For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about forgiveness in human development.
Nearly everything that humans have accomplished as a species — building cities, making works of art, waging war, surviving in harsh environments — is connected to our ability to make and maintain forms of social cooperation. But how have these social processes come about? One way to investigate is through the lens of broad-scale evolution, looking for evidence in human prehistory of when different forms of cooperation developed. Another way is to look at when aspects of social cooperation emerge in the course of individual lives. For the past several years Amrisha Vaish, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, has been examining compassion and concern in children, studying when children gain the motivation to intervene to prevent transgressions, and at what stages they begin to show guilt, recognizing when their actions have damaged important relationships.
“A facet of being human is that we make mistakes and hurt others,” Vaish says. “We need to make amends and repair those relationships. Guilt essentially helps us to make repairs, to say ‘Let me make amends and let us continue this important relationship.’” Vaish realized that the expression of guilt is only half of the reparative process: “In order for the cycle to be complete, there has to be something that comes back from the victim — forgiveness.”