Forgiving you is hard, but forgetting seems easy : can forgiveness facilitate forgetting?
Date
07/2014Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Forgiveness is considered to play a key role in the maintenance of social relationships, the avoidance of unnecessary conflict, and the ability to move forward with one’s life. But why is it that some people find it easier to forgive and forget than others? In the current study, we explored the supposed relationship between forgiveness and forgetting. In an initial session, 30 participants imagined that they were the victim in a series of hypothetical incidents and indicated whether or not they would forgive the transgressor. Following a standard think/no-think procedure, in which participants were trained to think or not to think about some of these incidents, more forgetting was observed for incidents that had been forgiven following no-think instructions compared with either think or baseline instructions. In contrast, no such forgetting effects emerged for incidents that had not previously been forgiven. These findings have implications for goal-directed forgetting and the relationship between forgiveness and memory.
Citation
Noreen , S , Bierman , R & MacLeod , M D 2014 , ' Forgiving you is hard, but forgetting seems easy : can forgiveness facilitate forgetting? ' , Psychological Science , vol. 25 , no. 7 , pp. 1295-1302 . https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614531602
Publication
Psychological Science
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0956-7976Type
Journal article
Collections
Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.