Forgive and Forget, or Forgive and Regret? Whether Forgiveness Leads to Less or More Offending Depends on Offender Agreeableness

How does forgiveness predict the likelihood of reoffending? One survey study, one experiment, one 4-year longitudinal study, and one 2-week diary study examined the implications of forgiveness for reoffending in relationships. 

In all four studies, agreeableness interacted with partner forgiveness to predict subsequent offending; partner forgiveness was negatively associated with subsequent offending among more agreeable people but positively associated with subsequent offending among less agreeable people. 

Furthermore, Study 4 demonstrated a unique mechanism of each simple effect; relatively agreeable people engaged in fewer transgressions against more forgiving partners because they felt obligated to refrain from transgressing against such partners whereas relatively disagreeable people engaged in more transgressions against more forgiving partners because they perceived those partners were less easily angered. 

These studies indicate that completely understanding the intrapersonal and interpersonal consequences of forgiveness requires recognizing the dyadic nature of forgiveness and attending to qualities of the offender.

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By:  McNulty JK1, Russell VM2.

• 1Florida State University, Tallahassee, USA mcnulty@psy.fsu.edu.
• 2North Carolina State University, Raleigh, USA. 
• Pers Soc Psychol Bull. 2016 Mar 30. pii: 0146167216637841.

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To Blame or to Forgive? Reconciling Punishment and Forgiveness in Criminal Justice

What do you do when faced with wrongdoing—do you blame or do you forgive? Especially when confronted with offences that lie on the more severe end of the spectrum and cause terrible psychological or physical trauma or death, nothing can feel more natural than blame. Indeed, in the UK and the USA, increasingly vehement and righteous public expressions of blame and calls for vengeance have become commonplace; correspondingly, contemporary penal philosophy has witnessed a resurgence of the retributive tradition, in the modern form usually known as the ‘justice’ model. On the other hand, people can and routinely do forgive others, even in cases of severe crime. Evolutionary psychologists argue that both vengeance and forgiveness are universal human adaptations that have evolved as alternative responses to exploitation, and, crucially, strategies for reducing risk of re-offending. We are naturally endowed with both capacities: to blame and retaliate, or to forgive and seek to repair relations. Which should we choose? Drawing on evolutionary psychology, we offer an account of forgiveness and argue that the choice to blame, and not to forgive, is inconsistent with the political values of a broadly liberal society and can be instrumentally counter-productive to reducing the risk of future re-offending. We then sketch the shape of penal philosophy and criminal justice policy and practice with forgiveness in place as a guiding ideal.

Forgiveness is often allied with a range of emotions and reactive attitudes that express goodwill or positive regard, such as compassion, empathy, kindness, clemency and mercy.²⁰ Within legal philosophy, mercy in particular has been singled out as valuable if not indeed essential to the justification of punishment.²¹ Our first step therefore is to distinguish forgiveness from mercy, as the two are easily confused.

On the one hand, the grounds for both mercy and forgiveness may converge. Both can stem from compassion and empathy, which may occur in response to offenders who ‘make good’ by expressing guilt, regret and remorse, and apologising and offering reparation.²² Note that these various attitudes and actions on the part of the offender are not excuses or justifications: in themselves they do not bear on degree of responsibility or severity of offence. But they may nonetheless function to obviate the felt need to inflict punishment, for they offer evidence that some of the (non-retaliatory) ends that we may hope punishment serves, such as reduction of risk of re-offending, or atonement and the making of amends, have already been secured without it. With the exception of theories such as Kant’s²³ that punishment is not merely justified but necessitated by the ‘justice’ model’s conception of blameworthiness, consideration of these grounds may therefore incline us to show mercy for the offender or to forgive the offence, and therefore to punish less if at all. Hence, on the other hand, mercy and forgiveness may converge not only in their grounds but in their outcome: both may result in the voluntary withholding of punishment.

Yet mercy and forgiveness are distinct attitudes. Despite the fact that both can affect the decision of whether and to what extent to punish, once punishment has been determined and enacted, the question of mercy is otiose, while the question of forgiveness remains.²⁴ There is no question of whether or not to be merciful if we are not in a position to punish, whether that is because we have punished already, or because, more simply, we lack the power to do so. Mercy is a possible sentiment only for those with power and authority, exercised necessarily de haut en bas.²⁵ Yet there is a question of whether or not to forgive, wholly apart from our capacity to punish. The offender may have been appropriately punished and so paid their dues, and yet we find we do not forgive. Alternatively, we may find it in our hearts to forgive when no dues have been paid and we are not ourselves in any position to demand them, for we are powerless—unlike mercy, forgiveness can in theory be exercised de bas en haut, from powerless victim to powerful perpetrator...

Full article at:  http://goo.gl/VaVkcr

By:  Nicola Lacey* and Hanna Pickard**

*Departments of Law and Social Policy and Gender Institute, London School of Economics. Email: ku.ca.esl@yecaL.M.N.

**Department of Philosophy, University of Birmingham. Email: ku.ca.mahb@drakcip.h.

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Imagery Rescripting of Revenge, Avoidance & Forgiveness for Past Bullying Experiences in Young Adults

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES:

Forgiveness has been found to be a useful intervention for past trauma across a variety of situations. However, this has yet to be experimentally tested in victims of bullying. The aim of the current study was to evaluate the impact of imagining forgiveness, avoidance, or revenge responses towards a perpetrator among young adult victims of bullying.

METHODS:

One hundred and thirty-five undergraduate psychology students aged 17-24 who reported a recent experience of being victimized were led through imagery rescripting where they recalled a personal episode of bullying and imagined a new ending to one where they forgave, avoided, or took revenge on the bully.

RESULTS:

Results indicated significant differences between Time 1 (imagining the event as it occurred), to Time 2 (imagining an alternate ending) for all three processes. Negative affect decreased significantly in the forgiveness and avoidance conditions, but not in the revenge condition. Positive evaluations of coping decreased significantly in the revenge condition, but not in the avoidance or forgiveness conditions. However, imagined forgiveness of the bully was more stressful than either imagined avoidance or revenge.

LIMITATIONS:

The short-term measurements and the researcher-directed re-scripting limit the interpretation of results, however, yield valuable information about the immediate impact of imaginal exposure and point to future research directions.

CONCLUSIONS:

The impact of focusing on immediate stress reduction in dealing with bullying is explored, and a combination of short-term avoidance and longer term forgiveness is highlighted as a potentially effective strategy to deal with the negative emotional consequences of victimization.

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By:   Watson H1, Rapee R1, Todorov N1.

• 1 Department of Psychology , Macquarie University , Sydney , Australia.

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The Strength of a Remorseful Heart: Psychological & Neural Basis of How Apology Emolliates Reactive Aggression & Promotes Forgiveness

Apology from the offender facilitates forgiveness and thus has the power to restore a broken relationship. Here we showed that apology from the offender not only reduces the victim’s propensity to react aggressively but also alters the victim’s implicit attitude and neural responses toward the offender. 

We adopted an interpersonal competitive game which consisted of two phases. In the first, “passive” phase, participants were punished by high or low pain stimulation chosen by the opponents when losing a trial. During the break, participants received a note from each of the opponents, one apologizing and the other not. The second, “active” phase, involved a change of roles where participants could punish the two opponents after winning. Experiment 1 included an Implicit Association Test (IAT) in between the reception of notes and the second phase. Experiment 2 recorded participants’ brain potentials in the second phase. 

We found that participants reacted less aggressively toward the apologizing opponent than the non-apologizing opponent in the active phase. Moreover, female, but not male, participants responded faster in the IAT when positive and negative words were associated with the apologizing and the non-apologizing opponents, respectively, suggesting that female participants had enhanced implicit attitude toward the apologizing opponent. Furthermore, the late positive potential (LPP), a component in brain potentials associated with affective/motivational reactions, was larger when viewing the portrait of the apologizing than the non-apologizing opponent when participants subsequently selected low punishment. Additionally, the LPP elicited by the apologizing opponents’ portrait was larger in the female than in the male participants. 

These findings confirm the apology’s role in reducing reactive aggression and further reveal that this forgiveness process engages, at least in female, an enhancement of the victim’s implicit attitude and a prosocial motivational change toward the offender.

Below:  Task display and timing of Experiment 1. Top panel: passive phase. Bottom panel: active phase

Full article at:  http://goo.gl/Xr02bv

By: Urielle Beyens,1,2,† Hongbo Yu,1,2,† Ting Han,1,2,† Li Zhang,1,2 and Xiaolin Zhou1,2,3,4,5,*

¹Center for Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China

²Department of Psychology, Peking University, Beijing, China

³Key Laboratory of Machine Perception (Ministry of Education), Peking University, Beijing, China

⁴Beijing Key Laboratory of Behavior and Mental Health, Peking University, Beijing, China

⁵PKU-IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Peking University, Beijing, China

Edited by: Iris K. Schneider, University of Southern California, USA

Reviewed by: Rory Allen, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK; Chris Reinders Folmer, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands

*Correspondence: Xiaolin Zhou, nc.ude.ukp@401zx

 

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