An Interview with Research Psychologist Matt Hirshberg

Part One of Two

In this age of grievance and deadly conflict, what can we learn about forgiveness through the lens of science that expands what religion and moral philosophy teach us?

Social scientists have now been studying the psychological benefits of personal forgiveness for more than thirty years.[1] The act of forgiving, they have found, can have benefits both mental (less anger, anxiety, and depression) and physical (lower blood pressure, better sleep, improved immune system).[2]

More recently, researchers have been studying whether they can apply what they have learned about personal forgiveness to group forgiveness—as a way to reduce conflict among groups and enhance the prospects for peace. [3] What could be more urgent?

One of the leading researchers in studying forgiveness is psychologist Matt Hirshberg, Research Assistant Professor at the Center for Healthy Minds. I asked Matt to explain some of the research he is working on.

Dale Kushner: Please share the mission of the Center for Healthy Minds and the path that brought you there.

Matt Hirshberg: The Center for Healthy Minds (CHM) is a research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-M). Its mission is to cultivate well-being and reduce suffering through a scientific understanding of the mind. My professional career began as a middle school teacher. I viewed my role as a teacher primarily through the lens of supporting a holistic notion of healthy development in my students. That meant that although I was concerned with them learning class content, I was more focused on their development of social-emotional and academic skills that carry forward throughout life, including what have often been called virtues such as a forgiveness and compassion.

I had been a meditator before I began teaching and concluded that to the extent that I had cultivated these skills or virtues in my life, it was mostly through my meditation practice. I began each class with a brief meditation practice and observed benefits in my students and in the classroom dynamic, which made me interested in the potential of these practices in secular contexts. I then learned that research was beginning on forgiveness, mindfulness and other forms of meditation in a variety of contexts. I decided to go to graduate school so that I could participate in the work as a researcher and enrolled at the UW-M to study with Dr. Robert Enright, a founder of the scientific study of forgiveness. For the last few years of my PhD program, I worked as a graduate trainee at the CHM.

DK: Was your interest in doing research on forgiveness sparked by any particular event or experience?

MH: My primary focus coming into graduate school was on the potential for meditation interventions to cultivate well-being and reduce suffering. That same focus continues. My interest in forgiveness is twofold. First, I view forgiveness as an important positive characteristic and component of well-being and one that ought to emerge through serious meditation practice. Second, my PhD advisor, Dr. Robert Enright, had applied the same types of scientific designs to his study of forgiveness that I wished to apply to the study of secular meditation interventions. I wanted to learn from him.

DK: How do you define interpersonal forgiveness?

MH: The first important aspect of interpersonal forgiveness is that there must be a harm in an interpersonal relationship. Forgiveness begins with a recognition that one has been harmed. In that harm there is pain, resentment, and anger (which by the way are natural responses to harm). Having recognized the harm and the attendant suffering, one then must choose what to do next. The path to forgiveness involves a decision to work through the pain and the suffering by opening up to the possibility of forgiveness.

We should be clear that forgiveness is not forgetting or explaining away. In other words, the forgiver can be very clear that they were harmed, that the perpetrator and act(s) were wrong, that experiencing pain and anger is justified (and natural). However, because anger and resentment are corrosive to well-being, liberating oneself from the difficult experience may require offering beneficence or goodwill or compassion to the offender, but not necessarily for the offender.

Once a decision to move toward forgiveness has occurred, the next step in Dr. Enright’s process model is what he calls the work phase. In this phase, the forgiver tries to better understand the causes and conditions that contributed to the offender acting as they did and through this understanding the forgiver tries to see the offender in their full humanity. It also involves recognizing the full depth of the harm and pain and accepting it.

Forgiveness may result in reconciliation but it does not need to. It also may result in altruistic feelings such as empathy and compassion toward the offender because by going through the forgiveness process the forgiver recognizes the humanity of the offender and the suffering and the challenges he or she must have experienced to lead them to act in the way(s) they did. (Dr. Robert Enright describes his forgiveness process in some detail in his March 18, 2024 post on Psychology Today, “Complete the Forgiveness Journey with the Forgiveness Triangle.”)

DK: How are you defining groups? Does your research about group forgiveness apply to families? Neighborhoods? Countries? Or only to chosen groups such as corporations, companies, organizations and political groups?

MH: A group is any collection of two or more individuals with a shared identity. All of the examples listed above could be groups and group forgiveness could be relevant to them.

DK: How do you define group forgiveness?

MH: Group forgiveness is when an identity group (e.g., team, company, religious organization, country) establishes norms and values that promote forgiveness, make public statements and commitments that lead to or are consistent with forgiveness, and establishes structures that support forgiveness. For example, a truth and reconciliation process following strife between two groups is an example of a structure that supports forgiveness.

DK: How is forgiveness different from reconciliation, pardoning, excusing, accommodating?

MH: Reconciliation is coming back together after a breaking apart. Forgiveness might lead to reconciliation, but it is equally possible that forgiveness leads to strong feelings of compassion and the recognition that reconciliation would likely lead to more harm. Pardoning is typically a legal term that suggests a legal remedy for a prior transgression. Forgiveness does not pardon or excuse; the process of forgiveness involves fully appreciating that harm was done and accepting the consequences of that harm, and then making the decision to move beyond it. Accommodating intimates adjusting one’s point of view so that it is closer to another’s. While better understanding the causes and conditions that might have contributed to the offender offending is part of the forgiveness process, it does not involve accommodating an alternative understanding of the harm itself (e.g., the offender’s rationale).

DK: What do you want to understand better to develop measures to apply group forgiveness to peacemaking?

MH: There have been few studies testing conceptions of group forgiveness.[4] (Matt is co-author of the referenced paper) That is a good place to start. The interactions between individuals that comprise a group and the group itself are critically important and not well understood. More research on these dynamics and the effects that, for example, an influential forgiving leader has on group values, statements and structures at the individual level and on the group member level is another important topic to explore.

DK: What are the three most important things you’ve learned from your study of forgiveness?

MH: The first thing is that forgiveness is not for the benefit of the offender—it is the clear-eyed recognition that if we cannot accept and move through the harm and be able to see even our offender in their humanity, there are significant costs to our mental health and well-being. Second, forgiveness takes enormous courage and strength. Anger and resentment are easier than facing the pain of the offenses we have experienced and facing the ways these experiences have altered our lives. Third, the greatest gift we can give ourselves is forgiving those we have perceived as harming us, because it liberates us from anger and resentment.

[1] Enright, Robert, “Reflecting on 30 Years of Forgiveness Science” Psychology Today, April 16, 2019

[2] Laurence, Emily, “Forgiveness: How to Forgive Yourself and Others,” Forbes Health, January 27, 2023

[3] Enright, R. D., Lee, Y.-R., Hirshberg, M. J., Litts, B. K., Schirmer, E. B., Irwin, A. J., Klatt, J., Hunt, J., & Song, J. Y. (2016). Examining group forgiveness: Conceptual and empirical issues. Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 22(2), 153–162

[4] Enright, Robert D.; Johnson, Julie; Na, Fu; Erzar, Tomaz; Hirshberg, Matthew; Huang, Tina; Klatt, John; Lee, Chansoon (Danielle); Boateng, Benjamin; Boggs, Preston; Hsiao, Tung-En; Olson, Chelsea; Shu, Mei Ling; Song, Jacqueline; Wu, Peiying; and Zhang, Baoyu (2020) “Measuring Intergroup Forgiveness: The Enright Group Forgiveness Inventory,” Peace and Conflict Studies: Vol. 27: No. 1, Article 1.

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at Transcending the Past.

If you found this post interesting, you may also want to read “Teen Mental Health: What’s a Parent to Do?” Part Two of my interview with Matt Hirshberg, “Revenge Is Rarely Sweet,” “’Let It Go!’ More than a song title, the motto for our age,” and “How I write; love and forgiveness.”

Keep up with everything Dale is doing by subscribing to her newsletter, Exploring the Unknown in Mind and Heart.

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I began to write and publish poetry in my thirties. Soon, the word went out among my family members—Dale’s a poet!—something Robert Frost advised against calling oneself, claiming it to be a rather self-indulgent title. But to my family a poet I was, certified (by an MFA) and published.

My first writing assignment might have been my sister’s second marriage for which I was asked to write a poem. The sorts of poems written for weddings, birthdays, retirements, funerals are referred to as “occasional poems,” that is, composed for specific occasions. My sister requested I write a poem, and a poem I did write, though I cannot now recall a single line, nor how I felt composing it. The poem must have passed the mustard since I’m sure I would have remembered any negative comments, as these seem to have a longer shelf-life than praise. Fast-forward a few decades: the poem and my sister’s second marriage have both vaporized.

The next occasions I must have written poems for were birthdays, my Aunt Ann’s retirement, and maybe a Mother’s Day or two. I disliked having to create on demand but understood how much it meant to others to be the focus of an original piece of writing dedicated solely to them. And so I obliged. My father’s funeral is a blur. He died instantly in a car crash while I was camping with my family at a remote site above Lake Superior accessible only by canoe. The outfitters paddled out to find us, and we made it back in time for the funeral, but my poet-mind seemed gone for good. Of course a year later I was writing poems about my father, poems filled with memories and questions about who he was to me and who he was to himself, poems I couldn’t have written while he was alive.

Which is to say I’m in complete accordance with Wordsworth’s dictum that poetry is “emotion recollected in tranquility.” I’ve never been a writer who cozies up to writing on command. I do know plenty of writers who swear by writing assignments—Wake up at 6 AM for a week and write a poem before you get out of bed—and others who like to goof around with exercises at the back of writing books. And while I certainly see the merit in this and wish I had the inclination, alas, this way of writing is not for me.

But why not, I wonder? Here’s my guess: to generate my enthusiasm, I need to be empathically connected to the material. Empathy and not just interest means I need my heart and my mind engaged. The mind lines things up, makes a list, gets bossy. The heart insists on value. “Hey, why do you care about this stuff anyway? What’s it mean to you?” The mind and heart are a bit like a comedy duo, the mind played by Stan Laurel, the sourpuss realist, arms crossed over his chest, taking account. Sweet, dumb Oliver Hardy’s the heart—that fool, that big buffoon, ever-loving and always trying to connect.

I’m kidding, of course, stretching the truth (and metaphor) beyond its ken. But let me come back to my original subject—writing on assignment. Sometimes an assignment comes along that provokes heart and mind, and that’s exactly what happened when Justin St. Vincent asked me to write a piece for his terrific eBook,  Love, Live, Forgive.  Justin had gotten my name from The Fetzer Institute, where I had participated in a writer’s retreat on Love and Forgiveness.

I knew Justin’s assignment was one I could accept with pleasure. I wrote about compassion and healing. My offering includes lines like “Every piece of art is a statement about the human condition, every effort to create, a reflection of our tender, brutal, poignant selves.” And what I’ve discovered reading the other entries is that I am no rare bird in the art world in exploring love and forgiveness and compassion as themes. I’ve been hugely intrigued and inspired by what I’ve read by the other writers, musicians, and visual artists. Their words are insightful, surprising, original, pithy, humorous, wise and absolutely worth reading. There’s a sampling below. Hope you’ll download this free book and dip in soon.

From photographer and filmmaker Nicol Ragland:

“My most recent fine art series, ‘Between Two Worlds,’ is meant to subvert separatist thinking by reflecting back the destruction of life amongst the speed of our industrialized society. . . . We live in a culture that perpetuates turning a blind eye away from our fear, our grief, and destruction while in that same place is a tremendous amount of resolution, love, and truth.”

From DJ, producer and photographer Moby:

“To me, the opposite of love isn’t necessarily hate. The opposite of love is judgment, and the opposite of forgiveness is bitterness and resentment.”

From author, speaker and storyteller Naseem Rakha, a friend from the Fetzer Institute:

“For me, there is no creative life or noncreative life. There is just life, and each day I create what I can of it.”

From poet Demi Amparan:

“If we can relate to a person’s perspective and differences, it’s then hopefully possible for us to begin the process of love and forgiveness.”

 

 

 

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