Research Program / Claims / artificial-guilt-2
Artificial guilt is a branch that the conscious mind creates in its own image when contemplating natural guilt.
人工罪恶感是意识心在思索自然罪恶感时，按自身形象造出的分支。
Concept artificial 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
Approximately 600 adults are randomized to rumination after guilt, self-distanced reappraisal, or a neutral attention task; induce guilt with controllable responsibility scenarios, measuring self-blame beyond actual responsibility, generalization to unrelated events, and duration, with a 4-week follow-up, over about 12 months. If rumination selectively increases excessive self-blame rather than all negative emotions, it can support a cognitive generation mechanism; it cannot adjudicate the claim that the conscious mind creates an ontological branch.
Suggested paper title
Does Self-Referential Rumination Generate Excessive Guilt? A Preregistered Randomized Experiment
What it would overturn
If the result holds, it will revise the hypothesis that 'excessive guilt is entirely determined by the initial responsibility judgment, with subsequent rumination merely prolonging its duration'; this hypothesis is not a consensus across the field.
Candidate labs / funders
Roland Zahn，伦敦国王学院，自责偏差与情绪障碍研究; Felipe De Brigard，杜克大学，记忆与反事实思维研究
Specificity of Seth's formulation
'Creates in its own image' has no observable indicator; translating it into rumination or self-schema effects is a researcher's addition, not an ex post facto original prophecy.
Note
The current priority is to demonstrate that artificial guilt has incremental validity beyond shame, depressive self-blame, obsessive responsibility, and rumination; otherwise there is no reason to establish a separate construct.
Cite: Future Mind Institute, Seth Material Research Agenda, claim artificial-guilt-2, https://www.seth.org.cn/en/research/claims/artificial-guilt-2