Humility and Forgiveness for Peace

Peace is a multidimensional construct that has attracted scholarship from various domains. Drawing from prior work on virtues, I contend that the virtues of humility and forgiveness may operate as pathways toward inner, relational, and intergroup peace. After briefly defining peace, I situate virtues as inherently social processes. I also provide definitions and review expressions of both humility and forgiveness, and I provide conceptualizations for both humility and forgiveness, situating them as relational virtues ideally suited for navigating conflict. Specifically, they are designed to protect relationships and help repair following ruptures or offenses. Next, I review previous empirical evidence demonstrating how both humility and forgiveness may facilitate intrapersonal, interpersonal, and intergroup peace. Extant research makes a compelling case for both humility and forgiveness as necessary virtues for peace. As a more stringent test of the hypothesized relationships between humility, forgiveness, and peace, I report data from 11,111 participants who completed self-report measures of humility, forgiveness, and peace. The results reveal that whereas both humility and forgiveness are positively associated with peace, forgiveness is more strongly associated with inner peace, and humility is more strongly associated with relational peace. Finally, I make several recommendations to help advance the empirical psychology of peace, including considering existential concerns and the boundedness of human nature, replicating these associations through a programmatic series of studies, exploring the boundary conditions of when these virtues may or may not be useful (or may be deleterious) in facilitating peace, and expanding the methodological approaches to study peace.