Guilt: Another Gift Nobody Wants

An evolutionary/game-theoretic account of guilt. Scott first critiques Tooby & Cosmides' 'recalibration' theory (guilt as updating after bad outcomes): it fails because guilt attaches to GOOD outcomes too (the successful fratricide-king still feels it), it's a whole behavior-complex (self-flagellation), it's conspicuously social (3 AM confessions), and it occurs when one is blameless. His alternative: guilt is a costly-signal commitment device. The Mr. Dewey parable — a lawyer with a tiny angel on his shoulder who shocks him for misdeeds is the MOST attractive lawyer, because clients need only trust his self-interest, not his altruism. Guilt assures others you'll punish yourself even absent external enforcement, enabling trust and trade; public, costly displays (self-harm, status-lowering, withdrawal) are the unfakeable signals that distinguish real guilt from Ms. Wolfram's glued-on plastic angel. Then the elegant move on survivor's/undeserved guilt: a precommitment to feel guilt at a level between the gain from a crime and the punishment-if-suspected proves your innocence (in violent ancestral environments where a lone survivor was a suspect), with several testable predictions.

Quality 76 · Excellent. Strong / low-Excellent. A genuinely original evolutionary-psychology synthesis — guilt as a costly-signal commitment device, with the Dewey parable and the survivor's-guilt-as-innocence-proof account both clever and load-bearing, plus falsifiable predictions. Builds on Schelling/Frank/Tooby-Cosmides but reaches its own account. The meatiest post in this batch. 76.

Claude’s paradigm shift 52 · Moderate. Moderate(-upper). Stands on commitment-device and costly-signaling theory, but the specific guilt-as-assurance and undeserved-guilt-as-innocence-signal accounts are a fresh, well-developed synthesis. 52.

Real-world impact 2 · Minor. A genuinely original evolutionary-psychology synthesis (guilt as a costly-signal commitment device, with the Dewey parable and falsifiable predictions). Conceptual influence within rationalist discourse, builds on Schelling/Frank, no material change — low RWI.