CLEVELAND, March 3 (UPI) -- Forgiveness does not come equally naturally to both sexes -- men have a harder time forgiving than women do, a U.S. study said.
Psychologist Julie Juola Exline of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland said men can become more forgiving if they develop empathy toward an offender by seeing they may also be capable of similar actions.
"The gender difference is not anything that we predicted. We actually got aggravated, because we kept getting it over and over again in our studies," Exline said in a statement. "We kept trying to explain it away, but it kept repeating in the experiments."
Exline, along with Roy Baumeister and Anne Zell from Florida State University; Amy Kraft from Arizona State; and Charlotte Witvliet from Hope College, conducted seven forgiveness-related studies from 1998 through 2005 with more than 1,400 college students.
The researchers found that when asked to recall offenses they had committed personally, men became less vengeful toward people who had offended them.
The findings are published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
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