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Seeing a Wrongdoer’s Regret in a Story Made Readers More Forgiving
In A Nutshell
- Seeing a wrongdoer’s private regret made readers more forgiving when he was clearly at fault.
- Forgiving the character was linked to forgiving a real person in two later experiments.
- Reading a story alone did not clearly raise real-life forgiveness.
- Forgiveness was self-reported once, so lasting effects are unknown.
A repairman carelessly leaves a door open, and an 85-year-old woman’s new puppy escapes. He apologizes with the words “I wish I didn’t leave the door open.” In one version of the story, he says them out loud. In another, readers hear them only as his private thought. Readers forgave him more in the private-thought version, as long as he was clearly to blame. Those who forgave him more also tended to report more forgiveness toward someone who had wronged them in real life.
Anyone who has received a half-hearted apology knows words alone do not always settle a grudge. Researchers Angus Fletcher and Mark Matthews of The Ohio State University set out to test an old idea that literature builds empathy, one that has been hard to settle because good writing blends many techniques at once. Aristotle and Adam Smith praised literature for building compassion, while Jane Austen and George Bernard Shaw blamed what they saw as non-literary fiction for producing false, self-centered empathy. Fletcher and Matthews, who published their work in Frontiers in Psychology, tested a single technique on its own.
That technique is called internal focalization, a fancy term for showing a character’s private thoughts and feelings instead of only what the character says or does. Three online experiments ended with 1,563 people in their final samples, and two of them also asked about real-life grudges.
Fiction Readers Forgave an At-Fault Repairman More After Seeing His Thoughts
Participants were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online platform where people complete short tasks for pay. The researchers did not collect demographic details, but they expected the pool to be mostly white, mostly ages 20 to 40, slightly more female, and of lower socioeconomic status, based on earlier research into the platform’s workers. After exclusions, the experiments kept 371, 449, and 743 people. All were preregistered, meaning the researchers publicly committed to their plans before collecting data, a practice meant to keep results honest.
Every participant read a four-part story. Mary, who lost a puppy to a car as a child, adopts a new one at 85. She asks a repairman fixing her oven to keep the door shut, and he leaves it open anyway.
In the first experiment, the story varied in two ways. In one version, the repairman ignored Mary’s warning. In another, he cared but was distracted by problems at home. Separately, some readers got his apology as spoken words and others as a private thought. Readers then rated how willing they were to forgive him on a 10-point scale, and a second set of questions asked about the feelings behind forgiving him.
When he had ignored Mary’s warning, readers who saw his private thoughts averaged 7.3, compared with 6.3 for readers who only heard him apologize. The authors’ explanation is that seeing a character’s private regret makes the remorse easier to trust. When he was distracted by trouble at home, his thoughts made no clear difference. Readers were already more forgiving of him in that version.
Forgiveness for a Fictional Character Was Linked to Forgiveness for Real People
Later experiments used only the version where the repairman was at fault. Afterward, participants wrote about a time someone close had seriously wronged them, including what happened, whether that person had apologized, and what it would take to forgive. They then rated whether they had forgiven that person. Readers with access to the repairman’s thoughts again forgave him more, though the gaps were modest, under one point on the 10-point scale.
Readers who forgave the repairman more also reported more forgiveness toward their real-life wrongdoer. Statistical modeling pointed to an indirect path: private thoughts raised forgiveness inside the story, and that was linked to forgiveness outside it.
In the third experiment, 220 additional people read a technical report about a made-up company instead of a story. That group checked whether simply reading a story could explain the results. It could not: reading a story alone did not clearly raise real-life forgiveness compared with the report. The connection ran through the repairman’s thoughts and the forgiveness they produced inside the story.
Forgiveness has been tied in earlier research to greater life satisfaction and better relationships, though forgiving too freely can leave people open to being hurt again. The authors float the idea that fiction could offer a low-pressure place to practice forgiving. Still, all of this was self-reported forgiveness, meaning participants’ own answers, collected right after the story in an online survey. Whether any of it lasted, or led anyone to actually reconcile, was not tested.
One short story and one apology make a narrow test. Even so, it shows the long argument over whether fiction builds empathy can be tested one writing technique at a time, starting with a character’s private thoughts.
Paper Notes
Limitations
Participants came from online pools that tend to reflect Western populations, and their demographics were not recorded. The authors note that cultural customs could change the results. Some traditional Hawaiian cultures practice proactive forgiveness, called Ho’oponopono, which might make forgiveness easier to encourage, while cultures centered on defending personal honor might resist it. Cultures may also differ in how readily fictional experiences are seen as relevant to real life. Forgiveness was self-reported and measured only once, right after reading. Only one fictional situation, a remorseful repairman, was used. The differences between groups were modest. In Study 2, the pathway from the repairman’s thoughts to real-life feelings of forgiveness just missed the usual threshold for statistical significance (p = 0.058), and in Study 3 readers’ reported sense of getting inside the repairman’s mind was only marginally higher in the private-thoughts version (p = 0.076), a weaker check than in the first two studies. The authors suggest future research could examine the health benefits of literary forgiveness and how fiction might help people forgive without risking further harm.
Funding and Disclosures
The authors reported receiving financial support: research salaries and participant recruitment were funded by a grant from the Ohio State Department of English. They declared no commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a conflict of interest and stated that generative AI was not used in creating the manuscript. The studies were approved by the Institutional Review Board of The Ohio State University and preregistered on the Open Science Framework.
Publication Details
The paper, “Internal focalization influences real-life empathy: a literary contribution to wellbeing,” was written by Angus Fletcher and Mark Matthews of The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. It was published October 1, 2026, in Frontiers in Psychology, volume 17, article 1968457, as an open-access article under a Creative Commons Attribution license. The paper was edited by Madeleine E. Hackney of Emory University and reviewed by Gerald Cupchik of the University of Toronto and Yasir Riady of Indonesia Open University. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1968457. Citation: Fletcher A and Matthews M (2026) Internal focalization influences real-life empathy: a literary contribution to wellbeing. Front. Psychol. 17:1968457.
