Self-flagellation, it seems, has always been with us. From ancient cults of Isis and Dionysus, to the roaming flagellants of the European Middle Ages, to current examples of self-crucifixion in the Philippines in the Easter season and zanjeer (ritual self-infliction of pain, often with a chain) in many Islamic nations on the Day of Ashura. Most of us recoil when we see these behaviors. "Yes, guilt is one thing," we may think, "but why in the world would anyone hurt themselves for it?" What ever happened to saying you're sorry?
In an interesting take on this issue, Brock Bastian and colleague have a new paper out in Psychological Science suggesting that not only may the guilty want to punish themselves more but also, and here's the kicker, that they do so because the experience of pain itself eases feelings of guilt. The trick to examining this question, of course, is being able to separate the act of choosing to induce pain to oneself for a transgression from feeling that the pain eased a guilty conscience. Simply put, if I choose to whip myself because I've done something wrong, then I'm likely to say that the whipping made me feel better afterward.
To solve this problem, Bastian and colleagues used a clever procedure. They first asked people to recall and describe either a time they acted unethically or an every-day interaction they had with someone recently. After that, they moved on to a "different experiment" purportedly examining manual dexterity. Simply put, participants were told to put their arm into a bucket of water and to move paperclips submerged therein from one box to another for as long as they could (to a maximum of 3 minutes). There was one more piece of the puzzle to go, however. For some of the participants, the bucket of water was warm; for others, it was frigid. For any of you who have never done this (which is probably most of you), sticking your arm in ice water induces pain fairly quickly. This task, often known as a "cold pressor" test is a common method used to study pain tolerance.
But getting back to flagellation, here's what the researchers found. How long people left their arms in the bucket to move those paperclips didn't vary randomly. The people who had just recalled a less than ethical behavior, left their hands in longer. What's even more astounding, however, is that when later asked again to rate how guilty they felt for their actions (they had first rated their guilt just after recalling the memory), those who kept their hands in longer (and thus experienced more pain) showed the greatest reduction in their feelings of guilt. Now, in actuality, these people were not likely choosing to punish themselves. They simply were complying with a request to test their manual dexterity (albeit in a bucket of ice water). They clearly felt pain. But this experience of pain was all it took to alleviate some of their guilt.
The notion that the physical world and the social one are inextricably linked in the mind is ever growing. As our work has shown, simply altering people's feeling states can directly influence their judgments of how morally appropriate certain actions by others are. In the Bastian work, we're seeing another linkage -- pain, even pain that is quite incidental to the moral issues at hand, can reduce feelings of guilt, and do so completely outside of our conscious awareness. So, in the end, it may not be that the original flagellants caused themselves pain to punish themselves, but rather to relieve themselves of a different pain -- the throes of guilt.
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