Psychology Today | 20.08.2026 22:34
When I began studying forgiveness scientifically in 1985, I realized that forgiveness as a research topic had been neglected in psychological research for close to a century. Yes, there were a few journal articles on apology, but no published empirically based studies on people forgiving those who were unjust to them. As I started giving talks on forgiveness, I noticed two trends: (a) as in the psychological sciences, people in the general public rarely had conversations about forgiveness—what it is, how one goes about forgiving, and what occurs upon forgiving, and (b) when people adamantly opposed the idea of forgiving, they were misunderstanding what it actually is.
