Trinity Psychologist Delves into Forgiveness, Narcissism, and Hindsight Bias

I forgive you. Researchers have found that there is power in these three words and within the last several years, study after study has concluded that the act of forgiveness can have many beneficial aspects for a person who is wronged. 

But what effect does the act of forgiveness have on the person being forgiven? What happens to the transgressor after he or she receives forgiveness?

Harry Wallace, assistant professor of psychology at Trinity, uses experiments to study how forgiveness affects the behavior of the forgiven. Wallace’s social psychology lab has shown that receiving forgiveness usually motivates offenders to reciprocate the goodwill of the forgiver. For example, Wallace and his student assistants have found that transgressors who receive forgiveness are typically far less likely to repeat their transgression. The forgiven “tend to want to do better” by the people who forgive them, says Wallace.

In addition to their forgiveness research, Wallace and his student collaborators are investigating links between nonpathological narcissism and task persistence. Wallace explains that past research has established that narcissists are highly reactive to setbacks, but this research has not clarified whether this reactivity stems from threatened self-esteem or, alternatively, from frustration “that they can’t show off or get credit for the greatness they truly feel they have.” Wallace’s experiments suggest that narcissists maintain their inflated self-esteem following failure and their self-confidence helps them to persevere more than others to the extent that the goal is glorifying. Unfortunately their quest for glory can also lead narcissists to persist unwisely despite clear cues to quit.

Wallace’s social psychology lab also studies predictors of hindsight bias, a.k.a. the ‘knew it all along effect’ or a kind of Monday morning quarterbacking phenomenon.

“When people are informed about some facts or given some information, the tendency is for people to overestimate the degree to which they had that information prior to being told,” says Wallace. Wallace’s novel research indicates that the strength of hindsight bias is tied to the effort devoted to learn the new information.

Wallace explains that people assume (and are motivated to feel) that their personal investments toward gaining knowledge will yield knowledge improvement. “If you are working hard to earn the knowledge that you have, you would be less likely to claim you had this knowledge in the past.”

© 2007 Trinity University