Developing Conceptions of Forgiveness Across the Lifespan

• In Event: Beyond Punishment: How Do Children Respond to Moral Transgressions?

Abstract

Interpersonal conflict is an inevitable feature of large-scale human cooperative societies. Despite our proclivity for cooperation, we sometimes hold incompatible desires or goals and act to maximize our own desired outcomes, even at others’ expense. The universality of conflict requires that people develop a toolkit of solutions for responding to interpersonal transgressions, mediating disputes, and resolving conflicts. Two of these strategies—and those that we focus on here—are punishment and forgiveness. Social and developmental psychology have primarily focused on how individuals punish as a response to wrongdoing (Marshall & McAuliffe, 2022). By comparison, forgiveness has received relatively little empirical focus, and thus there remains much to be known about how individuals conceive of forgiveness, how such concepts differ from punishment, and how such conceptions of forgiveness emerge from childhood throughout adulthood.
The current project aims to address this gap in the literature by directly comparing how children, adolescents, and adults perceive the consequences of forgiveness and punishment and how these responses compare to doing nothing. To what extent are forgiveness, punishment, and refraining from intervention viewed as conceptually distinct, and how do perceptions of these intervention strategies change over development? To address these questions, we presented young children (4- to 9-year-olds; n = 130), adolescents (11- to 14-year-olds; n = 200), and adults (n = 200) with scenarios in which the victim of an interpersonal transgression responded by forgiving the transgressor, punishing the transgressor, or doing nothing. Participants then rated the likelihood of twelve post-transgression consequences, chosen in accordance with existing literature to capture a diverse range of possible outcomes following the transgression and victim response. These consequences were grouped into four categories: (1) Positive Behaviors and Emotions, (2) Negative Behaviors, (3) Behavior Change, and (4) Evaluations.
We found that children, adolescents, and adults conceptualized forgiveness as distinct from both punishment and doing nothing when considering the outcomes of different responses to wrongdoing (or the lack thereof). In particular, children, adolescents, and adults associated more positive outcomes with forgiveness and associated more negative outcomes with punishment and doing nothing. When evaluating age-related differences, we found that children tended to rate positive outcomes as more likely and negative outcomes as less likely than both adolescents and adults. For the majority of consequence items, no significant differences were found between adolescents and adults, suggesting that these two age groups tend to have similar perceptions of the consequences of forgiveness, punishment, and doing nothing. These findings provide robust evidence for the notion that forgiveness is in fact viewed as distinct from a lack of punishment, and also introduce promising future directions in the study of forgiveness and other transgression responses.

Authors

• Abby McLaughlin, Boston College
  Presenting Author

• Katherine McAuliffe, Boston College

• Julia Marshall, Boston College