Conceptions of forgiveness across the lifespan
Today, I present lengthy excerpts from an article I found interesting. McLaughlin, Marshall & McAuliffe (2024) published “Developing Conceptions of Forgiveness across the Lifespan in Child Development. Here are edited excerpts:
Understanding how to respond to transgressions is central to cooperation, yet little is known about how individuals understand the consequences of these responses. Accordingly, the current study explored children's (ages 5–9), adolescents' (ages 11–14), and adults' (N = 544, predominantly White, ~50% female, tested in 2021) understandings of three such responses—forgiveness, punishment, and doing nothing. At all ages, participants differentiated between the consequences of these three responses. Forgiveness was associated with more positive and fewer negative outcomes, while the opposite was true for punishment and doing nothing. With age, participants were less likely to expect positive outcomes, and this effect was strongest for punishment and doing nothing.
Interpersonal conflict is an inevitable part of social relationships in large-scale human cooperative societies. As members of cooperative groups, we often hold conflicting goals and act to maximize our own desired outcomes at others' expense. The universality of conflict requires that people develop a toolkit of solutions for responding to interpersonal transgressions, mediating disputes, and resolving conflicts. This is particularly important when they themselves are the victims of transgressions. Two of these strategies—and those on which we focus in the present study—are punishment and forgiveness.
Punishment, operationally defined as the imposition of a penalty in response to a transgression, is observed early in development and across cultures. Evolutionary perspectives have argued that punishment functions to ensure cooperation among non-kin and in larger-scale societies where reputation alone cannot discourage antisocial behavior. Research on punishment has typically differentiated between second-party punishment, which is punishment meted out by the victim of a transgression, and third-party punishment, which is done by an uninvolved witness to the transgression; the current paper will focus only on second-party cases. Focusing only on second-party punishment in the present study allows us to home in on victims' responses to interpersonal transgressions and to make more direct comparisons between punishment and forgiveness.
Some work suggests that even though children punish when they are victims of a transgression, they negatively evaluate second-party punishment. In the current study, we explore the behavioral and affective outcomes associated with second-party punishment across the lifespan in order to gain insight into the nuances of how individuals perceive this response strategy as well as how it may compare to other responses.
Forgiveness has been defined by psychologists in many different ways: as “a suite of prosocial motivational changes that occurs after a person has incurred a transgression” (McCullough, 2001, p. 194) or as the process of “[giving] up their right to resentment and [offering] kindness, respect, generosity, and even love to the one or ones who acted unfairly” (Enright & Song, 2020).
Regardless of the particular definition being used, forgiveness is understood to serve an important role in repairing damaged relationships and restoring intragroup harmony in the aftermath of interpersonal transgressions. Psychologists have argued that forgiveness may have emerged in humans to mend social relationships when the transgressor is socially valuable and has shown that there is low risk of future exploitation, thereby improving the victim's long-term welfare. Forgiveness is generally viewed by adults as a prosocial response to transgressions, although individual-level differences such as agreeableness, emotional stability, and religiosity have been shown to predict evaluations of forgiveness.
Instead of punishing or forgiving in the face of a transgression, victims may choose to do nothing. Although this may not be considered a response per se, we believe understanding intuitions surrounding doing nothing is important because it is a readily available reaction to an interpersonal transgression that involves some behavioral aspects of forgiveness (i.e., choosing not to punish) but does not necessarily involve a motivational change.
In the present study, we addressed three key research questions. First, do individuals distinguish between the consequences of forgiveness, punishment, and doing nothing? Second, where do we observe differences in the consequences associated with these response strategies? And third, for which of these consequences do we observe age-related changes, and what is the nature of these changes?
We found that participants from our three age samples displayed significant differences in the consequences associated with forgiveness, punishment, and doing nothing. We found an effect of Condition for all 12 of the items included in our study, providing robust evidence that, across a broad age range, people tend to view the consequences of forgiveness, punishment, and doing nothing as distinct from one another.
To unpack the nature of these distinctions, we first observed general patterns in the directionality of participant ratings in each of the four categories we introduced to scaffold our hypotheses. First, for Positive Behaviors, we found that participants rated the likelihood of these consequences higher after forgiveness than after punishment or doing nothing. Second, for negative behaviors, participants rated negative consequences as least likely after forgiveness and relatively more likely after punishment and doing nothing. Third, for Affective Change, we observed that positive affect in victims, offenders, and bystanders was rated most likely after forgiveness and least likely after punishment. Fourth and finally, for Others' Interest in Affiliating, participants rated the likelihood of others' interest in affiliating with victims and offenders highest after forgiveness and lower after punishment and doing nothing. Together, these results suggest participants systematically distinguished between the behavioral and affective consequences of forgiveness, punishment, and doing nothing.
For nearly all the items included in the study, forgiveness led to significantly different ratings than punishment or doing nothing. Forgiveness was perceived as the most likely to lead to positive behavioral consequences and the least likely to lead to negative behavioral consequences. In contrast, ratings following punishment were not significantly different from ratings following doing nothing for half of the items. When compared to forgiveness, punishment and doing nothing were both perceived as less likely to promote positive consequences and more likely to promote negative consequences. This pattern of results suggests that, far from viewing forgiveness as simply refraining from punishment, participants perceived forgiveness as having unique positive consequences relative to the two other response strategies.
We observed interaction effects for eight of the 12 items we included in this study: Victim's Trust, Victim's Empathy for the Offender, Victim's Avoidance, Victim's Willingness to Gossip, Victim's Pursuit of Revenge, Offender Recidivism, Victim Positive Affect, and Others' Interest in Affiliating with the Victim. For most items where we found age-related effects as a function of the response strategy, this variation was a result of differences between children's ratings, compared to adults' and adolescents', for punishment and doing nothing but not for forgiveness. Age differences were found for forgiveness in only five of the items for which we observed an interaction between Condition and Age, suggesting that, in general, perceptions of forgiveness remain relatively stable throughout development. We also found that even young children differentiated between the three response strategies. This finding provides evidence that experience with transgressions and associated responses may increase individuals' tendency to differentiate between various responses, although the ability to do so is present even in the youngest participants.
Importantly, although our child participants tended to, in general, view forgiveness as leading to positive consequences and punishment and doing nothing as leading to negative consequences, our data does point to some more nuanced distinctions. In particular, even our child participants tended to view Offender Recidivism as more likely after the victim did nothing compared to after the victim punished or forgave the offender. Thus, children in our study were able to recognize that punishment has value in deterring future offenses, although it also is expected to generate negative consequences in other domains.
The results of the present study generate several important theoretical questions. First, why do our participants perceive the consequences of punishment and doing nothing as so similar? There are several distinct explanations for why we may have observed these patterns of results. One of these is participants' interpretation of a victim's decision to do nothing and their attribution of negatively valenced emotions and motivations in the aftermath of a transgression. Our participants may have assumed that both the punishing victim and the victim who did nothing were similarly upset by the offense and motivated to inflict harm, but that the victim who did nothing was able to restrain their behavior. If the difference between these two victims was perceived predominantly as a difference in behavior, not an internal state, this may explain why punishment and doing nothing yielded such similar patterns of ratings.
Second, why do we see more developmental change in punishment and doing nothing compared to forgiveness? One possible reason for this finding is that younger children in our sample may have displayed a general positivity bias in their expectations following interpersonal transgressions. In general, children may have assumed that victims would harbor fewer negative emotions, regardless of the response strategy. This positivity bias may have resulted in children having more positive expectations about individuals' interactions across conditions, but since these other age groups (i.e., adolescents, adults) also viewed forgiveness as generating positive outcomes, age differences were less prominent for forgiveness. In this way, the present findings suggest that social learning may result in children recognizing the negative outcomes associated with punishment and doing nothing while simultaneously maintaining children's initial inclinations that forgiveness is associated with positive outcomes. In support of this possibility, children also tend to view punishment as a path to redemption, which may lead children, more than adolescents or adults, to infer that any response to a transgression would promote positive and obstruct negative consequences.
Another potential explanation for the developmental differences we observed is the cognitive and psychological changes that are occurring over the course of the lifespan. Between the age ranges in our child, adolescent, and adult samples, there are important psychological developments that may have influenced the way participants interpreted the consequences of forgiving, punishing, and doing nothing.
Finally, the free-response data we generated by asking participants to define the words “punish” and “forgive” generates valuable insights into how children, adolescents, and adults conceptualize these response strategies. For instance, with respect to definitions of forgiveness, all age groups tended to reference apologies, while adolescents and adults also used terms evoking concepts of letting go and moving on. These trends indicate a shift toward a more nuanced concept of forgiveness and a change from a focus on required conditions for forgiveness to the emotional components of forgiveness, in line with Enright's process model of forgiveness.
Our results indicated that, regardless of age, participants distinguished between the consequences associated with forgiveness, punishment, and doing nothing and did so in meaningful ways. Forgiveness was most likely to be associated with positive behavioral and affective consequences, while punishment and forgiveness were more likely to be associated with negative consequences. These findings generate important questions regarding why punishment and doing nothing are perceived as so similar across the range of items in this study, as well as why forgiveness is so distinct. We also observed age-related differences, with children providing different ratings than adolescents and adults in the aftermath of punishment and doing nothing. Children provided higher ratings than older participants for positively-valenced items and lower ratings for negatively-valenced items in these two conditions, which leads to questions about the mechanisms underlying these developmental shifts. The results of this study help us better understand what individuals expect to occur in the aftermath of forgiveness and punishment and how these expectations change over development.
I like the size of their sample and the methodology. It also seems important to differentiate the three responses to transgressions that merit forgiveness and helpful to know that, even very young children understand the differential consequences of responses. It also makes a good argument for using forgiveness as a response.