Dealing with Hurt: Whether and How Self-distancing Facilitates Forgiveness

Abstract

Interpersonal relationships are inevitably accompanied by instances of wrongdoings that may threaten one’s health and well-being. A key mechanism for individuals to protect themselves against the repercussions of these transgressions is to forgive their offender. Although adopting the perspective of the offender can help promote forgiveness, it is questionable whether this beneficial effect extends to transgressions accompanied by stronger negative emotions and motivations. For this reason, the current paper proposes self-distancing, which involves taking a ‘fly on the wall’ perspective, as an alternative strategy to facilitate forgiveness following transgressions, particularly those perceived as severe. To test this, participants were asked to recall a recent minor or severe offense by a close other, to either focus on their own perspective of the event, adopt the perspective of the offender or take a self-distanced perspective, and to then report on their level of forgiveness. In comparison to the self-focused perspective, both the self-distancing and offender-focused perspectives resulted in marginally more forgiveness of minor transgressions, but not of severe transgressions. The increase of forgiveness can be explained by a reduction in feelings of anger. Taken together, the current study provides promising findings for the value of self distancing as a means to facilitate forgiveness. Although it was not found to be superior to an offender-focused perspective, we argue that this does not undermine its potential to be an effective strategy to help individuals cope well with the unavoidable transgressions they face.