Elsevier

Current Opinion in Psychology

Volume 44, April 2022, Pages 275-280
Current Opinion in Psychology

Review
An evolutionary psychology view of forgiveness: individuals, groups, and culture

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2021.09.021Get rights and content

Abstract

We review the logic of an evolutionary perspective on forgiveness, highlighting how insight into the likely function of forgiveness — solving adaptive problems related to acquiring and maintaining social relationships — has productively guided research and theory. A combination of experimental, longitudinal, cross-sectional, and cross-cultural evidence supports the claim that victims' perceptions of harmdoers’ relationship value and exploitation risk causally influence whether or not victims forgive harmdoers. We also review the nascent literature on the topic of intergroup forgiveness and consider how the concepts associated with interpersonal forgiveness, such as apologies, relationship value, and exploitation risk, might help us understand forgiveness between groups, cultures, and societies. Finally, we explore the intersection of evolutionary and cultural perspectives on forgiveness, and consider how concepts from these two research traditions might be integrated to help us understand forgiveness even better.

Introduction

Social relationships are fundamental to human life. In even the closest relationships, however, people sometimes harm each other emotionally, socially, materially, and even physically. In the wake of such harms, people often choose to restore relationships rather than abandon them, opting for forgiveness and reconciliation instead of revenge or avoidance. Forgiveness, the process by which a victim undergoes a prosocial change in their motivations toward a transgressor, is crucial for maintaining and repairing relationships, and much empirical attention has been paid to mapping when, why, and how victims forgive their transgressors.

In an influential systematic review, now more than a decade old, Fehr et al. [1] summarized what researchers had discovered up to that point about the affective, dispositional, and situational correlates of forgiveness. They concluded that forgiveness was positively associated with empathy, agreeableness, and perspective-taking, and negatively associated with anger. They also discovered that people are more likely to forgive when they feel more committed and close to the transgressor, and when they feel more satisfied with the relationship.

In the decade since Fehr et al.’s [1] important review, researchers' understanding of forgiveness has improved dramatically, with new insights into many dimensions of forgiveness, including its measurement [2], its personality correlates [3], and its clinical utility [4]. Researchers have also made progress in developing an evolutionary understanding of forgiveness [5, 6, 7, 8]. The evolutionary perspective on forgiveness has yielded several unique advances, including the placement of forgiveness within a broader theoretical framework describing the evolutionary logic of helping and harming and an analysis of the information-processing tasks that an evolved system for forgiveness would likely require [9].

Here, we review the recent progress that has emerged from thinking about forgiveness as an evolved feature of human psychology. In addition to reviewing research on interpersonal forgiveness, we apply the evolutionary model of forgiveness to the budding field of intergroup forgiveness and use the evolutionary model to point to nascent findings regarding cultural differences in forgiveness. For all of these topics, we identify high-priority research questions that might merit researchers’ attention in the coming years.

Section snippets

The evolutionary logic of forgiveness

Guided by the principle of natural selection, an evolutionary perspective on psychology rests on the assumption that psychological mechanisms evolve to maximize inclusive fitness, a term that designates the additive effects of an individual's direct reproductive success and the reproductive success of the individual's genetic relatives (who, of course, share genes in common in proportion to their degree of relatedness), which raises the reproductive success of the individual indirectly. On this

Intergroup forgiveness and evolutionary psychology

To date, researchers have applied the evolutionary computational approach to forgiveness almost exclusively to relationships in which one individual has harmed another individual. However, many researchers have focused their efforts over the past decade on understanding how individuals as members of social groups — ethnic, religious, political — come to forgive other groups. In a recent meta-analytic review, Van Tongeren et al. [21] identified several variables that predict intergroup

Culture and forgiveness

Researchers have documented substantial cross-cultural variation in how forgiveness is understood and practiced. Where do these cultural differences come from? Cross-cultural differences in forgiveness have been attributed to variation in the cultural values of individualism and collectivism [26], and other cultural variables might be important as well, but a value-based explanation merely leaves a promissory note as to how those cultural differences emerged in the first place. We think an

Conclusion

Over the past decade, scientific understanding of forgiveness has expanded dramatically, giving us new empirical insights into its causes and effects. An evolutionary approach to forgiveness, we believe, has the potential to integrate all of these findings into an overarching theory that can explain not only how forgiveness works but also why humans have the capacity to forgive in the first place [7]. We look forward to additional research on forgiveness from an evolutionary perspective in the

Conflict of interest statement

Nothing declared.

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge support for this work from a grant the John Templeton Foundation (Grant #29165).

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