The psychology of forgiveness with Michael McCullough (Transcript)

Please note the following transcript may not exactly match the final audio, as minor edits or adjustments could be made during production.

Michael McCullough: I think the thing that surprised me the most is just how badly resentment can eat people up and corrode relationships.

Adam Grant: Hey, it's Adam Grant. We're doing something different for this season of WorkLife, my podcast with TED. We're pairing each of our regular episodes with a companion interview to build on and challenge what we said today. We're following up our episode on apologies by talking about forgiveness with psychologist Michael McCullough.

Mike is a UC San Diego professor and a pioneer in the study of forgiveness as well as gratitude, empathy, and morality. He's the author of The Kindness of Strangers, How a Selfish Ape Invented a New Moral Code, and Beyond Revenge: the Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct. We had a fascinating conversation about the psychology behind forgiveness, what causes people to hold grudges, and when it's wise not to forgive.

Michael McCullough: I probably see it maybe a little bit more strategically than other people see it. Kind of the motivational machinery that might be, make somebody interested in the first place. 

Adam Grant: I was surprised by the, this point that you made about how like resenting another person or, you know, failing to forgive, you know, within reason, um, can actually take a toll on you. Being too unforgiving is actually bad for my wellbeing. 

Michael McCullough: Absolutely, yeah. There's a giant research literature suggesting that resentments and unforgiven harms show up in lost sleep, lost energy, difficulties with regulating blood pressure. You know, just an enormous number of physical kind of sequela, but nevermind those. Just also the unwellness that comes from ruminating, um, and being preoccupied with really unproductive memories. So if you're sitting around nursing grudges, painting over people who've harmed you in the past with kind of scarlet letters and stigmatizing them and refusing to let them back into your life, I mean, you're stripping away sources of social support, but you're also gonna get locked into a mental space of just thinking about how you've been mistreated rather than ways in which you've been really well treated by others.

Adam Grant: Wow, that, that sounds like a recipe for, uh, for a victim complex. 

Michael McCullough: Yeah, totally. 

Adam Grant: Or a victimhood complex, I should say. 

Michael McCullough: Yes, exactly. Yeah. 

Adam Grant: Let, let's start with the basic psychology of forgiveness. What motivates people to give it? What motivates people to seek it? What are we after? 

Michael McCullough: Let's take it from the seeking side. Why would you want forgiveness? Because there's actually risks to be had by even bringing up a harm that you've, you've created for somebody. You know, if you just think at the most basic level, well, maybe what I did to this person they never even found out about. Or maybe the fact that they haven't spoken about it means they didn't care, or it wasn't as big of a deal as I thought. So all along those points, I think what we're doing is trying to weigh risks. Because there is the risk of retaliatory harm. You know, maybe it's not somebody bashing you on the head with a soup can, but it's telling other people about the awful thing you did. Uh, it could be heaping guilt on you next time you talk. And I think stage one for most people would be to try to hide the initial risks by just denying them. You know, denying that anything happened, hoping nobody noticed. Um, 'cause the further you go down that road of having to, you know, hear the person you harmed, yes, actually positively indicate you did harm them, then there's been this kind of piercing to your own moral, um, self-concept as like a decent person. So even seeking forgiveness, deciding to seek forgiveness means acknowledging you harm somebody. You think of this like a trial, you know, you're kind of pleading guilty, you know? 

Adam Grant: Oh, I like that. 

Michael McCullough: You, you have surrendered a big part of your potential defense when you seek forgiveness. 

Adam Grant: I've seen people circumvent that risk, or at least try to by saying, we, we don't see eye to eye on the harm done, but you're mad at me, so I, I'm, I would love to repair this so that you're no longer angry and we can get along. Does that work? In other words, can I, can I still seek forgiveness without pleading guilty? Like I'm, I'm acknowledging that you've, you've had a negative reaction to my behavior, but I'm not necessarily admitting fault. 

Michael McCullough: Yeah, I mean that's a, that's a tough conversational bid right there where we're not, you know, where we're not even going to agree on the meaning of the events. You know, if you think about this as a process of negotiation, um, where I'm gonna give a little, you're gonna give a little and we're gonna try to get someplace mutually productive, um, I think that is a step. You know? So if what I said to you wasn't meant to be critical or ridiculing, but constructive or helpful, then same facts about what I said, very different intention. So where can we meet? Well, maybe we can meet in, I know this was harmful to you. I know this was hurtful. It doesn't, it doesn't sound like I'm gonna be able to convince you that my intentions were benign. We're coming from different cultural backgrounds. I grew up in a family where people, you know, argued in very pointed ways, and it was out of love rather than out of, you know, ill will. Um, I can't convince you of that, but I, we can agree that what I did harmed you so. It's a middle way, I think between, you know, a complete acknowledgement of the meaning the, the victim has experienced and deny it completely. 

Adam Grant: Yeah. That, that's helpful. So let's take the other perspective now, when someone has wronged you or you feel harmed by someone else. Um, you have a few options. One is to try to get revenge. Another is to avoid them, uh, or ghost them. Uh, and then a third is to forgive them. How does the, the victim decide which option to choose? 

Michael McCullough: What our working hypothesis has been for a long time is that people evolved to forgive, um, as our species was becoming modern. There was a lot to be said for restoring the right kind of relationships. We're a, we're a species that requires a lot of cooperation to make a living, and we just don't have the luxury of just lobbing off every unproductive relationship. We have to restore some. But you could also make the mistake of forgiving rashly, and if you're gonna forgive rashly, what's gonna happen is you're gonna end up repairing and restoring relationships with people who don't, who actually don't have goodwill for you, who harmed you and probably, you know, might very well harm you again. Or individuals who, who kind of don't have a whole lot of value to you going forward as a cooperation partner. You know? And that's just kind of the fall, tragic fall in this of our lives. What I think of forgive or, what, what I think our evolved minds are trying to do when we're trying to decide whether to try to repair this relationship with somebody versus avoid them or retaliate is figure out, all right. I can see the, the benefits of restoring this relationship, but I need to figure out whether those benefits are on offer and I need to figure out whether this person's likely to harm me again in the future. And if the answers to that are yes and no, well that looks like somebody who'd be a good candidate to forgive. And if not, well maybe it's not so smart. 

Adam Grant: That, that makes a lot of sense. It, it seems like where many people get stuck is instead of asking the question that you posed, which is like, what, what is the future impact of this relationship? They think about the role the person has played in the past. 

Michael McCullough: Yeah. 

Adam Grant: So like, oh, well, you know, I have to give, I have to forgive. They're family. 

Michael McCullough: Right. 

Adam Grant: Or, you know, well, but they used to treat me well. 

Michael McCullough: Yeah. 

Adam Grant: Nevermind that, you know, something has shifted. How do you think about helping people reframe that?

Michael McCullough: That's such a great question. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and if you'll indulge me, I want to give you what I think is a pretty decent analog. When a romantic relationship ends, we often kind of, like we know it's over, and yet there's a part of us that just sort of stays connected and attached to the relationship and you kind of have to grieve it and let go of all that. And I think that's because the mind is wired up in such a way that it doesn't wanna let go of that really, a relationship that was once really valuable too rashly. So I think the mind wants a lot of evidence to accumulate that continuing this relationship is not gonna happen, or it's a really bad idea before you're really willing to kind of let go of it completely. It's like, I really don't wanna cut off this relationship rashly. Um, if I, we have this big kind of reservoir of positive relating in the past, because that's a good indicator we might have them again in the future. And that's where a lot of conflict comes, comes from in forgiveness. 

Adam Grant: Yeah, very much so. People often say, um, you know, you shouldn't bite the hand that feeds you. But I also find myself reminding them sometimes, you shouldn't feed the hand that repeatedly bites you. 

Michael McCullough: Yeah. Yeah. That's nice. That's really nice. 

Adam Grant: Although you can't feed a hand, but, you know, forgive that part of the, of the, the flip of the cliche.

Michael McCullough: I love it. No, I love it. That's a really nice insight. We have stores of positive relationships with a lot of people in our lives, and sometimes they do things that just require us to kind of cut off those relationships. The unproductive ones, you know? But we often look back and you don't want to give it up too quickly. You want to forgive, you want to forgive, you want to forgive. And I think we probably differ in this, like some of us are really risk averse. You know, I might be on this side. I mean, certainly I put more emphasis on trying to salvage relationships than a lot of people I know would, you know? A lot of people are like, why didn't you just like, forget that person? You know, just move on. And I think I'm like kind of conservative where I just think like, man, establishing relationships is really a lot of work and it takes time. Like I don't think I want to just like cash in my chips on that. I think I want to spend some time seeing if we can rehabilitate it. Whereas other people are like maybe more, you know, comfortable with risk and they're like, nah, it's time to move on and find another best friend. You know, something like that. 

Adam Grant: Yeah, that, I guess that that reminds me a little bit of the Laura Carstensen work on socio-emotional selectivity and how people become choosier as they, as they get older about like, who do I really wanna spend my time with? Uh, and so it sounds like you're, you've resisted that, that pressure.

Michael McCullough: Yeah, I, I mean, I, I think so, yes. But you know, I'm not getting any younger at the same time and I can really relate to that. You lose some of that just sort of social entrepreneurial kind of spirit.

Adam Grant: I am gonna ask you to put on your counseling psychologist hat, 'cause I, I need your wisdom and advice here. 

Michael McCullough: I don't get to do this nearly enough, so I'm ready. 

Adam Grant: I've gotten what for a long time was confusing feedback from people who know me well. 

Michael McCullough: Hmm. 

Adam Grant: Some of them tell me I'm too forgiving, and others tell me I'm too unforgiving. And at first I thought, okay, maybe that just means I'm the middle. And then I thought, no, this, this feedback is coming from people who are farther on one end of the spectrum or the other than me. 

Michael McCullough: Mm. 

Adam Grant: And so they're judging me relative to where they are. And I, I think there's some truth to both of those interpretations, but lately where I've landed is I think that the, the major driver of this seemingly conflicting feedback is I'm extremely forgiving of small violations. 

Michael McCullough: Hmm. 

Adam Grant: And extremely unforgiving of large ones. 

Michael McCullough: Okay. 

Adam Grant: And I wonder, is that common? Have you encountered this? How should I think about that? How do I explain it to other people who don't understand it? Um, just curious to get your reactions to that and what, what advice I am missing in how to navigate this. 

Michael McCullough: Yeah. I mean, I do, I do think that, you know, the world is full of these, the mind is a prediction machine, right? What the brains are doing is allowing us to predict what the future is gonna look like. And you know, the world is full of these like extremely noisy cues. I would say you're probably being, you know, a fairly rational consumer of, of this kind of information. If someone's little harms, little slights. Those are probably less diagnostic of somebody's underlying disposition. Someone who's always doing little slights, you might say, well, I'm pretty sure this is a very careless person. Just sort of principles of politeness they violate over and over. They're always late. They don't seem to respect my time or um, feelings, but it's all minor stuff, you know? So I can just say like, well, this is a person I really like and I just have to live with this kind of foible they have, that seems to be intrinsic to their personality. So I think that's fine. You know, like you're, you know, depending, well, let me ask you, when, when someone in your life, you know, kind of repeatedly goes through a sequence of these little slights, what do you make of it? 

Adam Grant: What I usually do is I, like, I hear the, well, okay, I, I guess what typically happens is I sort of, I file it away as information about like, okay, maybe this is a specific situation where, you know, we don't agree on principles or, you know, I can't trust them in this way, but it's part of a big 3D picture of them. 

Michael McCullough: Okay, yeah. 

Adam Grant: And so I've just, I've just learned like, oh, they had all these virtues and now there's this little vice. And I wanna be aware of that so that, you know, like I, I don't bump into that, that issue again, or, you know, maybe I need to give them feedback on that 'cause they've never been told how it comes across. Um, and then, you know, if somebody does something major, I think the, the big violations for me are in the, the integrity and generosity buckets. 

Michael McCullough: Yeah. 

Adam Grant: You know, if someone tells a, a lie or cheats or doesn't follow through on a commitment or uses others for personal gain, then I'm like, okay, yeah. This is a, a potential character flaw and I do not necessarily want a relationship with this person anymore. Is, is my default reaction. 

Michael McCullough: I think that's good. Yeah. I, I think if you're, you know, you take these little ones and I mean, you could make the inference like, wow, interacting with this person's gonna be a death by a thousand cuts. You know, it's, but that's, you know, that's, you know, but it could, you could just say like, well, yeah, but I heal up.

I'll get over it and we'll go back to, you know, having a beer and talking about sports next week, you know, or whatever it is. But yeah, you're right with these harms that are basically about character or generosity. Um, or. 

Adam Grant: Respect for other people. 

Michael McCullough: Yes, an indifference to the possibility of creating grave harm for somebody like the, those kind of high stakes violations are really saying something very different about somebody's character. So I don't know if, um, you know, like where your point of making that distinction falls, like relative to the rest of the world or something like that. But I think you're making the right kind of judgments. I think probably people sit somewhere along that, right? So I, I think you probably could kind of like imagine people who won't forgive any of them. You're like, I don't know. That doesn't seem like a great way to live. And other people who just will forgive everything and that seems like a really bad way to live. So maybe you're, maybe you're stuckness is some people telling you they want to pull you down, they want, they want you to be down where they are, which is like, you should forgive all of them and others saying you shouldn't forgive any of 'em. You know? So. 

Adam Grant: Yeah. And I, I don't wanna be pulled too far in either direction. 

Michael McCullough: That's right. Yeah. So we probably each, you know, that's probably an interesting individual difference actually, is like, you, I don't know what you wanna call it, you know, forbearance or harm tolerance or something along those lines. We probably differ in that. You know? 

Adam Grant: So interesting. I eagerly await your paper on those individual differences. 

Michael McCullough: Yeah. Yeah. It'd be great. I mean, I have, we have looked a lot at individual differences in people's tendencies to forgive. There's a lot of work on that, but I don't think I've ever thought of it as where you fall along a continuum of kind of severity of harms. 

Adam Grant: Yes. 

Michael McCullough: And the frequency too. I mean, both are important. Like how often are you gonna harm me? And on average, how painful are those harms gonna be? 

Adam Grant: That's, I, I think that's a great way to look at it. And yeah, I think it, I, I guess it resonates for me to say like, it takes a lot to cross me.

Michael McCullough: Hmm. 

Adam Grant: And so if you do, you're not coming back.

Michael McCullough: Uhhuh. Yeah. 

Adam Grant: Now, the other, the other thing I wanted to ask you about from a personal perspective is, uh, last week in our episode, I had a little debate, uh, with Beth Polin, one of my favorite apology researchers, about the request for forgiveness and whether it should be made.

Beth Polin: Will you forgive me? You could also word it as any statement that invites the other person in. 

Adam Grant: I wanna fight you on this one. 

Beth Polin: Okay. 

Adam Grant: Because I think when someone asks for forgiveness, it sounds self-centered. Like at least it's the way it comes across to me. Like when someone says to me, will you forgive me or do you forgive me? What I hear them saying is, I'm shifting my attention from the fact that I wronged you to the fact that I want you to absolve me of blame. And to me, it undercuts the apology. 

Beth Polin: Hmm. Yeah. Instead of thinking of it as self-centered, think of it as an invitation. You're welcoming the other person in to the trust repair process, and it still is their choice because people can choose to not engage in the trust repair process, right? We've all heard, you know, I forgive you, but we still need to go our separate ways, right? So you get that forgiveness, but you do not get the full relationship repair. 

Michael McCullough: I love this so much because, um, you know, I've had encounters, um, both on the business end of, of those kind of requests for forgiveness and probably also on the one delivering them, where you go from, wait a minute, I'm the person suffering here. I'm the one who got harmed by the harm, and now I feel like you are, you are the one that needs to be comforted here because you're so upset with by your guilt, you know. So I've experienced the point, a point of view you're bringing, which is, wait a minute, you're apologizing. Now you're asking me for forgiveness? Like the fact that I haven't forgiven you is a problem I the victim now need to solve. You've made this all about you all of a sudden, you know? 

Adam Grant: Bingo. 

Michael McCullough: Yeah. I, I mean, I, I have, I know I have made apologies like that, and I know I have received them, and I, I think, I think that's right. I, I also understand where Beth is coming from, which is there's something powerful about the meaning. That that statement, will you forgive me or I hope you'll forgive me, it carries surplus meaning that also changes kind of the negotiation process that, you know, the granting of forgiveness is. So, um, you know, let's go from the first side. Um, please forgive me, I feel horrible about what I did. I just wish I could take it back. Um, I feel awful about myself. I know this speaks really poorly of me. You've totally changed the topic. Um, when what we should be talking about is maybe not even like, will you forgive me, but maybe what a lot of victims want. I know this is what a lot of victims want is, I know I harmed you, what can I do to repair it? Maybe the winning combination is I acknowledge it, I agree with your meaning, you are correct in how it speaks about my character, but I think there is another way of understanding, um, my value to you and how I want to demonstrate this is by doing the best I can to undo the harms, you know, that I committed. 

Adam Grant: I think that's a really nice way to thread the needle because after talking with Beth, I, I ended up, you know, really conflicted on this. Um, you know, on, on the one hand, I still, I still have this reaction of, yeah, don't, don't put the burden on the victim to tell the offender No, no, it's okay. We're good. Uh, and, you know, and, and the ask can feel too much like, like a demand. 

Michael McCullough: That's right. 

Adam Grant: But on, but on the other hand, I like the idea of the invitation, um, and communicating, like, our relationship matters to me. And so if I can, if I can play back to you, your approach, um, maybe with slightly different words. I can imagine saying to somebody, I would love to earn your forgiveness. Um, what can I do to repair this relationship? 

Michael McCullough: Yes. Yes. I like that one a lot. What can I do to demonstrate to you that I'm somebody you can trust, who can be of value to you going forward, who's unlikely to harm you again in the future?

Adam Grant: It seems like a lot of people want to forgive or even offer forgiveness, but then struggle to actually do it. 

Michael McCullough: Mm-hmm.

Adam Grant: I mean, I, I think every marriage has gone through some version of, like, but you, you told me you weren't gonna bring that up again. 

Michael McCullough: Mm-hmm. Right. 

Adam Grant: Or didn't, hadn't we already moved past this? Right? Um, and you know, we see this in, in all kinds of relationships that, you know, sometimes like people, they're like, okay, I wanna forgive, but I didn't forget, but I haven't really forgiven. I'm still holding a grudge. How do you get over that kind of grudge if you're struggling to let it go? 

Michael McCullough: It's very hard to put a dark line under your accounts and say anything above the line we're not gonna talk about anymore. Um, now that's adaptive, you know? Um, it would be kind of a crazy design for a human mind that you could just simply erase the past and not refer back to it as, as it's as it's necessary. 

Adam Grant: Yeah. That's why Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind would never happen in real life.

Michael McCullough: That's right. That's, oh yeah. What a, what an amazing movie. I know some people really hate it, but I really loved it. Here's the problem. There's no way humans are designed to forget the past, okay? And every time you remember that harm, part of what you're gonna remember is the harmfulness of it, unless you've changed the meaning of it in a really deep way. Because you can change the meaning of it and say, that harm marked a really important turning point in our relationship. You know, there's, there's different kinds of meaning you can ascribe to it that would make the harmfulness not be the first thing that comes to consciousness. You know, it's a milestone. This was a watershed for our relationship. It almost killed our relationship, but we got past that stuff. 

Adam Grant: That is such a powerful reframe. Uh, a, a turning point. A crucible. You're right, it changes the way that you look at the past and it also then gives you a reason not to re-litigate it. 

Michael McCullough: That's right. I haven't forgotten about it. What I have done is changed how I have integrated into my sense of self or into the sense of my relationship history, you know?

Adam Grant: Yeah. Oh, I'm, I, I am all in on this one. This is a, a great rethinking moment for me. 

Michael McCullough: Oh, good. Yeah, for me too. I mean, I, so many of these questions you're bringing up, I've really never thought of in this way, so this is awesome for me as well. 

Adam Grant: Okay. So maybe zooming out a little bit, um, this, this conversation makes me think a lot about cultural differences. What are the most important cultural differences that you think we should be aware of, um, when you think about what a forgiving, you know, community or workplace or family or society looks like. 

Michael McCullough: Right. Yeah. Um, there's a, a million different dimensions you could use to think this through. Uh, one would be religious culture. In some versions of religious culture, like, you know, interpersonal forgiveness is like the apex thing, you know? Um. The, the tradition I know the most about would be the Christian tradition, where it's like forgiveness is supposed to be unconditional. It's supposed to be full, it's supposed to be constantly refreshed, but that's like not the only religious view of this thing. You know, like you could turn to other traditions. They're like, no, no, no, no, no. It's all about repentance. Like, I don't want to, I don't want to hear about this just infinite forgiveness, infinite patience, take anything on the cheek, like I wanna see changed behavior. There's also regional cultural differences in how people respond to harms. I was raised in Jacksonville, Florida, and um, even now in the 21st century, you can still feel the kind of focus on honor and dignity that goes back a long way in Florida history. You know, people have very long memories in the South about harms and slights, and that's probably why there's so much focus on politeness.

Adam Grant: Oh, fascinating. That's a feature of a culture of honor. I never thought about it that way. 

Michael McCullough: Absolutely. Yeah. No, I, I, I think this is, this is right. You know, I don't wanna trivialize this. Like, it's just nice to be nice to people, you know? I don't, I don't wanna overanalyze 'cause like, I like when people are polite to me, I like being polite, you know?

Um, but there. 

Adam Grant: Bless your heart then. 

Michael McCullough: That's a, like, I live that I really, I, that's, that's, that's totally my thing. Um, but there's a way in which you can view it also, I mean, as a kind of aggression control. I mean, I think the good news is that, you know, people who are sort of pathologically unforgiving, you know, I don't know that there's a lot of them, you know, I think most of us have kind of set points somewhere in like a favorable place. We're gonna forgive a lot of the low stakes harms. We're gonna put you in a penalty box for the moderate harms that you've committed against me, and there will be some kind of, you know, life without parole offenses as well. So, um, you know, it's getting that mix right. And wherever we set our needle down on along that continuum is, it's history, it's personality, it's culture. Um, and I wouldn't dream of kind of having the wisdom to tell anybody where they should kind of calibrate to, but too much of either end is probably a bad thing.

Adam Grant: This episode was produced by Daphne Chen. Our team includes Brittany Cronin, Constanza Gallardo, Greta Cohn, Grace Rubenstein, Daniella Balarezo, Banban Cheng, Alejandra Salazar, and Roxanne Hai Lash. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Our show is Mixed by Sarah Bruguiere. Original music by Hahnsdale Hsu and Allison Layton Brown.

That's the, the secret purpose of this podcast, right, is we, we just wanna motivate more research through talking to the most interesting thinkers I've come across. 

Michael McCullough: Well, it's paying off for me for sure. Thank you.