Are attitudes toward forgiveness ambivalent? To answer this question and explore whether such ambivalence predicts individuals’ propensity to forgive and tendency to view forgiveness as desirable/virtuous, we asked undergraduates (N = 159) to complete measures of ambivalence toward forgiveness, attitudes toward forgiveness, and tendencies to be forgiving/vengeful. Using a number of metrics, our findings suggest that attitudes toward forgiveness are moderately ambivalent. In addition, and as predicted, ambivalence toward forgiveness was associated with diminished inclination to be forgiving, enhanced pro-vengeance orientation, and less idealistic views of forgiveness. Further, highly ambivalent participants scored the same or lower than anti-forgiveness participants in tendencies to be forgiving/vengeful. These findings suggest the existence of a disconnect between people’s actual attitudes toward forgiveness and popular discourses on forgiveness and underscore the need for investigations of and theorizing on forgiveness that more fully recognize its possible costs and limitations or, at the very least, laypeople’s views on these.
“To forgive is the highest, most beautiful form of love. In return, you will receive untold peace and happiness.” Robert
Public discourse surrounding forgiveness provides considerable anecdotal evidence that Western society views forgiveness through a very positive lens. Popular aphorisms cast forgiveness as divine, self-help books extoll its praises, and experts expound on its benefits. We agree that there is much to like about forgiveness; nevertheless, we explore the possibility that people’s views on forgiveness are more complex than such discourse captures. We argue that attitudes toward forgiveness are ambivalent, and we explore whether such ambivalence predicts variation in people’s propensity to forgive and their tendency to view forgiveness as desirable/virtuous. Such ambivalence might have important but as yet unacknowledged implications for understanding whether and when people forgive.
Because humans are profoundly social beings, factors that shape whether and when people forgive are of special significance in understanding relationships. Relationships are critical for our health and wellbeing, fulfill important needs for belonging and felt security, and contribute to our happiness and life satisfaction (
An attitude is ambivalent when inconsistencies between and/or within its different components result in the co-existence of positive (favorable) and negative (unfavorable) evaluations of the attitude object (
The present paper presumes that whether people’s attitudes toward forgiveness are ambivalent may be of both empirical and practical consequence. Correctly forecasting an individual’s response to wrongdoing may, for example, be considerably more difficult when their attitudes toward forgiveness are ambivalent. Highly ambivalent attitudes are subject to greater variability over time and changing circumstances than attitudes low in ambivalence because they are both weaker (
If ambivalent attitudes are weaker, less stable, and more context dependent than those that are univalent, ambivalence in attitudes toward forgiveness may also diminish individuals’ actual propensity to forgive. As indicated previously, research suggests that forgiveness may confer important benefits for victims’ physical and psychological wellbeing and the health and quality of their relationships with their offenders. Should ambivalence in attitudes toward forgiveness attenuate individuals’ readiness or inclination to forgive, it may have very real consequences for their private and personal lives, particularly their health, wellbeing, and capacity to maintain relationships with those who wrong them.
Our literature search revealed just two studies examining ambivalence and forgiveness.
The results of both studies support the proposition that ambivalence may matter for forgiveness. Ambivalence in attitudes toward an offender was negatively associated with forgiveness for both husbands and wives in
Fortunately, findings from the broader ambivalence literature offer a foundation for such predictions. First, research shows that ambivalence is associated with less extreme and less certain attitudes (
Second, ambivalence is most likely when an attitude object produces both strong negative and strong positive evaluations (
As part of a larger study, participants completed measures of ambivalence toward forgiveness and scales assessing their tendencies to be forgiving versus vengeful and to view forgiveness as moral and desirable. We posed two hypotheses:
H1: Attitudes toward forgiveness will exhibit evidence of ambivalence.
H2: The more ambivalent their attitudes toward forgiveness, the less participants will report being inclined to forgive, the more they will report being inclined to seek vengeance, and the less they will endorse beliefs that forgiving is a morally desirable response to wrongdoing.
Affective ambivalence exists when people experience both positive and negative emotions toward the attitude object, thus feeling “torn” (e.g., wanting to forgive but fearing that forgiving might result in further hurt). Cognitive ambivalence occurs when people hold mixed or conflicting beliefs about the attitude object (e.g., believing that forgiving is a virtue while believing that an offense is unforgivable). In addition to experiencing
In sum, this study makes two important contributions to the literature on forgiveness. First, it permits empirical exploration of the possibility that, despite considerable pro-forgiveness discourse in our society, people’s attitudes toward forgiveness may be more nuanced than this discourse often supposes. Few studies have examined lay conceptualizations of forgiveness (for exceptions see
Undergraduates from a university in western Canada (
We assessed ambivalence, vengefulness, and dispositional forgiveness with multiple scales to determine whether our findings converged across measures capturing different aspects of these constructs. Unless otherwise noted, items employed a 1 c
Statistic | Variable |
|||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Mullet Forgiveness Scale |
TTF | ATF | Vengeance | |||
Blockage | Circumstance | Forgiving | ||||
2.36 | 4.90 | 3.75 | 3.45 | 5.01 | 3.00 | |
1.07 | 0.82 | 1.20 | 1.22 | 0.95 | 0.91 | |
Range | 1–5.80 | 1.43–6.57 | 1–6.50 | 1–6.67 | 2.40–6.80 | 1.35–5.83 |
Alpha | .86 | .65 | .85 | .73 | .63 | .85 |
Statistic | Ambivalence Measure |
||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Subjective Ambivalence |
Objective Thompson |
Objective Maio |
|||||||||
Intra-component |
Inter-component | ||||||||||
Cacioppo | P&P | Jamieson | Average | Cognitive | Affective | Average | Cognitive | Affective | Average | ||
3.87 | 4.02 | 3.63 | 3.83 | 0.98 | 1.85 | 1.41 | 24.82 | 28.37 | 26.58 | 24.13 | |
1.20 | 1.48 | 1.65 | 1.32 | 2.31 | 2.24 | 2.00 | 8.80 | 8.40 | 6.58 | 5.58 | |
Range | 1.33–6.44 | 1–7 | 1–7 | 1.11–6.74 | -2–7 | -2–7 | -2–6 | 3–46 | 8–48 | 9–44.50 | 9–40.50 |
Theoretical Range | 1–7 | 1–7 | 1–7 | 1–7 | -2–7 | -2–7 | -2–7 | 0–60 | 0–60 | 0–60 | 0–60 |
Alpha | .89 | .87 | .82 | .93 | — | — | .79 | — | — | — | — |
Two measures assessed
We generated scores for both intra- and intercomponent ambivalence using formulas in
Intracomponent Ambivalence = P + |N| - 2 * |P + N| + 30.
Following their lead, we also calculated average intracomponent ambivalence (i.e., the mean of affective and cognitive ambivalence). We then generated intercomponent ambivalence scores by calculating net evaluations for both the cognitive and affective components (i.e., the sums of the ratings for the thoughts (B) and feelings (F) participants listed) and applying the following formula:
Intercomponent Ambivalence = (|B| + |F| - 2 * |B + F| + 60)/2
Theoretically, scores on the Maio measures range from 0 to 60. Higher scores indicate greater ambivalence.
Next, participants completed a measure adapted from
We used the formula in
Ambivalence = (P + N)/2 − |P − N|
P refers to the sum of the values for the positive ratings and N refers to the sum of the values for the negative ratings. Scores fall on a theoretical scale from -2 to +7. Higher scores indicate greater ambivalence. Zero indicates low ambivalence, not no ambivalence. To facilitate comparison with the Maio measure, we also computed an average Thompson objective ambivalence index.
Finally, participants completed three
The 6-item Attitudes Toward Forgiveness Scale (ATF;
The 4-item Tendency to Forgive Scale (TTF;
The Mullet Forgivingness Scale (MFS;
The 20-item Vengeance Scale (
Descriptive statistics and reliabilities for the forgiveness/vengeance indices are reported in
H1 predicted that individuals would exhibit ambivalence in their attitudes toward forgiveness. Three lines of evidence support this hypothesis.
First, the means for the ambivalence measures consistently fell toward the middle or lower middle of their respective theoretical ranges rather than the low end. As
Second, levels of objective ambivalence observed here are comparable to or exceed levels of objective ambivalence reported for attitudes toward social issues such as euthanasia, capital punishment, and abortion, as well as attitudes toward nuclear power and parents—all attitude objects for which we might expect individuals to exhibit ambivalence. For example, rescaling the mean score for our Thompson cognitive ambivalence index (the lower of our two Thompson ambivalence indices) from our -2 to 7 metric to Thompson and Zanna’s -.5 to 4 metric produces a value of 0.99. Thompson and Zanna reported mean ambivalence scores ranging from .23 (for drinking and driving) to 1.39 (for both AIDS and euthanasia), with a median of 0.84 (
Our mean score on the Thompson affective ambivalence index is also comparable in magnitude to the mean level of ambivalence in attitudes toward nuclear power reported in
Similarly, levels of objective ambivalence on the Maio measure in our study are comparable to, if not higher than, levels of ambivalence in attitudes toward parents reported in
Third, one-sample
Note too that, with a single exception (the nonsignificant correlation between Thompson affective ambivalence and Maio cognitive ambivalence), the ambivalence measures were consistently and moderately intercorrelated (see
Variable | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1. Blockage | — | |||||||||||||
2. Circumstances | -.06 | — | ||||||||||||
3. Forgiving | -.49* | -.06 | — | |||||||||||
4. TTF | -.40* | -.02 | .45* | — | ||||||||||
5. ATF | -.52* | .04 | .52* | .38* | — | |||||||||
6. Vengeance | .59* | .03 | -.49* | -.43* | -.60* | — | ||||||||
7. Average Subjective | .45* | .05 | -.42* | -.46* | -.39* | .38* | — | |||||||
8. Cognitive Thompson | .34* | -.06 | -.31* | -.27* | -.43* | .38* | .40* | — | ||||||
9. Affective Thompson | .20* | -.01 | -.21* | -.17* | -.24* | .16* | .38* | .56* | — | |||||
10. Average Thompson | .32* | -.05 | -.30* | -.24* | -.37* | .32* | .47* | .80* | .88* | — | ||||
11. Cognitive Maio | .14 | -.12 | -.12 | -.15 | -.22* | .17* | .27* | .26* | .13 | .22* | — | |||
12. Affective Maio | .24* | -.09 | -.16* | -.17* | -.15 | .23* | .36* | .26* | .26* | .27* | .18* | — | ||
13. Average Maio | .24* | -.14 | -.18* | -.21* | -.24* | .26* | .40* | .32* | .24* | .32* | .78* | .76* | — | |
14. Intercomponent Maio | .28* | -.12 | -.22* | -.21* | -.18* | .24* | .36* | .29* | .26* | .28* | .54* | .42* | .62* | — |
*
Two additional findings warrant mention. First, participants displayed greater affective than cognitive ambivalence on both the Thompson and Maio objective ambivalence measures (Thompson:
H2 predicted that ambivalence in attitudes toward forgiveness would be associated with people’s general tendencies to be forgiving versus vengeful and to view forgiveness as desirable and virtuous. We predicted that people would be less dispositionally forgiving, more inclined to seek revenge than grant forgiveness, and less disposed to view forgiveness as a virtue the more ambivalent their forgiveness attitudes.
Our findings generally supported this prediction (see
To gain a deeper understanding of participants’ attitudes toward forgiveness, we investigated potential differences between individuals scoring very high and very low on ambivalence (cf.,
We assigned participants to high versus low ambivalence groups based on their scores on the average subjective ambivalence index (average subjective) and the two average intracomponent measures of objective ambivalence. We first performed a tertile split on each ambivalence measure, assigning participants in the bottom third of the distribution to a low ambivalence group and participants in the top third to a high ambivalence group (using both the Thompson & Maio average intracomponent indices allowed us to assess convergence across measures of objective ambivalence. Including average subjective ambivalence allowed us to assess convergence across subjective and objective ambivalence. To reduce the risk of Type I error, and because intercomponent ambivalence was available only for the Maio measure, we excluded the Maio intercomponent index of ambivalence from these analyses).
Next, we used a median split on the ATF to create pro- and anti-forgiveness groups for each ambivalence index, assigning low ambivalence participants to two groups: those perceiving forgiveness as relatively less desirable and virtuous (bottom 50% on the ATF) versus relatively more desirable and virtuous (top 50%). We then ran one-way ANOVAs comparing the three newly created groups (separately for the average subjective, average objective Thompson, and average objective Maio indices) on their scores on the MFS Blockage and Forgiving subscales, the TTF, and the Vengeance Scale. We excluded the MFS Circumstances subscale from analysis because it was unrelated to ambivalence.
Because these analyses were exploratory, we had no specific hypotheses about the results we might observe. Nevertheless, we generally expected the pro-forgiveness group to exhibit the most forgiving responses (e.g., be relatively more inclined than the other two groups to forgive than seek vengeance and score highest on dispositional forgivingness), the anti-forgiveness group to exhibit the least forgiving responses (e.g., be least inclined to forgive rather than seek vengeance and score lowest in dispositional forgiveness), and the high ambivalence group to fall between the two low ambivalence groups. Essentially, we expected individuals high in ambivalence to be less polarized in their responses than those low in ambivalence, because highly ambivalent individuals hold conflicting and contradictory views of/feelings about forgiveness that ought to moderate their inclinations to be vengeful and forgiving (cf.
As
Variable | Average Subjective |
(Average) Objective Thompson |
(Average) Objective Maio |
|||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Blockage | 2,103 | 16.25 | .24 | < .001 | 2,101 | 12.80 | .20 | < .001 | 2,104 | 5.94 | .10 | .004 |
Forgiving | 2,103 | 13.80 | .21 | < .001 | 2,101 | 6.95 | .12 | < .001 | 2,104 | 3.40 | .06 | .04 |
TTF | 2,104 | 19.45 | .27 | < .001 | 2,102 | 5.37 | .10 | .006 | 2,105 | 4.43 | .08 | .01 |
Vengeance | 2,103 | 16.87 | .25 | < .001 | 2,101 | 10.42 | .17 | < .001 | 2,104 | 4.98 | .09 | .009 |
Variable/Group | Average Subjective |
(Average) Objective Thompson |
(Average) Objective Maio |
|||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
MD | MD | MD | ||||||||
Blockage | ||||||||||
Anti | Pro | .56 | .28 | .12 | .47 | .30 | .27 | .32 | .32 | .59 |
High Ambiv | -.69 | .26 | .02 | -.63 | .28 | .07 | -.46 | .30 | .28 | |
Pro | High Ambiv | -1.25 | .23 | .00 | -1.10 | .22 | .00 | -.78 | .22 | .00 |
Forgiving | ||||||||||
Anti | Pro | -.71 | .32 | .07 | -.24 | .35 | .77 | -.17 | .35 | .87 |
High Ambiv | .63 | .29 | .08 | .67 | .33 | .10 | .45 | .33 | .36 | |
Pro | High Ambiv | 1.34 | .26 | .00 | .91 | .25 | .01 | .63 | .25 | .03 |
TTF | ||||||||||
Anti | Pro | -.50 | .31 | .23 | -.32 | .36 | .65 | -.01 | .34 | 1.00 |
High Ambiv | .97 | .28 | .01 | .52 | .33 | .27 | .65 | .32 | .11 | |
Pro | High Ambiv | 1.48 | .24 | .00 | .84 | .26 | .01 | .65 | .24 | .02 |
Vengeance | ||||||||||
Anti | Pro | .81 | .25 | .01 | .42 | .27 | .25 | .49 | .28 | .18 |
High Ambiv | -.34 | .23 | .30 | -.45 | .25 | .16 | -.12 | .27 | .88 | |
Pro | High Ambiv | -1.15 | .19 | .00 | -.88 | .19 | .00 | -.62 | .20 | .01 |
Across an array of measures, our participants displayed moderate levels of ambivalence in their attitudes toward forgiveness. As their ambivalence increased, they also exhibited a diminished inclination to be forgiving, an enhanced pro-vengeance orientation, and less idealistic views of forgiveness. These results support the conclusion that attitudes toward forgiveness often contain both positive and negative thoughts and feelings. They also provide an empirical basis for believing that such ambivalence might have important implications for understanding whether and when people forgive, by demonstrating that evaluative inconsistency in forgiveness attitudes is associated with variation in self-reported tendencies to be forgiving/vengeful and to perceive forgiveness as virtuous and desirable.
Both societal discourses surrounding forgiveness and scholarly treatments of forgiveness tend to emphasize the benefits of forgiving, painting a rather idealistic portrait that accords little consideration to its potential challenges, pitfalls, and limitations (
A small body of research has explored laypeople’s conceptualizations of forgiveness (e.g.,
Second, our study is the first to show that evaluative inconsistency—measured directly (subjective or felt ambivalence) or indirectly (objective or potential ambivalence)—predicts variation in broader beliefs about forgiveness (i.e., that it is desirable, moral, admirable, virtuous) and dispositional inclinations to be forgiving and to exact revenge. Our research thus moves the literature on lay conceptualizations of forgiveness beyond simple description to show that characteristics of such conceptualizations, in the present case attitudinal ambivalence, are associated with important forgiveness-related variables that may, in their turn, influence whether and when individuals forgive.
The results of our ancillary analyses augment the evidence for concluding that attitudinal ambivalence toward forgiveness may be consequential. Counter to our speculations, those whose attitudes were most ambivalent either scored lower than their anti-forgiveness peers or were statistically indistinguishable from them in their tendencies to be forgiving/vengeful. This suggests that, at high enough levels, ambivalent forgiveness attitudes may operate much like disapproving attitudes. If so, highly ambivalent individuals may be just as disinclined to forgive—and to seek revenge—as those with more uniformly negative attitudes toward forgiving, despite the presence of pro-forgiveness elements in their attitudes (e.g., beliefs that forgiving is healing, brings peace, is beneficial).
Such a possibility aligns well with findings showing that negative events, outcomes, affect, and cognitions are more influential in driving people’s feelings, thoughts, and behavior than their positive counterparts (
Scholarly treatments of forgiveness have occasionally been criticized for painting forgiveness in idealistic and uncritical terms (e.g.,
Practically, previous work on lay views of forgiveness has highlighted the need for counselors and therapists to define forgiveness for clients, warning them to expect disagreement with and possibly resistance to widely accepted definitions in the literature (e.g.,
The possibility that high ambivalence and anti-forgiveness attitudes might result in similar beliefs about the value of forgiveness and dispositional tendencies to be forgiving/vengeful may also have implications for the delivery of forgiveness interventions. If, as our results suggest, highly ambivalent forgiveness attitudes impact the processes by which people determine how to respond to wrongdoing in the same way that attitudes more uniformly opposed to forgiveness do, highly ambivalent individuals might benefit from interventions designed to promote forgiving (i.e., when appropriate) as much as those with negative attitudes. Furthermore, people may not need to be aware of inconsistencies in their attitudes for this to be the case: The results of our ancillary analyses were consistent whether we used subjective or objective measures to categorize participants into ambivalence groups.
Our decision to employ multiple measures of ambivalence, dispositional forgiveness, and vengefulness is a strength of this research. It allowed us to assess ambivalence in forgiveness attitudes in a way that acknowledged the several forms ambivalence can take while gauging the extent to which our results were consistent across different measures/forms of ambivalence and in relation to several different but related facets of forgivingness and vengefulness.
In hindsight, however, we recognize that the order in which participants completed the various measures may have affected our results in unintended ways. Participants always completed the open-ended Maio task prior to the Thompson measure, the objective measures of ambivalence before the subjective measures, and the ambivalence measures before the other variables. This order may have inflated consistency between scores on the Maio and Thompson measures of objective ambivalence, subjective ambivalence scores, convergence between objective and subjective ambivalence, and associations between the ambivalence and forgiveness/revenge-related variables.
We are inclined to believe, nevertheless, that the impact order had on participants’ responses was likely slight. First, the levels of objective ambivalence we observed are comparable in magnitude to levels reported elsewhere, and the correlations between the various Maio and Thompson indices ranged from weak and nonsignificant (.13) to moderate (.32). The correlations between the various subjective and objective measures of ambivalence were at best moderate in size (.20 to .49), as well, and generally comparable in magnitude to those reported elsewhere (e.g., range .18 to .36 with three of the five
In the future, there would be considerable value in investigating potential moderators of the associations between ambivalence and forgivingness-vengefulness. In line with
Finally, there is a clear need for research examining whether ambivalence in attitudes toward forgiveness predicts actual forgiving. Our findings suggest that ambivalence is related to the proclivity to respond to wrongdoing with forgiveness, rather than vengeance, and the tendency to view forgiveness as a desirable and virtuous act, but they cannot speak to whether such ambivalence affects people’s actual decisions to forgive. If withholding forgiveness may deprive both individuals and their relational partners of the benefits of forgiveness, or perhaps protect them from its possible harms, this is an important issue to investigate.
We began this paper by quoting from a poem that exhorts us to forgive, promising that forgiving confers benefits from reducing personal resentment and bringing happiness to others to becoming “the master of fate, the fashioner of life, the doer of miracles” (
A Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada post-doctoral fellowship awarded to the third author facilitated her participation in this research.
The authors have no funding to report.
The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.