Mistake Weight

Lower

Errors feel contextual: blame flows to circumstances or other people, and no strong guilt signal fires. Often this is protection learned where owning a mistake was unbearable, and the protection is real. So is the cost: repair rarely happens, and others read the non-response as indifference, eroding trust.

Calibrated (middle)

The sweet spot. Fault is registered to the degree it is actually yours, guilt is proportionate to the real impact, it motivates repair, and once repair is made the state resolves. This is what reliable accountability is made of.

Higher

Culpability lands acutely and physically, and the repair impulse is strong, which makes you someone who genuinely owns mistakes. But the signal stops scaling: small slips can fire the full guilt response, responsibility gets accepted for things with large external causes, and guilt can keep running long after the apology was accepted.

Certainty about harm

Confirmed harm lets repair begin; confirmed non-harm releases the signal. Not knowing whether you caused harm keeps both the guilt and the uncertainty running at once.

Visible impact

Errors with visible interpersonal impact amplify both the ownership and the distress.

Error rate of the day

Error-prone work or conditions that raise the mistake count fire this dial more often, which is correspondingly more depleting.

Confirmed repair

An explicit signal from the other person that the repair landed is what lets the guilt state terminate.

Baseline is how heavily mistakes tend to land; today's weight also depends on what is uncertain, visible, and unresolved right now.

Not attribution style

Mistake Weight is how much fault you feel; attribution style is what that fault means, whether it stays at 'I did this' or becomes 'I am someone who does this'. The two together form the shame-prone or the resilient configuration.

Not error detection

Error monitoring notices that something went wrong. Mistake Weight is what happens next: whether the detected error gets attributed to you and how hard the repair impulse fires. One detects; the other interprets and responds.

I can't tell if I made a small mistake or a serious one. It all feels the same.

the reaction we design for