Dispute Resolution: Forgiving and Forgetting

Forgiving. How do disputes ultimately get resolved in a culture of honor generally, and in the southern culture of honor, in particular? Our lab study provided data bearing on this issue.

For both northerners and southerners, the degree to which the subject accepted the apology depended greatly on how the subject himself had acted as he experienced the provocations. But the specific patterns for northern and southern subjects were opposite. Northerners who had stayed calm during the experiment were likely to accept the sub­ject’s apology and be rated as forgiving. Northerners who had “blown up” during the course of the study, however, were obviously quite mad. They were far less likely to ac­cept the apology and were also less likely to even shake the confederate’s hand when he offered it.

For southerners, the reverse was true. Southerners who stayed calm during the ex­periment seemed to still hold a grudge, and they were less likely to accept the confeder­ate’s apology and shake his hand. Southerners who had blown up, however, were actu­ally more likely to accept the apology and forgive the confederate rather than staying angry. It was as if southerners were following a cultural script that went something like: “You were a jerk. I blew up at you. Let’s shake hands and call it even.”

Forgetting. This was not just a short term phenomena, either. Six months later, we mailed a set of pictures to subjects who had been in our experiment and asked them to identify the person who had provoked them in the study.

With this long-term memory data, the same interaction occurred as with the hand shaking and forgiveness data. Few people forgot the person who had done this to them six months earlier. Yet, those who did were a) northerners who had stayed calm and b) southerners who had blown up. It appears that the people who had most resolved the conflict and put the incident behind them were the ones who had solved the problem ac­cording to their culturally appropriate scripts. Northerners who had cognitively explained away the incident and stayed calm as the provocations happened in the lab were more likely to forget about the incident than were northerners who had blown up. In contrast, southerners who had blown up were more likely to forget than were southerners who had stayed calm and not vented their anger. The interaction pattern was statistically signifi­cant.

Extreme caution is necessary in interpreting these results. The number of people classified as “blowing up” was kept extremely small because we wanted to put people in this category only if they had truly expressed their anger and not if they were merely working themselves up to an explosion. Specifically, we only classified a subject as “blowing up” if a) his anger scores were in the top 20 percent for the last time period or b) we had to stop the experiment. Thus, cell sizes in the “blow up” conditions (usually about 5 per cell, depending on the measure) were small, and extreme tentativeness in in­terpretation is appropriate.

As an aside, such information may be quite useful for people doing violence preven­tion work. These results suggest that there may only be true forgiving and forgetting for people in southern culture (and perhaps other cultures of honor) if two conditions are met: (1) the aggrieved party must have had some opportunity to express his anger, and (2) the provoking party must ask for forgiveness. These are tricky things because first, the expression of anger must be channeled into some appropriate and nonharmful avenue if violence is to be avoided; and second, the provoking party must be persuaded to ask for forgiveness, an act that may be seen as humiliating.

Yet there is some hope. In many classic cultures of honor, there is a strong tradition of the suppliant. If a person asks for forgiveness and performs the rituals in the right way, he must be forgiven (Gould 1973). In classical Greek culture, custom dictated that the suppliant was to indicate his submission to the other (by touching the other's hands, knees or chin), at which point the other was to raise him up and restore him to honor. The reciprocal nature of this honoring was extremely important. Thus, the paradox: through a “ritual procedure which enacts the total abdication of any such claim” to honor, a per­son's honor is given back to him (Gould 1973: 94).

To violate the expectation of reciprocity and mistreat the suppliant was a serious of­fense that could draw the anger of Zeus (protector of suppliants) or other men. In fact, classics scholar John Gould noted, two cases of such mistreatment “played a dominant role in the diplomatic propaganda of the Spartans and Athenians on the eve of the Pelo­ponnesian War” (Gould 1973: 74). Respect for the ritual of supplication and honor for the suppliant was considered extremely important and not something which could be vio­lated.

All this is not simply ancient history. There are parallel rituals among groups such as the Bedouin, the Tonga, and the Tswana today (Gould 1973: 101). And—if our lab re­sults are any indication—perhaps some version of this supplication ritual holds in the U.S. South: southerners who have expressed themselves may also be bound by the code of honor to accept the apologies of those who ask for it correctly.