Forgiveness in Indigenous Psychological Research: A Trojan Horse, a Western Knockoff, or a Traditioned Sensibility?

Abstract

This essay will honor the work of K.-S. Yang (Working at the interface of culture: Eighteen lives in social science. Routledge, London, pp. 62–76, 1997; Chang Gung Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 5(1):1–32, 2012) by (a) focusing on his model for a global psychology as presented in his last published paper (Yang, 2012), (b) making the case that Westernized psychology be critiqued for the implicit neoliberal paradigm that has colonized Western psychologies, and (c) showing that neoliberalism represents a threat to Yang’s vision for developing tradition-sensitive understandings of forgiveness in non-Western cultures. We believe that failing to recognize neoliberalism’s impact within Yang’s framework for conceptualizing indigenization in non-Western contexts poses a threat to Yang’s vision for a balanced global psychology, and we use forgiveness research in cultural contexts as an example of how neoliberalism is already subverting intercultural psychological research today.