Cowden Richard G, Worthington Everett L, Chung Caleb A, De Kock Johannes H, Weziak-Bialowolska Dorota, Yancey George, Shiba Koichiro, Padgett R Noah, Bradshaw Matt, Johnson Byron R, VanderWeele Tyler J
Human Flourishing Program, Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA.
Sci Rep. 2025 Apr 30;15(1):12144. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-82502-8.
We used nationally representative data from the first wave of the Global Flourishing Study (N = 202,898) to (1) explore the distribution of forgivingness in 22 geographically and culturally diverse countries and (2) identify potential differences in dispositional forgivingness across nine sociodemographic characteristics (age, gender, marital status, employment status, years of education, immigration status, frequency of religious service attendance, religious affiliation, racial/ethnic identity). Our descriptive analysis supported substantial cross-national variation in the proportion of people who endorsed 'often/always' forgiving others, ranging from .41 (Türkiye) to .92 (Nigeria). We estimated country-level descriptive statistics for forgivingness in each sociodemographic category, and then performed a series of random effects meta-analyses to aggregate results across countries. Meta-analytic results provided evidence of subgroup differences in forgivingness for religious service attendance and (to a lesser extent) age, with the highest forgivingness observed among people who attended religious services more than once a week and those 80 years or older. However, sociodemographic differences in forgivingness varied considerably across countries, including for those sociodemographic variables that did not show clear evidence of subgroup differences when country-specific estimates were pooled. Our findings lay the foundation for population-level assessment of forgiveness over time and public health strategies to promote forgiveness.
我们使用了来自全球繁荣研究第一波的具有全国代表性的数据（N = 202,898），以（1）探究22个地理和文化多样的国家中宽容度的分布情况，以及（2）确定在九个社会人口学特征（年龄、性别、婚姻状况、就业状况、受教育年限、移民身份、宗教仪式出席频率、宗教归属、种族/民族身份）方面，性格宽容度的潜在差异。我们的描述性分析表明，在认可“经常/总是”原谅他人的人群比例方面，存在显著的跨国差异，范围从0.41（土耳其）到0.92（尼日利亚）。我们估计了每个社会人口学类别中宽容度的国家层面描述性统计数据，然后进行了一系列随机效应荟萃分析，以汇总各国的结果。荟萃分析结果提供了证据，表明在宗教仪式出席情况以及（在较小程度上）年龄方面，宽容度存在亚组差异，在每周参加一次以上宗教仪式的人群以及80岁及以上人群中观察到最高的宽容度。然而，宽容度的社会人口学差异在各国之间差异很大，包括那些在汇总特定国家估计值时未显示出明显亚组差异证据的社会人口学变量。我们的研究结果为随时间推移在人群层面评估宽恕以及促进宽恕的公共卫生策略奠定了基础。
