Guilt is heavy

Have you ever felt guilty? Come on, we all carry traces of guilt somewhere…entire religions have been built on it. It might not be over major misdemeanours like an affair or grand theft; maybe it is because you ate the last Tim Tam in the pack, perhaps it is due to the fake “sick day” you took from work, or perhaps it is down to the lie that you told your partner about how much those new pants cost? So we all have known the burden of guilt to some degree and even that word “burden” is typical of how we talk about guilt; it is a burden, a “weight” on your conscience, it is “heavy”. Since guilt is so intimately linked with notions of heaviness these researchers wanted to see whether the weightiness of guilt might translate into human behaviour.

The whole field of “embodied cognition” is built around the idea that thoughts and emotions interact with the body to guide behaviour. So would the traditional “heaviness” of guilt translate into people altering behaviour due to a perceived experience of increased weight?

To test this the researchers had subjects recall something unethical they had done in the past. Later, they asked them to rate their subjective feeling of their own bodyweight. The responses in this test were compared to people who either recalled an ethical act, recalled an unethical act by someone else, or who did not recall any act. The results showed that people who recalled an unethical act reported heavier subjective perceptions of bodyweight than the other groups.

In a second study people were again either asked to recall unethical acts and were compared to other control groups as before. This time the participants were asked how much effort would be involved in either helping people with a physical task like carrying groceries upstairs or a non-physical task like giving them spare change. Non-physical tasks were not impacted but people who recalled unethical memories, and who were feeling guilt, perceived that the physical tasks required greater effort compared with the control group.

This supports the idea that the heaviness of guilt is a real thing and that you do “carry” it with you. It also shows that there are really no linguistic accidents and that we embody guilt as if it does actually have weight. That might be a bit heavy to contemplate, but don’t let it get you down.