The decision to participate in mediation and individual factors: the role of moral foundations and their relation to restorative and retributive orientations

ABSTRACT

The present study explores people’s willingness to participate in victim–offender mediation and the role played by moral foundations and the retributive and restorative justice orientations in this decision. Participants were exposed to a burglary victimisation hypothetical scenario in order to capture the decision to participate in victim–offender mediation. Based upon our interpretation of the positive association found between the retributive and restorative orientations, our analysis revealed two clear patterns of association between, on the one hand, the fairness/reciprocity moral foundation and the restorative orientation and, on the other hand, the authority/respect moral foundation and the retributive orientation. The ingroup/loyalty moral foundation directly and negatively predicted the decision to participate in mediation, while the fairness/reciprocity moral foundation had an indirect effect on the decision, through the restorative orientation.

KEYWORDS:

• Decision
• victim–offender mediation
• restorative orientation
• retributive orientation
• moral foundations

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank warmly Ivo Aertsen and Lode Walgrave for the helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. The author would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers at RJIJ for their useful feedback on this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Since 2012 the authors have started to use slightly different terms: care/harm; fairness/cheating; loyalty/betrayal; authority/subversion; and sanctity/degradation that emphasise the polarity inherent in each set of moral foundations. However, in the present article we use the original designation given to each of the five sets of moral foundations proposed by Moral Foundations Theory (Graham et al., 2011).

2 The purity/sanctity moral foundation corresponds to Shweder`s ethic of divinity (Shweder et al., 2006). However, the exploration of this set of moral intuitions is not comprehended in the aims of the present article.