It is a fact of life that people do wrong to others. People may harm a person they know, or they may harm a stranger. Those harms take many forms, including physical, emotional, social, and financial wrongs. As part of this process, the victims of wrongdoing may also choose to forgive the perpetrator.
What exactly is the benefit of this forgiveness?
This question has been the subject of much discussion in psychology, both to understand the underlying influences of forgiveness as well as to understand the benefits it may have to people who are struggling because they were the victim of someone else’s actions. A fascinating paper published in 2025 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General by Gabriele Fernandez-Miranda, Matthew Stanley, Samuel Murray, Leonard Faul, and Felipe De Brigard provides insight into this issue.
These researchers explored the influence of forgiveness on the memories of victims and perpetrators of a wrong. In particular, they explored whether forgiveness affects people’s ability to remember the details of past events, whether they can remember the emotions they experienced in that past event, and also whether that memory still elicits an emotion.
Across several studies, participants were given a prompt to remember a past event. Participants were asked to recall an event from the previous 10 years in which they were the victim of wrongdoing. One study asked a group to remember an event in which they were the perpetrator of a wrongdoing. Half of the people in the victim (or perpetrator) groups were asked to remember an event in which they forgave the perpetrator (or were forgiven). The other half were asked to remember an event in which they did not forgive the perpetrator (or were not forgiven).
They wrote several sentences about their memory of the event they recalled. Then, they answered a questionnaire in which they rated the vividness of their memory for the content of what happened, the vividness of their recollection of the emotions they experienced at the time, and the strength of that emotion now as they recall the event.
Across several studies, forgiveness had its primary effect on the strength of the emotion people experience now. Both victims and perpetrators have reasonable memory for the event that occurred in the past, regardless of whether they forgave (or were forgiven), though victims tend to have more vivid memories than perpetrators. In addition, victims and perpetrators tend to remember how they felt at the time of the event. However, victims and perpetrators feel less bad about the past event now when there was forgiveness than when there was not.
The biggest impact of forgiveness is that it allows the intensity of the emotions elicited by an event to fade. One study also demonstrated that this change in emotional intensity is related to a decrease in the victim’s tendency to want to avoid the perpetrator and to seek revenge on the perpetrator.
These studies help to understand the psychological mechanisms by which forgiveness benefits the forgiver. It can be difficult to have memories that continue to elicit significant negative emotions even years after the event. Those negative emotions can make it difficult to move past something bad that happened in the past. Forgiveness of a perpetrator is one step toward a future in which that past event has less of an emotional hold on the present, which can help the victims of wrongdoing to move on with their lives. Depending on what was done wrong, it may also help the victim rebuild their relationship with the perpetrator.
