Abstract
People often experience conflicts in their interpersonal relationships. To repair and restore a relationship, the perpetrator engages in compensatory behaviour after experiencing feelings of guilt, while the victim attempts to communicate their forgiveness. Although many previous studies focused on the forgiver (i.e., the victim), few have investigated the responses of the forgiven (i.e., the perpetrator). We investigated whether victim forgiveness relieved perpetrator guilt through two studies. Data were collected from Japanese undergraduate and junior college students. In Study 1, we manipulated the presence of victim forgiveness to investigate the effects of forgiveness on perpetrator guilt. Study 2 investigated whether the result of Study 1 was replicated and the effect of forgiveness on moral self-evaluation. Studies 1 and 2 showed that victim forgiveness did not relieve perpetrator guilt. In addition, equivalence testing and Bayes factor strongly supported these null results. Study 2 showed that perpetrators evaluated themselves as relatively immoral compared to their victims when receiving forgiveness. These results suggest that a unilateral approach toward reconciliation (i.e. the victim’s pre-emptive forgiveness) is inadequate for restoring the relationship as the perpetrator because they may believe themselves undeserving of forgiveness from the victim.
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Data Availability
The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable requests.
Notes
People often express forgiveness implicitly. According to Exline and Baumeister (2000), implicit forgiveness is expressed as saying something soothing to perpetrators, such as ‘That’s okay’ and ‘No big deal’, as well as through behaviours toward perpetrators. Because explicit forgiveness might cause bitter feelings among perpetrators, it is more useful and low risk for victims to express forgiveness implicitly (Adams et al., 2015). Therefore, victims use implicit forgiveness more frequently than explicit forgiveness. In fact, Mooney et al. (2016) used the phrase, ‘Please don’t feel bad or worry about it at all’ as a forgiveness manipulation, not directly employing the word ‘forgive’. Therefore, we used implicit forgiveness as our forgiveness manipulation.
In Study 1, we measured compensatory behaviour for half the participants. The remaining participants were asked to respond to 11 items measuring how strongly they agreed with moral values (e.g. ‘I want to live with courtesy’, ‘I want to live with restraint’). We averaged the scores of the 11 items to a create composite measure of moral value (α = .72). A one-way ANOVA revealed no significant main effect for conditions, [F(2, 79) = 0.58, p = .561, η2 = .01].
Before equivalence testing, we conducted Levene’s test of equality for variances. In Studies 1 and 2, we confirmed all variances among pairs in equivalence testing were not significant, Fs < 3.3, ps > .05. Thus, we used Student’s t-statistic for equivalence testing.
We investigated whether the estimated victim’s sadness was higher in the Sadness condition than in other conditions and whether the estimated victim’s anger was higher in the Anger condition than in other conditions. In fact, the estimated victim’s sadness was higher in the Sadness condition (M = 6.83, SD = 0.38) than other conditions [Forgiveness: M = 6.16, SD = 1.07, Anger: M = 6.11, SD = 0.66), χ2(2) = 11.66, p = .003, η2 = .21]. The estimated victim’s anger was higher in the Anger condition (M = 6.74, SD = 0.45) than other conditions, [Forgiveness: M = 5.42, SD = 0.90, Sadness: M = 5.67, SD = 1.03), χ2(2) = 24.91, p < .001, η2 = .45].
We conducted the Kruskal-Wallis test with the damage estimation, excluding two participants who estimated an extremely higher price of damage (i.e. above mean + 3SD). However, even when their data were added, the result remained non-significant [χ2(2) = 1.75, p = .418, η2 = .03].
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank Keiko Dono, Ryota Tsukawaki, Tomoya Imura, and Takashi Nakao for providing opportunities to conduct the questionnaire survey. This paper is based in part on a doctoral dissertation submitted to the Hiroshima University by the first author, supervised by the second author.
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This work was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for JSPS Fellows (17 J05039) from the Japan Society for Promotion of Science to the first author.
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Furukawa, Y., Nakashima, K. & Morinaga, Y. Does victim forgiveness relieve perpetrator guilt? Examining null effects with equivalence tests and Bayes factor. Curr Psychol 42, 4641–4652 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-01805-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-01805-5