The Importance of Forgiveness

Take our Empathy Test

Find a therapist near me

Forgiving someone for some transgression is definitely easier said than done.

Forgiveness includes a large emotional component, often deviating dramatically from conscious intentions.

Often, the mind wants to forgive but the heart won't let it.

An evolutionary perspective helps us to understand why forgiveness can be so complex.

Have you ever had the fullest intention to forgive someone, yet found yourself having a difficult time actually doing it? For instance, if you caught a close family member in some lie related to any number of family matters, your mind may well say "it's not a big deal, I'm going to just forgive this person and move on—this is family, after all," while something else inside you feels like forgiveness is just wrong. Or imagine if you are in long-term marriage and you come to find out that your partner has been stepping out of the relationship for years. As someone who values family deeply, you may consciously want to forgive your partner for the transgression, but your heart, which was broken along the way, simply might not let you.

As these examples show, forgiveness is a difficult psychological and social animal for sure. An evolutionary approach to forgiveness can help us to understand why this is the case (De Jesus et al., 2021).

An Evolutionary Perspective on Forgiveness

To understand our current psychology, it is often helpful to look to our ancestral past and to the conditions that were prevalent and recurrent during the bulk of human evolutionary history (see Geher & Wedberg, 2022). While reconstructing our deep evolutionary past requires some level of speculation, based on data from archaeologists, evolutionary biologists, evolutionary psychologists, and scholars in other fields, we have a strong sense of certain features of ancestral human conditions that bear strongly on the nature of our minds today.

Up until the advent of agriculture, about 10,000 years ago (see........

© Psychology Today