Why Blame Feels Hard To Take

[H-KQGE]

I like this one. It's about personal responsibility & the perception of negative/positive & one's own role.

http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112965989/why-blame-feels-hard-to-take/

When something we do produces a positive result, we actually perceive it differently than we would if that same action yielded a negative result. In particular, people feel a greater connection between voluntary actions and their outcomes if those outcomes are good than if they are bad. The discovery, reported on October 3 in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, yields important insight into notions about personal responsibility.

“Our result suggests that people may really experience less responsibility for negative than for positive outcomes,” says Patrick Haggard of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. “This is not merely a retrospective justification about how well we have done: the actual experience that we have changes, even in basic aspects like its timing.”

The researchers used a standard approach to explore a phenomenon known as “sense of agency,” which refers to the feeling that one’s voluntary actions produce some external sensory event. For instance, Haggard explains, if you flip a light switch and a light comes on, you often experience those events as nearly simultaneous, even if there is a bit of a lag.

Haggard’s team wondered whether our perception of time might depend on the emotional outcome of an action. To find out, they tested people by asking them to press a key. Those key presses were followed with negative sounds of fear or disgust, positive sounds of achievement or amusement, or neutral sounds. Participants were then asked to estimate when they had made the action or when they had heard the sound.

These studies reveal that individuals sense a longer time lag between their own actions and the response when those responses are negative than when they are positive. In other words, people actually experience a lower sense of agency for actions associated with a negative outcome.

The findings may help to explain why people are generally ready to take credit for good outcomes but not to accept responsibility for bad ones, the researchers say. It might also reveal why blame can be so much harder to accept than praise.

People may actually experience different levels of responsibility in the two situations. But that’s not to say that they shouldn’t be held responsible for their actions.

“The way we experience agency is not the same as the fact of agency,” Haggard says. “We have to take responsibility for what we actually do, not just for how we experience things.”

—

 

[obyvatel]

I did not find the conclusions of this neuroscience experiment convincing.

Haggard’s team wondered whether our perception of time might depend on the emotional outcome of an action. To find out, they tested people by asking them to press a key. Those key presses were followed with negative sounds of fear or disgust, positive sounds of achievement or amusement, or neutral sounds. Participants were then asked to estimate when they had made the action or when they had heard the sound.

Negative sounds are more likely to cause an arousal in the sympathetic nervous system due to our social nature and evolutionary reasons. This arousal most likely causes our internal time keeping system to shift from the baseline. Hence the perception of time gets skewed. Research on the effect of emotion and arousal on time perception indicate that arousal can result in the perception that more time has passed than what an external clock measures. The reason given is that there is an internal clock which gives us our internal perception of time and arousal causes this clock to tick faster.

So the observation

These studies reveal that individuals sense a longer time lag between their own actions and the response when those responses are negative than when they are positive.

appear consistent with the above reasoning.

But the conclusion

In other words, people actually experience a lower sense of agency for actions associated with a negative outcome.

does not necessarily follow from the observation imo.

The findings may help to explain why people are generally ready to take credit for good outcomes but not to accept responsibility for bad ones, the researchers say.

We do not "like" it when things do not go the way we expect (good outcomes) - neither do animals. This is due to primitive instincts shaped by evolutionary forces. But humans have the higher faculty by which we can take responsibility for bad outcomes and change them. History and evolution show that we have used that faculty to good effect in at least a materialistic way to reach where we are at today.

So I do not think responsibility avoidance for adverse outcomes is biological as the study tries to portray. I think it is rather a result of environmental conditioning in a ponerized society that gives rise to such inclinations in some otherwise normal people. Responsibility avoidance is the hallmark of pathological people who occupy important social and political positions in today's world. As there is a tendency on the part of people to follow the leaders (after all they got "good outcomes" by doing what they do), the characteristics of the leaders tend to rub off on us often in an unconscious manner.

By the way, the scientist Patrick Haggard apparently does not believe that humans have conscious free will (_http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/8058541/Neuroscience-free-will-and-determinism-Im-just-a-machine.html). It is interesting to see how reductionist techniques in science are used to undermine and deny the existence of higher faculties in normal humans and reduce them to a state which is pathological for them.

 

[H-KQGE]

Hello obyvatel. I feel that this also lacked more necessary data. There is no information on the surroundings where this test took place. Was it large/open or small/closed/secluded? How about the internal objects, (instruments) anything that could give a foreboding sense? Even lighting & more. All of those things are potential stressors for anyone at anytime & even sitting down (i'm assuming that they sat down for the key pressing action) could be construed by the sympathetic nervous system (I think) as some kind of stress. By that I mean situations & environments such as school leading right up to university & or stressful (potentially) times where there's pressure to perform, which might require the maximum from oneself.

In my mind these cues could've been priming the participants before the test, which to those conducting it would seem straightforward enough. All this before the negative auditory cues mind. And while we're at it, the part where it says "people feel a greater connection between voluntary actions and their outcomes if those outcomes are good than if they are bad" makes me think of myself as an example. Judging from what i've become more aware of with my own cognitive behaviours, I imagine (using the above cues) going into a university lab (& I would feel awkward for real) after accepting an invitation for a voluntary test. Seeing that a lot of people have issues with doctors, dentists & generally most medical settings, the aforementioned cues aren't hard to imagine to a decent proportion of those that might be reading this.

Now it isn't clear if participants were told about the nature of the sounds beforehand but for me, hearing a "negative sound of fear or disgust" (whatever the researchers deemed those to be) would probably get my heart beating, or a "case of the sweats" etc. I would shift into an autonomic state, producing an involuntary response due to the low frequency (bass range) associated with danger, predators, thus a lack of safety. This scenario in my mind, will be even worse because I would realize that I voluntarily put myself in such a situation adding to the SNS' s lengthy historical inventory of threats in the environment. Well maybe that's more for someone who's too hard on themselves but I think it's valid nonetheless.

I had originally tried to edit the post & ask what was meant by the estimation of when the action had been made or the sound had been heard, but I missed the 30 min window. I may have been overthinking it, fortunately you posted & made it clearer. Thanks for that. Thanks also for pointing that out about Haggard. It really is incredible to hear those views repeatedly, IMO if the general public knew just a little more on certain subjects (they would have to seriously identify with it for any practical application like study) a large portion would think that we're not bio-automatons & that there is more.

 

[Keit]

The researchers used a standard approach to explore a phenomenon known as “sense of agency,” which refers to the feeling that one’s voluntary actions produce some external sensory event. For instance, Haggard explains, if you flip a light switch and a light comes on, you often experience those events as nearly simultaneous, even if there is a bit of a lag.[...]

These studies reveal that individuals sense a longer time lag between their own actions and the response when those responses are negative than when they are positive. In other words, people actually experience a lower sense of agency for actions associated with a negative outcome.

The findings may help to explain why people are generally ready to take credit for good outcomes but not to accept responsibility for bad ones, the researchers say. It might also reveal why blame can be so much harder to accept than praise.

I also think that this research lacks data, or proper explanation of the observed results. Not sure if this is going in the right direction, but it seems to me, that what they are missing is connecting the observed phenomenon with the concept of cognitive dissonance.

According to wiki,

The "sense of agency" (SA) refers to the subjective awareness that one is initiating, executing, and controlling one's own volitional actions in the world.[1] It is the pre-reflective awareness or implicit sense that it is I who is presently executing bodily movement(s) or thinking thoughts. In normal, non-pathological experience, the SA is tightly integrated with one's "sense of ownership" (SO), which is the pre-reflective awareness or implicit sense that one is the owner of an action, movement or thought. If someone else were to move your arm (while you remained passive) you would certainly have sensed that it were your arm that moved and thus a sense of ownership (SO) for that movement. However, you would not have felt that you were the author of the movement; you would not have a sense of agency (SA).[2]

And the definition of cognitive dissonance:

Cognitive dissonance is the distressing mental state that people feel when they "find themselves doing things that don't fit with what they know, or having opinions that do not fit with other opinions they hold."[4] A key assumption is that people want their expectations to meet reality, creating a sense of equilibrium.[5] Likewise, another assumption is that a person will avoid situations or information sources that give rise to feelings of uneasiness, or dissonance.[1]

Now, our brain's "natural" tendency is to optimize the process as much as possible, and this optimization is usually expressed as "filling in the blanks", having patterns, expectations, etc. So, if one is in a "sense of agency" mode, maybe it's quite "normal" for the brain to expect a rather "positive" result to an action, than negative. Maybe it lights up similar areas of the brain to those that light up when other "sense of agency" actions are performed?

And when instead of "positive" one gets a "negative" result, a brain experiences a sort of cognitive dissonance, and that's the reason for the lag or the disconnect when it comes to taking responsibility.

Cognitive dissonance theory explains human behavior by positing that people have a bias to seek consonance between their expectations and reality. According to Festinger, people engage in a process he termed "dissonance reduction," which can be achieved in one of three ways: lowering the importance of one of the discordant factors, adding consonant elements, or changing one of the dissonant factors.[6] This bias sheds light on otherwise puzzling, irrational, and even destructive behavior.

 

[Joe]

I like this one. It's about personal responsibility & the perception of negative/positive & one's own role.

http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112965989/why-blame-feels-hard-to-take/

Interesting, it's similar to the idea that people don't really know themselves very well. They believe they are intending one thing and expect a certain response, but get something different or the opposite. That might explain better why people reacted 'bemused' or 'confused' when they don't get the response they expected, which is most often a positive response or one that is line with what they expect. When it doesn't happen, they don't know themselves, or can't See themselves enough to immediately question their own intentions or motivations, so it must be some other factor for which they are not to blame!