Forgiving usually takes time: A lesson learned by studying interventions to promote forgiveness

Numerous accounts of research on promoting forgiveness in group settings ha ve been published, indicating that forgiveness can be promoted successfully in varying degrees. Many have suggested that empathy-based interventions a re often successful. It takes time to develop empathy for an offender. We r eport three studies of very brief attempts to promote forgiveness in psycho educational group settings. The studies use ten-minute one-hour, two-hour, and 130-minute interventions with college students. The studies test whethe r various components-namely, pre-intervention videotapes and a letter-writi ng exercise-of a more complex model (the Pyramid Model to REACH Forgiveness ) can produce forgiveness. Each study is reported on its own merits, but th e main lesson is that the amount of forgiveness is related to time that par ticipants spend empathizing with the transgressor. A brief intervention of two hours or less will probably not reliably promote much forgiveness; howe ver, one might argue that it starts people on the road to forgiving.