The most common cause of guilt is having lied or concealed the truth. This is especially true until middle age. From the age of 45, feelings of guilt often revolve around not having spent enough time with the family or not having been there for them enough. This is reported by researchers from the Erfurt University of Applied Sciences and the SRH University of Health in Gera in the journal "BMC Psychology".
The psychologist Tobias Luck and the psychologist Claudia Luck-Sikorski asked in an online survey almost 900 adults whether they were currently suffering from guilt at the moment or ever. Affirmed around three quarters. On average, the respondents called two to three different reasons - women a little more than men. The approximately 1500 causes mentioned were almost 50 categories.
"Most of the reasons seem to be rather concrete, for example related to their own mistakes and situations with certain people," the two researchers report. Mostly it was about a guilty conscience towards other people or because of one's own weaknesses, for example laziness, unreliability or because of an unhealthy lifestyle. Rarely was it about joint responsibility for social or global problems (2 percent), even less often about violations of religious commandments and prohibitions (0.4 percent of the reasons mentioned).
Women had a guilty conscience more often than men towards their children, towards other family members and a sense of responsibility for others. Men felt guilty of mistakes and problems in the partnership. The age group from the age of 60 not only regretted the missed time with the family, but also comparatively often a separation or divorce and separate failure or failure. Luck and Luck-Sikorski interpret this in the sense of developmental psychologist Erik H. Erikson: According to his theory, the most important thing for older people is the back view of a fulfilling life and the feeling of having accomplished something.
However, they want to interpret their findings with caution: an open-ended question such as in the present survey could only reveal reasons that the people themselves are aware of, they write. In addition, her online sample was not representative of all adults in Germany. However, a central finding almost coincided with that of a representative telephone survey by Luck and Luck-Sikorski from 2021. According to this, 68.5 percent of adults had feelings of guilt before, not much less than the 74 percent in the current online study.
Note d. Red.: In the first version it stood in the second paragraph that a quarter of the test subjects had answered the question of guilt; In fact, however, it was around three quarters. Please excuse the mistake.
