I can't believe an educated person would think like this.
I'm Angela Duckworth.
I'm Steven Dubner.
And you're listening to No Stupid Questions.
Today on the show, is holding a grudge really worth it?
Come on in, the grudge water is fine.
Angela, we have a question today.
It's short and sweet from one Bobby Fortinelli.
He writes to say, my wife holds grudges indefinitely,
although thankfully none against me.
Why do some people hold grudges and not others?
How does one let go of grudges?
P.S. Bobby writes, I'm sending in this question with my wife's blessing.
That's a preemptive don't hold a grudge against me
for asking Angie and Steven about grudges.
So, Angela, why do some people hold grudges and not others?
Is that knowable?
No, there is a research literature on grudges.
I don't know why some people are grudge holders
other than to speculate that given this is about ruminating
and given that a lot of people involuntarily hold on to grudges,
kind of despite themselves,
my guess is that people who are worse at emotion regulation
and lower in emotional stability are probably more likely to be grudge holders.
I think, roughly speaking, a grudge is the opposite of forgiveness, right?
Hang on a second. That's an interesting thought.
I need to get my mind around it.
A grudge is the opposite of forgiveness.
Well, let's try to define grudge.
Let's do.
I think what a grudge is is when somebody has wronged you, you think,
and you are ruminating about it
and you feel like that transgression,
that slight, that insult, that attack, however you frame it in your mind,
that it has not been canceled,
that there is a debt that hasn't been paid, so you're hanging on to it.
When I think of the word debt,
I think of a loan that needs to be repaid,
but loans are usually borrowed with permission.
To me, a grudge feels more like a theft rather than a permitted borrowing.
It's not like, oh, I forgot to return this library book or I still owe you $10.
Exactly.
But there's something about, like, almost some kind of violence was done.
Yeah.
I have to point to some of the, I think, best thinking about this,
which was done by Roy Balmeister and his co-conspirators.
Roy Balmeister is a social psychologist.
He wrote this article, I think more than two decades ago now,
on forgiveness and grudges.
Roy's point is that when we say, I forgive you,
we use that phrase for when you forgive someone a debt,
some monetary transaction or piece of property,
but also we say that when it has nothing to do with monetary compensation,
you didn't borrow anything, you lied to me, you cheated on me,
you tripped to me, you hurt me, and I'm going to use that same word.
And the reason why I think Roy Balmeister is so interested in the etymology
of forgiveness, which I am proposing is the opposite of holding a grudge,
is that there is something about restoring the value of a relationship
that happens when we forgive someone,
and there is the refusal to do that when we hold a grudge.
So that makes perfect sense.
I did just happen to Google around a little bit while you were talking,
not that I wasn't also listening, I was multitasking successfully.
You were completely listening and also looking at Roy Balmeister's work.
But here's a component of his explanation that I find particularly interesting.
He writes that forgiveness is an individual or intra-psychic phenomenon.
In other words, I'm deciding to forgive you or someone,
and that implies not actually engaging with the other person.
Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Is an apology necessary? Is a conversation necessary?
Or can you kind of sprinkle some Balmeister-Duckworth dust on this grudge
and just have it disintegrate without the offending party
even getting the satisfaction of knowing how ticked off you were?
So Roy's proposition is that there are two dimensions of forgiveness.
And one of them is interpersonal.
There has to be some kind of conversation.
And then there's an intra... He calls it intra-psychic,
but you could call it intra-personal.
We're just internal, let's say, right?
Exactly. So there's an external and an internal.
And he calls total forgiveness when both happen.
And I can, with hesitation, share with you my grudge story.
Yeah, I think we need to put the spotlight on an example,
and I think the example should come from you.
But you know what? It's a grudge that is no longer a grudge,
so maybe I shouldn't feel so bad about it.
It's a happy ending grudge story. Okay, so this is good.
We can use you as a case study.
As you all want to do.
I am very fond of your examples, let me tell you why, Angela.
And I'm just less fond of my examples.
I know. Okay, I will be the example human here for grudges.
So here's the story. I am living in San Francisco with Jason.
We are newly married, so I guess it's the late 90s.
And I invite two friends from college who I'm not sure I should name or not.
Why don't we call them Adolf and Benito, just as placeholders?
Well, they're women. Let's call them A and B.
Okay. A and B come, or they say they're going to come and visit me in San Francisco.
And it's a little bit of a college reunion because we were all three of us good friends in college.
And by the way, I think three is a lousy number for friendship because somebody's always, relatively speaking, the third wheel.
And I think in this case, the grudge is very related to my having always felt like a little bit of the third wheel in this three-way friendship.
So they say they're going to come out on a certain day.
And this is my memory, not theirs.
But my expectation was that they were going to come from the airport to my little apartment on Stockton Street in San Francisco,
where Jason and I were living, because, of course, they were there to see me and they wouldn't be able to wait.
Of course.
So that was my expectation.
The insult, the transgression, the theft, if you want to call it that, is that they ended up spending a day together before coming to my apartment.
At any rate, the two of them, A and B, had a grand old time together without me and then came to see me the following day.
And you greeted them with all the warmth that one might expect in the frozen food section of a supermarket.
I'm pretty sure I didn't say like, oh, I understand.
I also definitely held on to this internal feeling of resentment and having been slated.
Can we deepen this story just a tiny bit?
I want to know what was their relationship with Jason?
Did they like Jason?
Did they know him?
Had they been to the wedding, et cetera?
Both of them had been to the wedding.
Both of them were thumbs up on Jason.
So I don't think they were avoiding my new husband.
But is it possible that they're thinking we're going to fly to California, going to see her old friend Angela and her husband, Jason.
But, you know, Angela and Jason are now married.
They have their own lives.
And like, we're just going to spend a day doing stuff and then we'll go there the next day.
Is it possible that it was just casual, no insult intended at all?
Or do you believe that there was some exclusion of you as, oh, Angie's the third wheel even more now because she had the temerity to go and get married.
I did get married first.
And maybe there was some, you know, well, let's let the married people do what married people do.
I don't think they were trying to hide it either.
Right. So I think they were like, oh, wasn't that fun?
Like I was so mad.
I was so hurt.
I refused to see them.
Hang on. I got to make a few notes to self.
Do not ever tell Angela you are going to be in the town where she lives and not go see her on the first day of your visit.
Well, I think that's a good rule, honestly.
But grudges are things that, by definition, you ruminate about.
And I think there was a quality of that.
Like I can't believe you didn't come see me from the airport.
I can't believe you made me feel so left out.
It reminds me of this experimental paradigm in psychology called cyber bully, where you are on some online computer game.
And you think that there are two other players because there's a little avatar of you.
And then there's these two other avatars.
And you just assume that everybody's sitting at a computer somewhere in their room.
And it's a little bit like in elementary school where you pass the ball to each other.
But then it quickly becomes monkey in the middle.
And then the two other avatars just keep passing the ball to each other.
It's a paradigm which reliably induces stress, even when you're just playing a computer game.
So I think I had that feeling of being excluded.
And actually, I do think they're better friends with each other.
The forgiveness that eventually happened was because I realized that these two people are better friends with each other.
Like, they are.
It sounds like you came to the conclusion that they didn't really have anything to apologize about.
Yes.
I need a few more details here.
So you ultimately saw them finally on that trip or you didn't.
I think I did see them.
I probably gave them like silent glaring looks at dinner.
Did you say anything to them?
Like, boy, my feelings were really hurt.
I don't think I did.
At least I didn't have a complete conversation.
I probably said something.
Sounds like Bobby's asking the wrong person here.
I hate to say.
Well, I told you this is a reasonably happy story because eventually I did not only forgive
these two friends, A and B, interpersonally, as Baumeister would say, like externally.
We actually had a reunion in a city that none of us lived in.
So there was no confusion about like who would spend time with whom.
We went out to Arizona.
They make movies about this sort of thing like middle-aged women have a reunion in a desert-like place drinking white wine and sharing stories.
Isn't there usually some terrible outcome?
Like there's someone that's been following you and they ransack your wallet and they steal your identity.
No, no, no. Different genre, Stephen.
It's not a thriller.
It's just, you know, three middle-aged women, actually four, because there's a little sister of one of these friends.
Imagine how left out she felt.
Yes.
Well, to the point of the happy ending, Stephen, none of us felt left out.
I mean, I'm not saying this is going to ever make it into Nora Efron's screenplay,
but I recall that we talked about this San Francisco fiasco.
Well, your Arizona midlife Jubilee will not become Nora Efron's screenplay for sure because she's dead, unfortunately.
But it was so fun.
But when I heard Bobby's question, it immediately brought to mind not only the trip of these friends A and B to come visit me,
but also several arguments that I've had with Jason in our marriage where I think I am pretty good at holding a marital grudge.
In both cases, though, Stephen, it is so interesting to me that we ever hold on to a grudge, especially after the person who has transgressed.
They apologize.
I'm now thinking about when Jason and I have had arguments.
And if one of us apologize, let's say him.
Why is it that when somebody like your husband says, I'm sorry, why is it that that doesn't like a magic spell immediately cancel out the debt?
I think that's a great question.
I mean, I've read a lot about the so-called science of apologies.
There was a great paper a few years ago in the economics literature by John List, who's at the University of Chicago and Ben Ho, who's an economist at Vassar College.
They look at the science of apology as a psychologist might.
But with data that economists use, it was spurred on by John's working with Uber, the rideshare company.
When he was working with Uber as their chief economist, he had a really bad Uber ride and he was ticked that he didn't get an apology from the firm.
And so that triggered this empirical study of it.
They had some strategies for what needs to work for an apology.
And part of it is that it needs to feel sincere, but also that it needs to cost the person.
It needs to feel to the person who's being apologized to that the apologizer is really giving up something, whether it's pride or whatnot.
So when you say that a lot of times in your marriage, the apology won't really, quote, work, I wonder if it's because it's just words.
And I mean, really, is an apology of just words even an acceptable apology in your mind?
Well, this gets to what are the costs and benefits of grudges and the opposite forgiveness?
What's really going on there and why would there have to be something other than words?
And if you think about the rationale or the logic of holding grudges, what this is all about is the value of an interpersonal relationship, the value of relationship between a wife and a husband, between three best friends from college.
And when we feel like that relationship has been devalued, what you are doing is you are kind of like holding that other person accountable.
You are making them do something to restore the value of the relationship.
And if I forgive you too quickly, you will, for example, in the future, take advantage of me again.
So I think that's probably the primary benefit of holding a grudge.
And there's an evolutionary angle here, too, like no individual member of a species is going to survive very long if they're continually the rube who gets taken advantage of.
But we should say that different relationships plainly have different values.
You were telling a story about these close friends from college coming to visit you and your husband, but they're all different kinds of potential grudges.
People hold grudges against retail outlets and companies that do them wrong.
Or Uber in the case of John List, right?
Exactly. Or people hold grudges against people that they don't know very well.
I will say I'm more of a bright line grudges. If I run across someone who is kind of low character, let's say, I just cross them off my list.
I'm not going to engage with that person or that institution anymore.
Well, if you write them off and you're not ruminating about that person, I don't think it's a grudge.
You're like, you're dead to me, but I'm not going to think about you.
That would be my argument because I don't want the psychic cost of the grudge holding.
I will say this. I play golf at this club and mostly they're very, very nice people.
And occasionally you run into someone who's just a jerk for whatever reason.
So it's interesting because it is a club.
So you will see them again.
And so it's not like you can just totally cross them off your list, but I just essentially stay out of their way.
I try to not encounter them. And if I encounter them, you know, quick wave or smile, that's it.
However, if it's someone with whom you've got a deeper relationship, then it starts to get really tricky,
like with a marriage that's plainly very highly valued or with anyone in your family, let's say.
There's a lot of investment in that and you care a lot about the shape of that future relationship.
And so, of course, you're going to put more investment theoretically into apology and ameliorating the grudge and so on.
And this leads me to thinking about estrangement, family estrangement.
So like with you and Jason, the price of estrangement is so high that we inherently do a much better job of trying to shave down
and ameliorate grudges or fights and to improve our apology game when the relationship demands that.
So I think what we're saying here, this is like Stephen and Angela coming up with their own theory of grudges right here on the spot.
At one extreme where you have a complete stranger or somebody who's practically a stranger
and you can easily circumnavigate that human being for the rest of your life, then there's really no point in having grudges.
At the other extreme, let's say your children, your spouse, you have such a motivation not to have a grudge that poisons your relationship
because there's such a cost to them.
So in the middle is probably where we have grudges, people who are neither total strangers nor complete intimates.
This would be, I think, the most likely terrain in which people would hold on to years long grudges.
Well, with a family member, blood is thick, sure.
But after a series of, let's say, hostilities or cruelty or really bad decisions, I think blood can thin out really fast.
And I would bet that most of those estrangements begin with some form of grudge, even though there is, as you put it, that extra motivation to solve it.
I have to say, I would request that listeners, if you've got a good grudge story that you want to tell us, maybe we can share it in a future episode,
just send us a voice memo about a grudge, resolved or unresolved.
Make a voice memo with your phone.
Just do it somewhere quiet. Get some good recording quality. Just make it a minute or two, not super long.
And put your name and where you're from and send it in, because I would love to hear other people's grudge stories.
Still to come on No Stupid Questions, Stephen and Angela discuss how to go about letting go of a grudge.
They're the one that did the wrong thing. Why do I have to apologize to them?
Now, back to Stephen and Angela's conversation about grudges and forgiveness.
I don't know if you want to take a few questions from a grudge inventory from Mike McCullough, who is one of the leading researchers on grudges.
If you have a grudge inventory, that means a questionnaire, yes?
Yeah.
Yeah, I want it. Bring it on.
Do you want to keep a grudge in mind when you think about this?
Are you sure you don't want me to ask you these questions about your grudges? I mean, I do have one grudge.
Can you say like one sentence about this grudge, Stephen?
Sure. This was a fairly close work friend. This person, in my view, transgressed.
Violated your trust.
Yeah, it was a professional betrayal. And it was what I considered in the moment really dishonest and tacky and bad.
When the event happened, I wrote to him immediately. I remember it was like five in the morning because I got up early.
I said, what the heck was this? And he wrote back this kind of baloney stuff.
And then two or three hours later, two people close to me, one work colleague and one family member, both saw the thing that this person had done.
And they said, oh, F hit like he is gone.
So then what happened?
I thought, you know, if this close family member and this very close work colleague are both telling me that this person needs to be excluded from my life, I'm going to exclude him.
I didn't want these other close people in my life to feel like I was violating their emotional truth by hanging on to this guy.
So, yeah, I hold this grudge. I don't encounter this person often. I did once at a party.
He came right up to me and wanted to be buddies. And I just kind of was a little bit of an Angela Duckworth cold fish based on your San Francisco description of your friends.
And so I guess I do nurse that one grudge. So when I take your inventory, I will think of that person.
OK, so it's got a very sexy name. This questionnaire is called the transgression related interpersonal motivations inventory for non-close others.
I had to take a breath while I was saying that I didn't have enough oxygen.
Did you say for non-close others?
Non-close others. So this is a questionnaire developed by Mike McCullough and colleagues. I have to say.
