The Incredibly Heavy Burden of Guilt

But more importantly, it might explain some things.
Posted Feb 22, 2013

There has been quite a bit of research done in the past decade or so on the concept of embodied cognition. The premise is fairly simple: our brains engage with the world through physical movements and sensations, so perhaps certain bodily states prompt certain cognitions even when they aren’t directly relevant. One of my favorite demonstrations of this was done by Lawrence Williams and John Bargh (link is external). In this study, the experimenter, whose hands were full, asked participants to briefly hold their cup of coffee. The trick was that the cup of coffee was hot for half of participants, and iced for the other half. Participants who held the warm cup of coffee later rated a hypothetical person as emotionally and socially warmer than participants who held the cold cup of coffee. They translated the physical sensation of warmth into the social concept of warmth, which might seem crazy, but the metaphor might be based partly on reality. After all, we learn about the concept of social warmth as infants by literally being held close to our parents; at that stage, physical warmth is social warmth. As adults, even though the sensation of warmth through a cup of coffee shouldn’t signal anything other than physical warmth, because the connection is still there, it triggers cognitions related to social warmth, and voila, it influences how warmly we see other people.

Encouraged by this example, the field just exploded with similar phenomena, such as the desire to wash your hands (link is external) or punish yourself (link is external) when feeling guilty. Some of the demonstrations seem to border on the ridiculous, like a study showing that filling out a survey with a weighted (compared to a light) clipboard leads people to take it more seriously – literally giving the issue more weight (link is external). The issue with a lot of this work has often been that it merely shows a phenomenon without really attempting to explain why it happens. Why on earth would some of these metaphors be literally enacted? I’ve written before about how important it is for the field of social psychology that we take great care in our methods in order to be taken seriously as a science, and many of these kinds of studies seem to be a little too good to be true. That is, I, like a lot of other people, have been left wondering whether these phenomena are real, or whether the sexiness (read: newsworthiness) of the findings led the researchers and reviewers to engage in the all-too-human tendency to give the methodological flaws a free pass.

That’s not to say that I think there’s nothing to the idea of embodied metaphors. On the contrary, certain bodily states absolutely do accompany certain thoughts and feelings, and there’s plenty of reason to believe that they can influence each other. However, for any given finding, without a very good explanation for precisely how and why it would work, I’m going to be skeptical. It was with that frame of mind that I read some new work by Maryam Kouchaki, Francesca Gino, and Ata Jami [link], looking at the experience of guilt embodied as a feeling of heaviness (guilt as a heavy burden to carry), soon to be published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (link is external). While the paper is certainly not perfect, it definitely makes some progress on that front.

In all of their experiments, they had participants wearing heavy or light backpacks while recalling episodes when they felt guilty. Those wearing the heavy backpacks, which seem to embody the physical sensations associated with guilt, reported feeling more guilt afterwards, and actually behaved more ethically (since they already felt guilty), being less likely to cheat on a test, or eat an indulgent snack.

Where things get interesting is in a final study, where the researchers measure how quickly (fluently) participants are able to recall a time when they felt guilty (or a neutral episode). What they find is that the feeling of heaviness from the backpack leads people to recall a guilty episode (but not neutral episodes) more quickly, more fluently.

This bit is really important, because it explains why, in all of the other experiments, the heavy backpacks don’t seem to make people feel guilty on their own – they only increase the experience of guilt from recalling a guilty episode. Embodying the physical sensations associated with guilt isn’t going to create feelings of guilt out of nowhere; it only influences how we process relevant information – in this case, how easily we can search our memories for a time when we felt guilty.

Extrapolating a bit, maybe this finding can help us figure out which phenomena to be most skeptical about. Does the embodied action appear to create a psychological state (like an emotion) out of thin air? Does it appear to apply to situations that have nothing to do with the relevant physical or emotional state? Is there no obvious means for the embodied action to be influencing cognition (or vice versa)? Does the metaphor itself seem like a bit of a stretch? If you’re not answering in the affirmative, you have good reason to be skeptical.

not mine.credit and source: PSYCHOLOGY TODAY