Building Forgiveness Around the World

In July, 2019, a project on Building Forgiveness Around the World was funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation. Its Principal Investigator is Dr. Man Yee HO from City University (Hong Kong), and Ev is Scientific Director. Harvard Public Health Professor Dr. Tyler VanderWeele is Statistics and Research Design Director.

The research involves two big studies at each of seven sites: Hong Kong, Indonesia, Ukraine (two sites), Colombia, South Africa, and Ghana.

Project 1: Public awareness-raising campaign that attempts to alert people in a community to (1) definitions of decisional and emotional forgiveness, (2) health, mental health, and relationship benefits of forgiveness, and (3) resources that they can use to experience forgiveness.

Project 2: Effectiveness of REACH Forgiveness 2-hour DIY workbooks. This will be studied in randomized controlled trials involving 500 people at each of the 7 sites. This two-hour DIY book will be available at the end of the project (by the end of 2022) in Mandarin, Cantonese, Spanish, Ukranian, Russian, and Indonesian—as well as English.