Should All Be Forgiven?

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While Witvliet labors to show the physiological benefits of forgiveness, Emory University primatologist Frans De Waal is busy extending its evolutionary pedigree. A study at his Living Links Center suggests that the Christian church's teaching on reconciliation may be viewed as the refinement of mechanisms reaching back not some 2,000 years but 25 million. "Instead of looking at conflict resolution as uniquely ours," he says, "we are showing that it exists in many cooperative species," particularly chimpanzees. De Waal's work focuses on the "social memories" of primates, and he says, "We have full confidence that they have memories of fights, hold grudges--and make up when necessary." While such behavior is not synonymous with forgiveness, says De Waal "it's hard to imagine it's not related."

Evolutionary psychologist David Buss, a professor at the University of Texas in Austin, has pondered the sociobiological logic of forgiveness and concluded that at least in the realm of mating, men and women may be programmed to employ it differently. Males, he suggests, are less likely to forgive a fling because if the woman becomes pregnant, "a man doesn't want to be investing resources in other men's children." In contrast, a woman may be more forgiving of a man's one-time infidelity (assuming that he has already given her a child) but less forgiving of a long-term diversion of material or emotional resources to another woman or a second family. "From an evolutionary perspective," says Buss, "part of the reason a woman marries is to secure all the resources of a man for herself and her children."

As intriguing as such musings are, theories are made flesh outside of laboratories. A persuasive anecdotal demonstration is occurring in a spotless apartment on the struggling South Side of Madison, Wis., where a graduate student named Paul Cardis is revisiting a former insurance processor named Delilah Bell. Five years ago, Bell's fiance died of drug- and alcohol-related pneumonia, leaving her to raise their four children alone. To Bell, his death was worse than needless. It was a betrayal, and alternating bouts of anger and despair reduced her to a state close to paralysis. "I would talk to my mother about it," she says. "And she would say, 'Just let it go.' I'd say, 'How can you say that?'"