Flying the Unfriendly Skies?: The Role of Forgiveness and Race in the Experience of Racial Microaggressions

ABSTRACT

Because even subtle forms of racial discrimination can damage well-being, identifying individual differences that shape this stress process is important. Dispositional forgiveness has been shown to influence how people perceive and react to interpersonal transgressions, yet its role in the context of racial discrimination has not received much research attention. In the current study, participants completed an initial measure of dispositional forgiveness and then considered a scenario that could be deemed racially discriminatory. Next, participants' perceptions of the scenario, negative affect, and cognitive performance were assessed. Dispositional forgiveness predicted all three outcomes such that more forgiving individuals were less likely to view the event as racially discriminatory and showed lower negative affect and greater cognitive performance after reading the scenario. Moreover, race moderated these relationships such that forgiveness played a more beneficial role for ethnic minorities than for whites.

Keywords:

• cognitive task
• dispositional forgiveness
• negative affect
• racial discrimination

Notes

1. The design of this study included an identity manipulation task in which, after completing the initial measure of forgiveness, participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions designed to increase the salience of different aspects of identity. This manipulation was unsuccessful at producing significant differences on the dependent outcomes of interest, and questions were raised about the underlying meaning of different aspects of identity between whites and ethnic minorities during the peer-review process. Therefore, this manipulation was omitted from the current analyses. However, it is important to note that the overall pattern of findings is consistent when this manipulation is included in the analyses.