New study on prayer and forgiveness. Here are the experiments:

The new study, published in the journal Psychological Science, draws data from 119 people over two experiments.

In the first, participants assigned to say a single prayer for their romantic partner reported a greater willingness to be forgiving of that person than did participants who were asked to describe their partner to a recording device “as if they were (talking) to a parent.”

The second study was more revealing, with participants – all of whom were comfortable with prayer – split into three groups: those asked to pray for a friend, those asked to pray about any topic, and those asked to think positive thoughts about a friend every day for four weeks.

People in the first group were much more likely to be forgiving of that friend than those in either of the latter two groups, which notably showed no significant differences between them. The first group also expressed more “selfless concern” during the testing period.

Is it just me or do these experiments seem rather silly? Why wouldn’t you be more forgiving of a person rather than a thing posing as a person (the recorder). Similarly, the connection one has with a friend is usually stronger than one has with a “topic” with which one is concerned.