We have all heard the adage Forgive and Forget. The advice itself makes sense. When someone has done something wrong to us
in the past, bearing a grudge will make all interactions later difficult. If you are always remembering the details of
what someone has done wrong to you, then you are forced to relive those details
in ways that bring those past events vividly into the present.
So, when you have forgiven
someone, it is valuable to also forget the details of what they have done.
But, does that actually work? Does forgiveness allow you to forget those
details of a past transgression?
This question was explored in an
interesting paper in the July 2014 issue of Psychological Science by
Saima Noreen, Raynette Biermann, and Malcolm MacLeod.
In an initial session,
participants read a variety of scenarios in which they imagined that someone
had done something wrong to them. Each
scenario described the person, the event, and the person did afterward. Participants asked whether they would forgive
the person for what they had done. The
scenarios involved a variety of transgressions including lying, infidelity, and
theft.
From people’s responses, the experimenters
selected twelve items that people were willing to forgive and twelve that they
were not willing to forgive.
In the second session, the
experimenters explored people’s ability to forget the details of the scenarios.
First, participants read 24 scenarios
that were paired with words that could be used to remind people of the
scenario. Half the scenarios were ones
that participant was willing to forgive and half were ones that participant was
not willing to forgive. Participants
practiced associating the words with the scenario until they could recall the
scenarios after hearing the word with better than 50% accuracy.
Then, for half of the items they
learned, participants saw the word gain and were given a new set of
instructions. Those in the Think condition were given one of the
words and were told to think about the scenario associated with the word and to
state how the transgressor made amends for their mistake. Those in the No Think condition were told to avoid thinking about about the
scenario associated with the word. The
other half of the items that were not part of the Think or No Think conditions
were used as a baseline.
Last, participants were asked to
recall all of the scenarios given the cue words they had learned.
Overall, participants were equally
good at learning to associate scenarios with words regardless of whether they
were willing to forgive the transgressor or not.
However, the recall data following
the Think or No Think conditions was interesting. For scenarios in which the participant was
not willing to forgive the transgressor, these conditions did not have any
influence on later recall. For scenarios
in which the participant was willing to forgive the transgressor, participants
in the No Think condition recalled fewer scenarios (and fewer details of those
scenarios) than participants in the Think condition. The baseline items came out in between the
two conditions.
What is going on here?
Previous research suggests that
the instructions used in the No Think condition can make it harder for people
to recall details of things they learned or experienced in the past. These results suggest that the No Think
instructions work for transgressions that people are willing to forgive, but not
those they are not willing to forgive.
This result suggests that
forgiveness may actually give people permission to forget. That is, when people are willing to forgive,
then they are willing to give up the details an episode. But, when they are unwilling to forgive, they
keep those details around. Presumably,
they will also re-experience those details negatively when they remember them
in the future.
There are a number of interesting
studies that remain to be done to understand this result better. For one, this study used all hypothetical scenarios. It would be interesting to look at the
relationship between forgiving and forgetting with situations people actually
experienced. For another, this study
focused on the relationship between forgiving and forgetting. It would also be interesting to know whether
inducing people to forget details of an event would influence their tendency to
forgive.