Literature can inspire us to forgive, Ohio State researchers find

A few words revealing a fictional wrongdoer’s private regret can make readers more willing to forgive him. That shift may also connect with how they think about someone who hurt them in real life. The evidence comes from experiments designed to isolate one storytelling technique, rather than compare entire novels or literary genres.

Ohio State University English professor Angus Fletcher and social psychologist Mark Matthews tested “internal focalization,” a narrative method that gives readers access to a character’s thoughts and feelings. Fletcher is associated with the university’s Project Narrative. Their study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, found increased forgiveness toward a fictional repairman when readers encountered his private remorse. The findings were strongest when the story portrayed him as responsible for his actions.

The proposed real-life benefit requires more qualification. Analyses linked forgiveness of the character with self-reported forgiveness of a remembered personal offender, suggesting a possible pathway between the two. The work did not show that reading repaired relationships, treated depression or produced enduring changes in behavior.

For more than 2,000 years, thinkers have argued that literature helps people understand others’ experiences and emotions. A widely discussed 2013 study appeared to support part of that idea. It reported that reading literary fiction improved performance on tests of theory of mind, the ability to understand another person’s beliefs, intentions and feelings.

Later attempts to reproduce that result produced mixed findings, including several failed replications. That uncertainty prompted Fletcher and Matthews to ask a narrower question: Could one identifiable storytelling technique influence one specific response, forgiveness? Rather than compare passages labeled literary or nonliterary, they compared versions of the same story with and without access to a remorseful character’s private thoughts.

“We said, ‘What do we know about the history of how artists develop these techniques for creating empathy?’ We put the most powerful of those techniques into a story, and then tested whether that story without the technique creates empathy and if the story with the technique creates empathy,” Fletcher said. “By being more precise about it, we were able to identify these very specific mechanisms and connections.” That approach focused the experiment on forgiveness rather than establishing every broader claim about empathy or mental health.

The story centers on Mary, an 85-year-old woman whose childhood puppy died after being hit by a car. Decades later, she adopts another puppy to help heal that grief. When a repairman visits, she warns him to keep the door shut, but he leaves it open and the puppy escapes.

The researchers varied the explanation for his mistake. In one version, he disregarded Mary’s request; in another, personal problems distracted him despite his concern about the door. That distinction tested whether readers’ explanations for the wrongdoing affected their willingness to forgive.

Next came the central writing manipulation. Some readers learned that the repairman privately wished he had not left the door open, while others encountered him expressing the same regret aloud to Mary. The comparison kept the basic message of regret similar while changing readers’ access to his internal experience.

The researchers never revealed whether Mary forgave him. That omission prevented her behavior from supplying an example for readers to follow. Instead, participants judged whether she should forgive him and how forgiving they themselves would be.

The study separated decisional forgiveness from emotional forgiveness. Decisional forgiveness concerns an intention or willingness to forgive, while emotional forgiveness involves reduced negative feelings toward the offender. A person can report one without experiencing the other to the same degree.

Participants answered questions measuring both dimensions. For the fictional case, emotional questions asked them to imagine being Mary after deciding to forgive. Other questions measured how clearly they felt they could understand the repairman’s thoughts and motives.

“Once we know the transgression is someone’s fault, what we discover is that if we can create a condition where you can see the internal remorse, the internal world of the person, people can feel the sincerity of it,” Matthews said. The researchers interpret that access as a way to make forgiveness more possible. Their experiment tested responses to a constructed narrative, where the character’s private thoughts were available to the reader.

The three studies recruited paid participants through Amazon Mechanical Turk and retained 1,563 after exclusions for incomplete responses or failed comprehension checks. The analyzed samples contained 371, 449 and 743 participants, respectively. All three experiments received ethics approval and were preregistered, meaning the researchers recorded their plans before collecting data.

In the first experiment, internal focalization did not increase forgiveness across all conditions combined. Its benefit emerged when the repairman had disregarded Mary’s request and appeared in control of his actions. When personal difficulties helped explain his mistake, adding private remorse did not produce a significant extra benefit.

That pattern guided the next two studies. Both used the version emphasizing his responsibility and compared access to private thoughts with spoken regret. Readers receiving the internal perspective reported more decisional and emotional forgiveness toward the character.

In the second study, average decisional forgiveness was 6.97 with internal focalization and 6.09 without it, on a 10-point scale. Emotional forgiveness also increased, although its average difference was smaller. These results describe changes in questionnaire scores, rather than a universal conversion from anger to forgiveness.

The technique therefore appears to matter in a particular context. Readers had already encountered a sympathetic victim, a serious consequence and an apologetic offender. The experiments do not establish that access to any character’s thoughts, regardless of content, will make readers more forgiving.

The second and third experiments also asked participants to recall a serious wrong committed by someone close to them. They described the offense and answered questions about their own forgiveness. This added a personal experience to the fictional judgment without requiring contact with the actual offender.

The researchers used mediation analyses to test whether internal focalization related to personal forgiveness through forgiveness of the repairman. These models supported indirect links, particularly between the corresponding decisional measures. Evidence for the emotional pathway was less consistent: its reported result in the second study fell just outside the conventional statistical significance threshold, while the third study supported it.

Such models are consistent with the proposed transfer, but do not independently prove that forgiving the character caused personal forgiveness. Responses to fictional and personal situations could share influences that the experiment did not isolate. The real-life claim is therefore more tentative than the experimental effect on judgments of the repairman.

The third study also included 220 participants who read a technical report instead of the story. Simply reading the story did not improve real-life forgiveness overall compared with that control. This finding narrows the claim to a proposed process involving the specific technique and readers’ responses, rather than a general benefit from any story.

Some participants described their personal offense before reading the fiction, while others encountered the story first. Everyone completed the personal forgiveness ratings afterward. Changing the presentation order did not significantly alter forgiveness of the fictional character.

Important questions remain about the participants and outcomes. The researchers did not collect demographic information, and their online samples may not represent different cultural approaches to forgiveness. They also measured immediate self-reports, leaving the duration and practical consequences of the responses unresolved.

The authors identify another future question: whether fiction can support forgiveness without encouraging relationships that expose someone to further harm. They also propose testing additional literary techniques and possible health benefits.

The next step is establishing whether a brief shift in a reader’s response becomes a lasting, useful change beyond the questionnaire.

These resources place the experiment alongside recent evidence, a forgiveness intervention and the field’s influential replication debate.

Empathy and perspective-taking in literary fiction: a systematic review and meta-analysis of psychological evidence and theoretical insights
This review examines modest, context-dependent links between reading and social understanding, distinguishing experimental findings from correlations. (Frontiers in Psychology, September 2026)

Cognitive effects and correlates of reading fiction: Two preregistered multilevel meta-analyses
These analyses synthesize experiments and associations involving fiction, showing why the size and type of any reading benefit matter. (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, June 2024)

International REACH forgiveness intervention: a multisite randomised controlled trial
A structured forgiveness workbook trial measured outcomes after two weeks, offering a comparison with the literary study’s immediate questionnaire responses. (BMJ Public Health, March 2024)

Research findings are available online in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.

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