In 1995, on New Year’s Eve, Everett L. Worthington Jr.'s mother was viciously assaulted and murdered in her home during a botched robbery. The details of the crime are sickening enough to make you question the humanity of the two perpetrators. No adjective is too strong—heinous, brutal, evil.
At the time, Mr. Worthington, a professor of psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University, was one of a handful of scholars studying forgiveness. His initial reaction to the crime, though, was understandably visceral: He was filled with rage. He wanted to kill his mother’s killers. He recalls in his 2003 book, Forgiving and Reconciling: Bridges to Wholeness and Hope, how he later struggled to empathize with the two young men responsible.
“I needed to think through the murder of my mother, as painful as that might be, in as much detail as I could,” Mr. Worthington writes. “I knew I had to get inside the heads of those who committed that murder. I didn’t want to do that. I needed to do it.” He argues that this kind of imaginative empathy, while extremely difficult, is one of the foundations of forgiveness.
The topic of forgiveness went from being a sideline to Mr. Worthington’s primary academic interest. He’s since published eight books and numerous papers on the topic. He’s also helped dole out more than $9-million to forgiveness researchers, first as co-director of a grants program at the John Templeton Foundation and later as executive director of A Campaign for Forgiveness Research, a nonprofit organization. As a result, in part, of those efforts, the number of papers published on forgiveness has grown from a few dozen in the late 1990s to well over a thousand today.
So, it’s fair to ask, what have researchers learned about forgiveness?
For starters, they’ve found that it matters not just to the person who is forgiven, but also to the forgiver, and that a capacity for forgiveness is associated with mental and physical well-being. One study found that quality-of-life ratings improved for terminally ill patients after four weeks of “forgiveness therapy,” in which they learned techniques like imaginative empathy. Another study discovered that cardiac patients who were generally more forgiving had lower cholesterol levels. Still another found that military veterans who struggled with forgiveness had more severe post-traumatic stress disorders.
A former graduate student of Mr. Worthington’s, Michael McCullough, now a professor of psychology at the University of Miami, believes that an instinct for forgiveness is a “built-in feature of human nature” (he also argues that we have a revenge instinct, which should come as no shock). Meanwhile, Frans B.M. de Waal, the noted professor of primate behavior at Emory University, has observed chimpanzees kissing and making up after a fight; whether such reconciliation qualifies as full-fledged forgiveness is debatable, but it suggests that the concept is part of our evolutionary past. One theory is that animals that live together need to forgive one another, lest minor conflicts tear apart the group.
Recently, second-generation forgiveness scholars like Ryan Fehr have pushed the field in new and surprising directions. In one study, Mr. Fehr, a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at the University of Maryland at College Park, looked at the relationship between forgiveness and creativity.
First, Mr. Fehr and his colleague Michele J. Gelfand had participants recall an incident in which they either forgave or failed to forgive someone during a routine daily interaction. The researchers then asked the subjects to draw a picture of an alien from another planet. Those drawings were judged for creativity by three independent raters. Depictions of the aliens that looked less human (three eyes instead of two, say) were deemed more inventive.
What the researchers found is that people who failed to forgive drew less creative aliens. That matters, the researchers say, because it suggests that failing to forgive creates additional “cognitive load"—that is, it uses brainpower that is then unavailable for other tasks. Remarkably, just remembering a negative past incident takes a significant toll on those cognitive resources.
In the same vein, Dutch researchers recently set out to find whether there is a relationship between forgiveness and executive function, the cognitive-control center that organizes thought and regulates behavior. They had participants match letters that were flashed on a computer screen. They also tested them using the Tendency to Forgive Scale, which asks users to rate their agreement with statements like “I tend to get over it quickly when someone hurts my feelings.”
The participants who were better at matching letters were also more likely to be better at forgiveness. The researchers surmise that people with deficits in executive function may be prone to repetitive thought patterns and are thus more likely to dwell on the past. And, as we know from Mr. Fehr’s experiments, focusing on negative thoughts seems to stifle cognition.
While forgiveness has become a growth industry for psychologists, they don’t have the field to themselves. Political scientists, for instance, are interested in forgiveness on a societal scale, such as in Israel and Palestine. Then there are philosophers like Charles L. Griswold, whose 2007 book, Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration, calls forgiveness “a surprisingly complex and elusive notion.” He argues that it’s about more than dealing with the emotions of a grievance; it’s about the nature of justice, and it hasn’t always been considered a virtue. Mr. Griswold, a philosophy professor at Boston University, also contends that fellow philosophers have largely steered clear of forgiveness because of its religious associations.
David Konstan’s new book, Before Forgiveness: The Origins of a Moral Idea (Cambridge University Press), is a philosophical and historical take on the topic. His thesis is that interpersonal forgiveness is a modern notion, and that our ancestors thought of forgiveness solely in a religious context. Human beings didn’t forgive one another; God forgives human beings.
“The religious tradition actually prevented interpersonal forgiveness,” says Mr. Konstan, a professor emeritus of classics and comparative literature at Brown University. “To repent is to treat the other [forgiving] human being as a god.”
Other researchers disagree, but Mr. Konstan says the historical evidence is strong as long as you accept his narrow, secular definition of the word “forgiveness.”
He is willing to put the arguably modern concept into practice. After scheduling an interview about his new book, a reporter neglected to call him at the appointed time and had to apologize for the mix-up.
“That,” the professor replied cheerfully, “is quite all right.”
