Tag Archives: forgiveness

Think Globally, Forgive Instrumentally

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Why do some societies place a higher priority on forgiveness than others do? It is tempting to imagine that the differences come down to differences in religious values, but the group of nations that place the highest priority on forgiveness in their hierarchies of values includes Egypt, Ukraine, Vietnam, the United States, Australia, Japan, and Sweden—hardly a religiously homogeneous club. The same goes for the societies that place forgiveness relatively low in their value hierarchies: Canada, Turkey, China, Poland, Chile, India, and Israel are about as religiously varied as you could get.

So if it’s not religion that really matters, then what does?

The social psychologists Katje Hanke and Christin-Melanie Vauclair found a clever way to examine this question. They took advantage of existing published research that used the Rokeach Values Survey, which was first published in 1967. The Rokeach Values Survey asks respondents to rank-order two lists of values according to their personal importance. One of the lists comprises 18 so-called “instrumental values,” which Rokeach defined as “preferable modes of behavior.” The instrumental values are means to other ends–they’re people’s individual approaches to obtaining what Rokeach called the “terminal values” (this list, too, is a grab bag that includes “Wisdom,” “Salvation,” “National Security,” and everything in between). The Instrumental Values, then, are the means you use to fulfill the aspirations that matter most to you in life.

Hanke and Vauclair gathered up as many articles as they could find that used the Rokeach Values Survey between 1967 and 2006. With those articles in hand, they were able to estimate the value priorities of people in 30 different countries. Here’s a list of Rokeach’s 18 instrumental values and the mean rankings they received across all 30 nations. As you can see, on average “Forgiving” comes in right in the middle at #8:

Table 1

That average ranking is misleading, however, because as Table 2 shows, the 30 societies differed quite a lot in the priority they placed on forgiveness.

Table 2

These cross-national trends are interesting enough, but the real value of this cross-cultural study comes from the researchers’ effort to examine the qualities of those societies themselves that determine the priority forgiveness receives. Hanke and Vauclair examined three measures in particular. The first was an index of human development that summarized information about mean life expectancy, national income per capita, and average level of educational attainment. The second was a measure of subjective well-being. The third was a measure of democratization.

The researchers found that societies that placed a relatively high value on forgiveness tended to have higher levels of subjective well-being and higher scores on the human development index. They were no more or less likely to be democracies. Moreover, when all three predictor variables were used simultaneously to predict the 30 nations’ prioritization of forgiveness, only the human development index emerged as a unique predictor of the importance ascribed to forgiveness. The societies in which people live long, fulfilling lives, it seems, are the ones in which people pursue forgiveness as a way of obtaining what matters most in life to them.

I find this conclusion to be particularly charming because it fits nicely with a body of theorizing called Life History Theory, which suggests that human beings adjust their approaches to life on the basis of whether they expect their lives to be long (vs. short), stable (vs. unpredictable), and mild (vs. harsh). When life is predictable and pleasant, people invest in the maintenance of thick, interconnected webs of social interaction that may not lead to personal payoffs for months, years, or even generations. In such an environment, it pays to forgive because forgiveness has the capacity to restore relationships that may pay out benefits over very long time horizons. When life is shorter, harsher, and less predictable, the theory goes, people have shorter fuses and defend their interests with threats of retaliatory violence. Such an interpretation also fits to some extent with some laboratory findings we have obtained about the role that early family environments might play in predisposing people to use revenge to defend their interests.

The study is not without its limitations. For some societies, for example, Hanke and Vauclair were able to find only a smattering of data upon which to make generalizations about an entire nation’s value profile over the course of 4 decades. Such estimates may contain much more noise than signal. Also, the authors they limited their search for possible society-level correlates of forgiveness to a rather limited number of possibilities. Still, it’s an admirable start. Given the tremendous attention that life history theory has been enjoying in recent years, and especially in light of the unceasing calls for social science to become a more self-consciously cross-cultural discipline, expect more work like this over the next decade.

Hanke, K., & Vauclair, C. M. (2016). Investigating the human value “forgiveness” across 30 countries: a cross-cultural meta-analytical approach. Cross-Cultural Research, 50(3), 215-230.

 

Thinking Outside the Box: The Power of Apologies in Cooperative Agreements

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TWO kids I know—let’s call them Jeff and Mimi–wanted a cat, so they begged their reluctant parents for months. Eventually the parents gave in, but they forced the kids into an agreement: “The cat box will need to be cleaned every day. We expect you to alternate days. If you miss your day, we’ll take fifty cents out of your allowance and give it to your sister/brother. If you like, you can think of the fifty-cent transfer as a ‘fine’ that we pay to your sister/brother for your failure to hold up your end of the agreement.” The kids agreed and Corbin the cat was purchased (or, rather, obtained from the Humane Society). The litter box-cleaning arrangement went well for three whole days, but compliance started to wane on day four. Hostilities began to simmer. Jeff became reluctant to clean the litter box on “his” days because of Mimi’s failures to keep up her end of the bargain, and vice versa.

“Recriminations” began to pile up.

After two weeks, the agreement was declared dead. The parents became the chief cleaners of the litter box. The father continues to wonder whether he should have read more game theory before even entertaining the idea of getting a cat.

Cooperative agreements like these tend to be dicey propositions: What’s Mimi supposed to do if Jeff fails to clean the box on his appointed day? Should he view it as a sign that Jeff no longer intends to honor the agreement (in which case she should stop honoring it herself, notwithstanding the $.50 fine that Jeff had to pay to her), or should she view it as a one-off aberration (in which case she might want to continue honoring the agreement)? It’s not clear, and that lack of clarity can make problems for the stability of such agreements.

Luis Martinez-Vaquero and his colleagues addressed this issue in a recent article that caught my eye. The paper is complex, but it’s full of interesting results (some quite counter-intuitive) about when strategic agents should be expected to make commitments, honor commitments, retaliate when those commitments are broken, and so forth. I suggest you give it a read if you are at all interested in these issues. But what really grabbed my interest was the authors’ exploration of the idea that the key to getting such agreements to “work” (by which I mean, “become evolutionarily stable*”) was to build in an apology-forgiveness system that causes agreement-violators to pay an additional cost (over and above the fine specified in the agreement itself) after a failure to cooperate, which might cause the defected-against partner to persist in the agreement despite the fact that it has been violated.

The researchers’ results enabled them to be surprisingly precise about the conditions under which highly cooperative strategies that used apologies and forgiveness in this way would evolve*: The costs of cooperating (cleaning the litter box) must be lower than the cost of the apology (the amount of money the deal-breaker voluntarily passes to his/her sibling), which in turn must be lower than the fine for non-compliance that is specified within the agreement itself (fifty cents). When those conditions are in place, you can get the evolution of actors who like to make agreements, accept agreements, honor agreements, and forgive breaches of agreements so that cooperation can be maintained even when those agreements are occasionally violated due to cello lessons that run late, or unscheduled trips to the emergency room, or geometry exams that simply must be studied for.

I’ve written here and there (and here) about the value of apologies and compensation in promoting forgiveness, but the results of Martinez-Vaquero and colleagues suggest (to me, anyway) that forgiveness-inducing gestures such as apologies and offers of compensation can come to possess a sort of fractal quality: People often overcome defections in their cooperative relationships through costly apologies, which promote forgiveness. Throughout the history of Western Civilization, various Leviathans have capitalized on the conflict-minimizing, cooperation-preserving power of costly apologies by institutionalizing these sorts of innovations within contracts and other commitment devices that specify fines and other sanctions if one party or the other fails to perform. But after the fine has been paid for failure to perform, what’s to keep the parties motivated to continue on with their agreement? Martinez-Vaquero et al.’s paper suggests that a little “apology payment” added on top of the fine might just do the trick. Apologies within apologies.

By the way, Jeff and Mimi’s parents are reviewing the terms of the old agreement later this week. Perhaps it can be made to work after all.

Reference:

Martinez-Vaquero, L. A., Han, T. A., Pereira, L. M., & Lennaerts, T. (2015). Apology and forgiveness evolve to resolve failures in cooperative agreements. Scientific Reports, 5: 10639.  doi:10.1038/srep10639.

 

*By which I mean “come to characterize the behavior of individuals in the population via a cultural learning mechanism that causes individuals to adopt the strategies of their most successful neighbors.”

 

The Real Roots of Vengeance and Forgiveness

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Yesterday, somebody pointed me to this article, which I wrote a few years ago for a magazine called Spirituality and Health. I had not realized until yesterday that the magazine had made the article available on the web. Even though it’s several years old, I still like the way it reads. In fact, it’s as decent a précis of my book Beyond Revenge as you’re going to find anywhere.

I’m not exactly a regular reader of this particular magazine, but their editorial staff have taken an interest in some of my research and writing over the years, including some of our (by which I mean, my and my collaborators’) work on forgiveness and gratitude, for which I have always been appreciative. The founder of the magazine, whom I was fortunate enough to know, was T. George Harris–one of the most colorful figures in the history of 20th-century magazine publishing. Some readers of this blog might know of George’s work in helping to turn Psychology Today into the behemoth it eventually became, but there is much more to George’s personal and professional life that’s worth knowing about.

George died last year at the age of 89. I found two really nice chronicles of his life–this one from the local San Diego paper (George was a La Jolla resident), and this one written by Stephen Kiesling, who not only is the editor-in-chief at Spirituality and Health, but also was one of George’s closest friends and fondest admirers.

 

A Refreshingly Human-Sounding Public Radio Interview: Yours Truly on Morality, Revenge, Forgiveness and Evolution

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I have a friend who won’t listen to public radio in the U.S. It’s not that he objects to public radio programming or pubic radio values: It’s just that he doesn’t like the sonic quality of public radio programs. In the United States, at least, public radio is very heavily produced. I generally cannot be on a radio show that is syndicated to NPR (National Public Radio) stations unless I’m willing to schlep myself over to an ISDN studio because NPR requires “that noiseless ISDN sound.” Turn your radio right now to an NPR station and you’ll get a decent sampling of what I’m describing.  Sometimes, I like that sound, but I must agree with my friend. It does sound rather sterile.

Ever since my friend mentioned this to me, I have been struck by how slick I sound (relative to real life) in general when I am on public radio shows in the United States. It’s not always a kind of slick that I like. Some of it has to do with the ISDN sound, but some of it also has to do with the editing after the interview is finished. Everyone involved ends up, I think, sounding smarter and more eloquent than they did during the interview itself. That’s not always a bad thing–nobody wants to sound like an idiot if he or she can help it–but as a listener, all of that sweet perfection can make you wonder if you’re at risk of getting a cavity.

I therefore found my recent interview with Charlotte Graham from a Radio New Zealand, for her show Summer Nights, quite refreshing–particularly (though not only) from an aural point of view. It’s really just an uninterrupted and unedited phone call between me in Miami (at 9:00 PM my time) and Charlotte in New Zealand (where it was 3:00 in the afternoon of the following day). The phone line wasn’t, to say the least, ISDN quality, and both of us (though I to a rather greater extent than Charlotte) exhibited a healthy dose of the errors and disfluencies that characterize most people’s real conversations. Even so, we managed to cover some decent conceptual territory on evolution, culture, morality, revenge, and forgiveness.

Here’s a link to the interview. Hope you enjoy it.