HAVING THE COGNITIVE CAPACITY TO FORGIVE - Part 2:

A 1982 study of young people explores the correlation of apology to forgiveness and points to some important age considerations. It is important here that the younger students have a greater capacity to forgive and judge without social input, i.e. an apology, than older students do.

In 2 experiments, 221 kindergartners and 1st, 4th, and 7th graders judged actors who committed a transgression under conditions of low or high responsibility and low or high consequences. The actors’ motives were good or bad and the act was intended or accidental. The actor then either did nothing or employed 1 of 3 increasingly elaborate apologies. As hypothesized, the actor's predicament was most severe, producing the harshest judgments when (a) the actor had high responsibility for committing an inadvertent act that produced high consequences, and (b) the act was the result of a bad rather than good motive or was intended rather than accidental. More elaborate apologies produced less blame and punishment and more forgiveness, liking, positive evaluations, and attributions of greater remorse. The judgments of the 7th graders were more affected by the actor's apology than those of the younger students (Ss). These age differences reflect the younger Ss' poorer ability to integrate social information and appreciate the implications of social conventions. However, the younger Ss' judgments were similar to those of older Ss (Darby 742).

These age differences seem to confirm that the capacity to forgive is present at an early age but becomes more refined as we learn to use it and work with others to elicit it.

These studies and comments start to reinforce the idea that the act of forgiveness is a part of most human behavior, starting at an early age. The complexities of how and when forgiveness can occur are too extensive to explore in this project but are important and worth further study. The evidence points to the act of forgiving as being directly associated with others actions (i.e. an apology) both as humans get older and more socialized and as a function of cultural differences. Both of these sway me toward the belief that there is a large element of learning involved in the understanding and act of forgiving, even if the cognitive ability is innate.

As pursued earlier in this paper, the capacity and desire for reconciliation appears to be a behavior/trait that is very much rooted in most people from a very early age and can be traced within other animal species as a core survival technique. The correlation and interdependency between forgiveness and reconciliation is important. If reconciliation can be achieved in a “truce” like resolution without forgiveness, but true long-term reconciliation that allows for healing and real reduced anxiety, requires forgiveness, components of relationship closeness and cooperation may also be a factor when forgiveness becomes a vital element. The understanding of relationships, at which we primates seem to be so good at, may be innately intertwined with our capability to forgive. Research points to forgiveness being a behavior which humans tend to become more skilled in as they mature. The research also indicates that most people have at least some access to a capacity to forgive, even if that forgiveness behavior must be predicated by an apology or other reconciling behavior (Darby 742).