Written: March 27, 2019 | Released: August 30, 2021
In my experience, many obvious-seeming psychological concepts explode in complexity when you attempt to dissect them. For instance, trying to respond to a question about “why we forgive” made me realize there are a vast number of motivations for forgiveness.
After someone wrongs you, you can forgive them based on:
UNDERSTANDING
• Empathy – you realize that you would have done the same thing that they did if you had the same choice to make. Consider: someone who harmed you only a little in order to gain something they value tremendously.
• Humility – you realize that you have made mistakes of equal or greater magnitude to this other person’s mistake, and that making mistakes of that magnitude do not tarnish a person irrevocably, just as you are not tarnished irrevocably by yours. Consider: someone harming you in a way that you once harmed someone else.
• Pity – you see how the bad actions were the consequence of weakness or misery or prior hardship. Consider: someone who has been rejected their whole life who lashes out in a harmful way at the first hint of rejection.
• Compassion – you realize it’s hard to be human, and that we almost all are fighting hard battles of one kind or another, and that the person who wronged you is probably no exception. Consider: someone struggling a great deal with the recent death of a loved one who does something harmful to you during that time.
• Redirection – you realize that while this person’s action harmed you, it actually had nothing to do with you. Consider: a person who deeply insulted your way of life, but who did so only because they have been greatly harmed by something related to that way of life.
PERSPECTIVE
• Ignorance – you realize the other party didn’t know what they were doing when they took the harmful action. Consider: a pet knocking over your grandmother’s antique vase.
• “Id”- since you realize it was the carnal part of the other person’s mind that caused them to do the thing (e.g., they were acting at that moment out of fear, or anger, or without their “System 2” mind being engaged, etc.) and that they wouldn’t have carried out the action if they had thought about it in a cool and collected state. Consider: someone insulting you because they were infuriated over something that had happened a few minutes before that’s unrelated to you.
• Unpredictability – you realize that while the person intended to take action, they did not foresee the negative consequences that resulted. Consider: someone throwing a pebble absentmindedly, which, through a bizarre series of very unlikely coincidences, causes a car accident.
• Mistakes – the person didn’t intend to take the harmful action at all. Consider: someone accidentally trips and, in doing so, knocks you into a pool.
SELF-INTEREST
• Relief – your anger is harming you, and forgiveness makes you feel better or leads to better consequences for you. Consider: forgiving a criminal that once robbed you because obsessing about getting revenge has made your life significantly worse.
• Identity – you don’t want to be the sort of person that holds a grudge, or because you think better of yourself if you forgive. Consider: the good feeling that results from being the “better and bigger person” and letting the wrongdoing go without retaliation.
• Social reward – others look positively on us for forgiving. Consider: a father who tells his son that he would be very proud of him if he could genuinely forgive his brother.
JUSTICE
• Punishment – the person has received a proportional punishment that fit the crime, and, in receiving it, has been absolved. Consider: someone who stole something from you but who has now undergone what you feel has been a fair punishment for that action.
• Restitution – the other person has undone the harm by the actions they took afterward. Consider: someone who damages a chair in your home and then goes out and buys an identical replacement chair for you.
• Compensation – the other person has done something good for you that you feel makes up for the harm. Consider: someone who, through negligence, causes you embarrassment in front of your colleagues at work, but then, to make amends, takes you to an expensive broadway play you’ve wanted to see and buys you a thoughtful present.
• Regret – the other person is genuinely remorseful of their action and truly wishes they had not done it. Consider: someone expressing deep regret while they give you a heartfelt apology for the harm they caused.
PHILOSOPHY
• Free will – you view the person as a product of their environment and genetics, and as much as you may not like their actions, and as much as you may choose to avoid them in the future or even warn others about them, you do not fundamentally believe in free will. Consider: someone who grew up in a highly traumatic environment and developed their current bad behavior as a coping mechanism for that terrible environment, and you view their behavior therefore as a deterministic consequence of this person’s history.
• Morality – you think it is morally “right” to forgive and “wrong” to hold a grudge. Consider: the teaching in the Bible that we should “turn the other cheek.”
• Change – the person has improved themselves since they made a mistake and are legitimately no longer someone who would make that mistake again. Consider: someone who has credibly adopted a new life philosophy and set of behaviors since they harmed you, and you can tell they wouldn’t harm you in that way today.
• Hard choices – you realize that if the person hadn’t harmed you in the way they did, something of even greater value in the world would have been lost. Consider: someone who is in the difficult position of choosing between harming just you and causing greater harm to many strangers, and they chose to harm you as the best of two bad options.
While psychological concepts (like forgiveness) do seem to explode in complexity upon analysis, which may create the feeling of being even more confused at first, this sort of analysis, in my experience, does tend to lead to a better understanding of the topic eventually. For instance, as complex as it is, forgiveness seems to mostly come down to considerations of (A) understanding, (B) perspective, (C) self-interest, (D) justice and (E) philosophy, depending on the situation and the person doing the forgiving, which is certainly not something I was aware of before I spent an hour or two thinking about it.
And perhaps, if you are having trouble forgiving, you can find a reason in the list above to forgive.
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