Research Program / Claims / guilt-7

When natural guilt is not confronted, the species retreats to old instinctual remnants, causing both instinct and reason to fail to function properly.

当自然罪恶感未被面对时，物种会退回到旧有本能残余，导致本能与理性都无法真正运作。

Concept guilt · Domain Belief Dynamics and Mind–Body Regulation · mechanism · 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
About 600 adults are randomly assigned to wrongdoing acknowledgment and repair, cognitive reappraisal, memory retrieval suppression, or active control. At baseline, post-intervention, 1 month, and 6 months, measure model-driven/habitual choices, response inhibition, cognitive flexibility, and real compensatory behavior. Pre-register a composite endpoint of 'increased habitual control and decreased goal-directed performance' to avoid interpreting a single-task decline as overall rationality failure.
Suggested paper title
Guilt Acknowledgment, Memory Suppression, and Goal-Directed Control: A Preregistered Longitudinal Experiment
What it would overturn
If a specific control deficit independent of stress and cognitive load is found, it will revise the hypothesis that behavioral consequences of emotional avoidance are explained by general emotion regulation and cognitive control mechanisms.
Candidate labs / funders
Michael C. Anderson; Zara M. Bergström; Robin Hellerstedt; Akul Satish
Specificity of Seth's formulation
'Species retreat to old instincts' has no clear behavioral or neural criteria; rewriting it as increased habitual control is the researcher's new operationalization, not a prediction already given by the original text.
Note
It is necessary to distinguish healthy memory control, denial of responsibility, and long-term experiential avoidance; the original claim cannot be extrapolated directly from short-term individual experiments to the species.
Evidence (1, DOI-verified via Crossref)

Cite: Future Mind Institute, Seth Material Research Agenda, claim guilt-7, https://www.seth.org.cn/en/research/claims/guilt-7