What You Need to Know About Personal and Group Forgiveness

Detail of photo of Expedition 59 prime crewmembers on March 13, 2019, before the Soyuz MS-12 spacecraft took them to the International Space Station for a six-and-a-half month mission.

Source: Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls) Public Domain

In this age of grievance and deadly conflict, what can we learn about forgiveness through the lens of science that expands what religion and moral philosophy teach us?

Social scientists have now been studying the psychological benefits of interpersonal forgiveness for more than thirty years.¹ The act of forgiving, they have found, can have benefits both mental (less anger, anxiety, and depression) and physical (lower blood pressure, better sleep, improved immune system).²

More recently, researchers have been studying whether they can apply what they have learned about interpersonal forgiveness to group forgiveness—as a way to reduce conflict among groups and enhance the prospects for peace.^3,4

Dr. Matt Hirshberg

Source: Dr. Matt Hirshberg / used with permission

One of the social scientists deeply engaged in studying forgiveness is research psychologist Dr. Matt Hirshberg, Research Assistant Professor at the Center for Healthy Minds. I asked Matt to explain some of the research he is working on.

Dale Kushner: Please share the mission of the Center for Healthy Minds and the path that brought you there.

Matt Hirshberg: The Center for Healthy Minds (CHM) is a research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-M). Its mission is to cultivate well-being and reduce suffering through a scientific understanding of the mind. My professional career began as a middle school teacher. I viewed my role as a teacher primarily through the lens of supporting a holistic notion of healthy development in my students. That meant that, although I was concerned with them learning class content, I was more focused on their development of social-emotional and academic skills that carry forward throughout life, including what have often been called virtues such as a forgiveness and compassion.

I had been a meditator before I began teaching and concluded that to the extent that I had cultivated these skills or virtues in my life, it was mostly through my meditation practice. I began each class with a brief meditation practice and observed benefits in my students and in the classroom dynamic, which made me interested in the potential of these practices in secular contexts. I then learned that research was beginning on forgiveness, mindfulness and other forms of meditation in a variety of contexts. I decided to go to graduate school so that I could participate in the work as a researcher and enrolled at the UW-M to study with Dr. Robert Enright, a founder of the scientific study of forgiveness.

DK: How do you define interpersonal forgiveness?

MH: The first important aspect of interpersonal forgiveness is that there must be a harm in an interpersonal relationship. Forgiveness begins with a recognition that one has been harmed. In that harm there is pain, resentment, and anger (which are natural responses to harm). Having recognized the harm and the attendant suffering, one then must choose what to do next. The path to forgiveness involves a decision to work through the pain and the suffering by opening up to the possibility of forgiveness.

We should be clear that forgiveness is not forgetting or explaining away. In other words, the forgiver can be very clear that they were harmed, that the perpetrator and act(s) were wrong, that experiencing pain and anger is justified (and natural). However, because anger and resentment are corrosive to well-being, liberating oneself from the difficult experience may require offering beneficence or goodwill or compassion to the offender, but not necessarily for the offender.

Once a decision to move toward forgiveness has occurred, the next step in Dr. Enright’s process model is what he calls the work phase. In this phase, the forgiver tries to better understand the causes and conditions that contributed to the offender acting as they did, and through this understanding the forgiver tries to see the offender in their full humanity. It also involves recognizing the full depth of the harm and pain and accepting it.

Forgiveness may result in reconciliation but it does not need to. It also may result in altruistic feelings such as empathy and compassion toward the offender because by going through the forgiveness process the forgiver recognizes the humanity of the offender and the suffering and the challenges he or she must have experienced to lead them to act in the way(s) they did.⁵

DK: How are you defining groups? Does your research about group forgiveness apply to families? Neighborhoods? Countries? Or only to chosen groups such as corporations, companies, organizations and political groups?

MH: A group is any collection of two or more individuals with a shared identity. All of the examples listed above could be groups and group forgiveness could be relevant to them.

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DK: How do you define group forgiveness?

MH: Group forgiveness is when an identity group (e.g., team, company, religious organization, country) establishes norms and values that promote forgiveness, make public statements and commitments that lead to or are consistent with forgiveness, and establishes structures that support forgiveness. For example, a truth and reconciliation process following strife between two groups is an example of a structure that supports forgiveness.

DK: How is forgiveness different from reconciliation, pardoning, excusing, or accommodating?

MH: Reconciliation is coming back together after a breaking apart. Forgiveness might lead to reconciliation, but it is equally possible that forgiveness leads to strong feelings of compassion and the recognition that reconciliation would likely lead to more harm. Pardoning is typically a legal term that suggests a legal remedy for a prior transgression. Forgiveness does not pardon or excuse; the process of forgiveness involves fully appreciating that harm was done and accepting the consequences of that harm, and then making the decision to move beyond it. Accommodating intimates adjusting one’s point of view so that it is closer to another’s. While better understanding the causes and conditions that might have contributed to the offender offending is part of the forgiveness process, it does not involve accommodating an alternative understanding of the harm itself (e.g., the offender’s rationale).