Suffering need not beget suffering: why we forgive

Parsing the components of forgiveness: Psychological and neural mechanisms

“…As with the ability to forgive, motivated forgetting is facilitated by lateral prefrontal areas involved in cognitive control (Anderson and Hanslmayr, 2014), and may thus present a mechanism whereby unwanted thoughts are removed from conscious awareness (Noreen et al, 2014). Future research should also examine the relationship between social group status and forgiveness processes in more detail, and how these align with our understanding of forgiveness at the interpersonal level (Baumgartner et al, 2012;Noor, 2016). Finally, different cultures are likely to differ in their valuation of social principles (Ruff and Fehr, 2014), and their expectations and understanding of forgiveness more broadly (Forster, 2018).…”

“…Because revenge uses retaliation to deter future exploitation by the wrongdoer, it often comes at a personal (e.g., feelings of anger and resentment, rumination) and social (e.g., jeopardized future gains and/or escalating cycles of counter-retaliations) cost (Carlsmith et al, 2008;Noor, 2016). By comparison, forgiveness presents the individual with an alternative strategy to secure personal benefits-by inhibiting revenge, decreasing avoidant motivations, and facilitating reconciliatory behavior, it increases the individual's social fitness.…”

Can we forgive a militant outgroup member? The role of perspective‐taking

“…Given our research context (Palestinian/Israeli conflict), it was deemed appropriate to assess the impact of our independent variables on forgiveness as one of our main motivational dependent variables (Studies 1 and 2). Over the last two decades, forgiveness–decreased motivation to retaliate against or avoid the offender and increased motivation to reconcile with the offender despite harmful acts (McCullough, Rachal, & Worthington, )–has become the focus of research that explores ways of ameliorating hostile intergroup relations (Noor, ; Noor, Brown, Gonzalez, Manzi, & Lewis, ; Noor, Brown, & Prentice, ; Noor & Nazneen, ; Noor, Shnabel, Halabi, & Nadler, ; Shnabel, Halabi, & Noor, ; Staub, ; Wohl & Branscombe, ). As theorised earlier, precisely because the induction of perspective‐taking is expected to challenge the ingroup's chronic stereotypical beliefs about the outgroup as a source of threat (Bar‐Tal, ; Stephan & Finlay, ; Vescio et al., ), we hypothesised that perspective‐taking would increase participants’ motivation to forgive the violent target individual.…”

“…That is, perspective‐taking may afford new mitigating insights about the outgroup to which the ingroup may not have had access previously. In turn, such new insights may lead to a decrease in the ingroup's motivation to avoid and retaliate against the outgroup and an increase in their motivation to display benevolence and forgiveness toward the outgroup, respectively (McCullough et al., ; Noor, ). In addition, consistent with the ITT, we predicted that threat would lead to decreased motivation to forgive the target individual.…”

To connect is to be influenced: What determines a third‐party's forgiveness attitudes to conflicting groups' violent partisan members?

“…Forgiveness is commonly defined as a decreased motivation to retaliate against or avoid an offender, and is simultaneously present with an increased motivation to reconcile with the offender despite the harmful act (McCullough, Worthington, & Rachal, ). The forgiveness literature, both at the interpersonal and intergroup levels, has rapidly grown over the last decade (Hewstone et al, ; McCullough et al, ; Noor, ; Noor, Branscombe, & Hewstone, ; Noor et al, 2008a,b; Shnabel et al, ; Wohl & Branscombe, ). Despite such growth, we are aware of only one research paper that has examined the role of third parties' forgiveness with a specific focus on interpersonal conflicts (Green et al, ).…”