unconscious actions. At present, however, we face serious obstacles. Most studies in cognitive neuroscience rely on averaging together many individuals. A group of individuals allows us to understand the average, or typical, brain. But it does not follow that each individual in the group is typical. And even if this problem were to be overcome, it would not help us to adjudicate cases in which normal waking consciousness was intact, but happened to be impaired at the time of the crime.

Nonetheless, the brain mechanisms underpinning different levels of consciousness are central to a judgment of automatism. Without consciousness, we are justified in concluding that automatism is in play, not because consciousness itself is not also dependent on the brain, but because consciousness is associated with actions worth holding to a higher moral standard. This perspective helps to arrest the slide down Eagleman’s slippery slope. Instead of negating responsibility, neuroscience has the potential to place conscious awareness on an empirical footing, allowing greater certainty about whether a particular individual had the capacity for rational, conscious action at the time of the crime.

Some worry that an increased understanding of consciousness and voluntary action will dissolve our sense of personal responsibility and free will. In fact, neurological self-knowledge could have the opposite effect. Suppose we discover that the brain mechanisms underpinning consciousness are primed to malfunction at a particular time of day, say 7am. Up until this discovery, occasional slips and errors made around this time might have been put down to chance. But now, armed with our greater understanding of the fragility of consciousness, we would be able to put in place counter-measures to make major errors less likely. For Brian Thomas, a greater understanding of his sleep disorder might have allowed him to control it. He had stopped taking his anti-depressant medication when he was on holiday, because he believed it made him impotent. This might have contributed to the night terrors that caused him to strangle his wife.

Crucially, increased self-knowledge often percolates through to laws governing responsible behaviour. A diabetic who slips into a coma while driving is held responsible if the coma was the result of poor management of a known diabetic condition. Someone committing crimes while drunk is held to account, so long as they are responsible for becoming drunk in the first place. A science of consciousness illuminates the factors that lead to unconsciousness. In reconsidering the boundary between consciousness and automatism we will need to take into account the many levels of conscious and unconscious functioning of the brain.

Our legal system is built on a dualist view of the mind-body relationship that has served it well for centuries. Science has done little to disrupt that until now. But neuroscience is different. By directly addressing the mechanisms of the human mind, it has the potential to adjudicate on issues of capacity and intent. With a greater understanding of impairments to consciousness, we might be able to take greater control over our actions, bootstrapping ourselves up from the irrational, haphazard behaviour traditionally associated with automata. Far from eroding a sense of free will, neuroscience may allow us to inject more responsibility than ever before into our waking lives.

~ For references to the scientific research discussed in this essay, see Steve Fleming's blog The Elusive Self.

Doug Contri - Empathy and Barriers to Altruism

This article comes from The Peace and Conflict Review, a publication hosted at the headquarters of the United Nations mandated University for Peace (UPEACE) in San Jose, Costa Rica.

Contri looks at the ways in which the wealthy (affluent) experience guilt and anxiety when confronted with extreme poverty, a condition that creates "defensive distortions" that appear to be (but aren't) "rational arguments against donating generously to the extreme poor." The solution to this problem, according to Contri, is to get the affluent more in touch with their empathy.

In essence, he argues that the affluent are not bad people (hence they do not donate more to help those most in need), but rather they are conflicted with guilt and anxiety, feelings that distance them from their empathy. Rather than condemn them, thereby creating more anxiety and guilt, we should assist them in accessing their empathy. Unfortunately, he offers little insight into how we might do this.

~ Doug Contri earned his doctorate in clinical psychology from Widener University’s Institute for Graduate Clinical Psychology. Since 1996 he has worked for the Federal Bureau of Prisons in the United States, providing psychological services to inmates, and has coordinated comprehensive drug, alcohol and criminal rehabilitation programs. 

Full Citation:

Contri, D. (2012). Empathy and barriers to altruism. The Peace and Conflict Review; Vol 6, Issue 1; ISSN: 1659-3995

Empathy and Barriers to Altruism

Doug Contri

PDF version

Concerned people respond generously to local human needs, while the needs of the extreme poor are neglected.  The affluent do not contribute more due to poorly managed empathy rather than indifference.  Specifically, the plight of the poor arouses anxiety and guilt among the affluent, who deploy cognitive distortions that protect them from these uncomfortable emotions.  These defensive distortions masquerade as rational arguments against donating generously to the extreme poor.  The guilt and anxiety of the affluent can be diminished by connecting them with their empathy rather than defending against it.  This will relieve the affluent of these psychological burdens and likely increase aid to the extreme poor. 

Contri makes extensive use of cognitive theory in this piece, through which he explains, in part at least, how people might arrive at what appears from the outside to be indifference.

Quoted below is one section of the article that I find highly relevant. In this section, he mentions a series of abbreviations for ideas previously discussed, called "barrier attitudes," that prevent people from offering charity to those in need - here is a list of those five attitudes:

• Magnitude View (MV), asserts the problems of the developing world are hopeless
• You Can’t Help Them All (YCHA), asserts that even were one to successfully help someone, there still remain a seemingly endless number of others needing help
• Help at Home First (HHF), asserts that we should help others in our own communities before looking beyond our borders
• Responsibility Position (RP), asserts that it is the responsibility of the people in developing societies to solve their own problems
• Responsibility Position (RP), asserts that it is the responsibility of the people in developing societies to solve their own problems

With that background, this will make more sense:

Analysis of empathy revealed its many effects, to include love, community, anxiety and guilt. Armed with this understanding, barrier attitudes were examined and found to contain thinking errors commonly found among criminals, errors whose chief purpose is to reduce anxiety and guilt, and which appear to be the explanation for these logically implausible postures. Barrier attitudes are one method for resolving the tension created by empathy. They allow for empathy’s positive effects of love and community while reducing its liabilities of anxiety and guilt.

Thus, the lack of ameliorative action towards the extreme poor, when expressed by the attitudes noted above, appears to be due NOT to indifference. On the contrary, it appears to be a reaction to empathy, caring if you will, a way to protect against the suffering compassion inevitably produces. So conceived, the barrier attitudes examined (MV, YCHA, HAHF, RP, LC) are a solution to an internal conflict for those who hold them; they are suffering in response to their empathy for others. While barrier attitudes are one method for resolving the tension created by empathy, these defensive cognitive distortions are not precise surgical instruments; rather they are blunt in their effects, such that their attenuation of anxiety and guilt also risks reducing connection to others generally rather than specifically. Stated plainly, though defensive cognitive processes reduce our dysphoria, they also reduce our connectedness, which is a principle foundation for happiness. They have side-effects; they are not free. For most of us there is a better solution to empathy’s conundrum.

Rather than deploying defensive cognitive distortions, most of us would be better off embracing our empathy in all of its ramifications. Of course, fully embracing empathy carries risks. However, it also carries enormous benefits. Recall that empathy is the basis for love and community, and that its expansion carries the possibility of deepening these experiences. Often, exposure to the extreme poor, and others in need, gives rise to greater connection and satisfaction than would have otherwise been attained.

David DiSalvo - The Neuroscience of Guilt Uncovers the Origin of Cooperation

Evidence of altruism and cooperation in the evolution of human culture keeps accumulating. It appears that the more complex our culture becomes, and its complexity is increasing exponentially, the more important it becomes for us to be in cooperation and to recognize our interdependence. We are doing this well (microscale) and failing miserably (macroscale).

This article offers another angle on how we developed cooperation (partly to avoid guilt).

The Neuroscience of Guilt Uncovers the Origin of Cooperation

Jun. 13 2011

David DiSalvo

Image via Wikipedia

When economists and neuroscientists get together, interesting things can happen. A team of researchers from the University of Arizona—including a neuroscientist, a psychologist, and a behavioral economist—used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine what happens to the brain when we experience guilt. In the process, they discovered one of the main drivers of human cooperation.

First, the researchers devised an economic game designed to test the theory of guilt aversion — our desire to avoid the negative feelings of guilt. In the game, some participants were called “investors” and were asked to award a certain amount of money to other participants called “trustees.” The trustees were told that the investors expected a certain amount of money back. Then, while in an fMRI machine, the trustees’ brains were scanned as they decided how much money to return to the investors.

When trustees decided to honor the investors’ trust and return the amount of money expected, the fMRI scans identified significant activity in regions of the brain known to be involved in guilt-motivated behavior. Different areas of the brain known to be involved in maximizing rewards showed activity when participants decided to not honor the investors’ trust and return less money than expected.

What this means is that two rather distinct neural structures are at play when we’re deciding whether or not to honor someone’s expectations. The neural structure underlying our desire to avoid guilt activates in conjunction with a decision to cooperate.

In other words, one of the reasons we cooperate with others is to avoid feeling guilty. The main contribution of this study is to substantiate that claim with a combination of well-tested economic and neuroscientific approaches, rather than air-filled conjecture.

Another grounded takeaway from the study is that some people are inherently more guilt-sensitive than others. The researchers demonstrated this by separately testing both kinds of trustees, those that decided to return the expected amount of money and those that decided to return less. Even when many of those that decided to not return the expected amount envisioned returning even less money, their brains still didn’t show much activity in the neural structure underlying guilt. Conversely, when participants that returned the expected amount were asked how they would feel if they returned less money, activity in the neural structure underlying guilt intensified.

The study also provides a final takeaway – that feelings are integral to economic decision-making. And if it’s true that some people’s brains are simply more sensitive to feelings of guilt than others, it’s interesting to wonder if some of us are truly not “cut out” for the hard and fast negotiations native to many kinds of businesses, while others aren’t wired to function well in roles requiring greater cooperation.

We can throw that question into the debate pit for more gnoshing. In any case, this research will hopefully catalyze more cross-disciplinary approaches to figuring out why we think as we think and do as we do.

Source: Neuron, Volume 70, Issue 3, 560-572, 12 May 2011

Tags: brain, Psychology, guilt, cooperation, evolution, David DiSalvo, Neuroscience of Guilt, Origin of Cooperation, neuroscience, Forbes, NeuroPsyched, Neuron, economists, neuroscientists, guilt aversion, human cooperation