Research Program / Claims / guilt-9

Guilt is born simultaneously with free will and behavioral responsibility at the conscious level.

罪恶感与自由意志及有意识层面的行为责任同时诞生。

Concept guilt · Domain Belief Dynamics and Mind–Body Regulation · ontological claim · interface 3/3 · testability 3/3 · status untested · ★ fundable

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
Recruit approximately 800 children from 18 months of age, assess every 6 months until age 7; measure nonverbal sense of agency, understanding of choice and compulsion, attribution of behavioral responsibility, compensation, and guilt expressions separately; use latent change point models to compare synchronous versus staged development. Test measurement invariance across different languages and temperaments; the duration is about 6 years; this design can only adjudicate the co-development of psychological capacities, not the emergence of metaphysical free will.
Suggested paper title
Developmental Timing of Guilt, Sense of Agency, and Responsibility Attribution: A Preregistered Longitudinal Study
What it would overturn
If strict synchrony and necessary interdependence are found, the hypothesis that 'sense of agency, responsibility understanding, and guilt can develop on different developmental timelines' would be revised.
Candidate labs / funders
Grazyna Kochanska; Roger Giner-Sorolla
Specificity of Seth's formulation
'Simultaneous birth' provides a potential temporal prediction, but the scale (individual or evolutionary) must be specified, and free will, belief in free will, and sense of agency must be distinguished.
Note
If the responsibility judgment and guilt scales share item content, they will create a synchronous relationship; mutually independent behavioral indicators must be used.
Evidence (1, DOI-verified via Crossref)

Cite: Future Mind Institute, Seth Material Research Agenda, claim guilt-9, https://www.seth.org.cn/en/research/claims/guilt-9