Research Program / Claims / artificial-guilt-5

Natural guilt is a preventive measure and does not involve atonement; the only post-hoc message is 'do not repeat.'

自然罪恶感是预防措施，不涉及赎罪，事后唯一讯息是“不可再犯”。

Concept artificial guilt · Domain Belief Dynamics and Mind–Body Regulation · ontological claim · interface 3/3 · testability 3/3 · status contradicted

This program treats the Seth Material as a source of hypotheses, not as doctrine to be validated. Lead dossiers are AI-compiled from the corpus with a book-and-session citation after every statement; literature reviews are AI web-search summaries whose references were all DOI-verified against Crossref; the agenda draft is an AI synthesis. None of it is Seth's original text, and none of it represents scientific consensus. English fields are machine-translated; the Chinese text is authoritative.

Seth sources (book §session)
Adjudicating experiment
Approximately 600 adults plus approximately 300 children in stratified replication, inducing guilt with minor wrongdoings with clear actual responsibility; randomly provide compensation opportunities, a mere no-repeat commitment, non-compensatory self-punishment, or neutral waiting. Measure guilt, compensation, and re-offending immediately and at one week, over 18 months. Pre-register whether compensation still reduces guilt after controlling for prevention expectancy, and use equivalence testing to determine null effects.
Suggested paper title
Reparation and Future Harm Prevention as Distinct Functions of Responsibility-Calibrated Guilt
What it would overturn
If it is strictly demonstrated that adaptive guilt only promotes prevention of recurrence, it will revise the functional model that 'guilt simultaneously serves both ex-post relationship repair and ex-ante behavioral regulation.'
Candidate labs / funders
Tina Malti，儿童道德情绪与亲社会发展研究; Marcel Zeelenberg，蒂尔堡大学，内疚与决策研究
Specificity of Seth's formulation
'Only message' is a clear exclusive prediction; but if all compensatory guilt is later reclassified as artificial guilt, the classification becomes circular.
Note
contradicted applies to the exclusive assertion when natural guilt is mapped to ordinary, responsibility-proportionate guilt; if 'atonement' refers only to religious ritual, compensation experiments do not refute this narrower claim, and an undefined special natural guilt remains untested.
Evidence (2, DOI-verified via Crossref)

Cite: Future Mind Institute, Seth Material Research Agenda, claim artificial-guilt-5, https://www.seth.org.cn/en/research/claims/artificial-guilt-5