In the past years, scientists have found three main ways to help people in their act of giving. First, let's talk about how forgiveness helps the donor. Second, we can understand the role of perceived injustices in our ability to cope with the injustices that life presents to us. Third, we can use many methods to deal with injustices, and forgiveness is just one of them.
People take steps to forgive, thinking about the benefits that may be to them. We learned from our experiments conducted in our fully random applied research that we applied the “REACH Forgiveness Module”, that even thinking about the benefits of forgiveness for about 10 minutes can motivate the act of forgiveness.
We gave participants comparable periods of time to reflect on and become familiar with the benefits of forgiving the forgiver. How long they spent telling themselves these benefits (8 hours, 6 hours, 5 hours, 2 hours, 1 hour, or just 10 minutes) resulted in no change in their level of forgiveness, and all participants were equally forgiving.
Although not as much as active interventions, the study of thinking about the benefits of forgiveness was also very important in terms of its results. We learned, hilariously, how science sometimes works, from the fact that even our "placebo control group" consistently helps people forgive.
The essence of science is to be open-minded to new and unexpected possibilities. Then you need to test these possibilities and see which ones work.
REMEMBER WE HAVE CHOICES
By recognizing that we have options other than forgiveness to deal with injustices, we reduce the pressure of forgiveness.
We all make calculations on our wound after being injured. The injustice gap “injusticegap” is an ongoing subjective tally of how perceived injustice is tied to each individual injury or crime. Injustice clearance was proposed in 2003, but a good scale of the theory was not yet available until 2015.
The theory argues that our sense of injustice increases if people refuse to admit they hurt us, or if suffering continues to pile up on people. However, our sense of injustice will usually subside when offenders apologize, make amends, and sincerely apologize.
According to the theory, the greater the perceived injustice gap, the harder it is to deal with. In fact, sometimes the clearing of injustice seems so large that it is more like a canyon that seems impossible to jump through, rather than a gap that we can forgive.
People's resilience increases by realizing that forgiveness doesn't have to do all the hard work needed to deal with large openings of injustice. We can use many actions together to reduce the feeling of injustice to where it can be managed with forgiveness.
Prof. Dr. Kemal Sayar, kemalsayar.com