Tipping the scales: Conciliatory behavior and the morality of self-forgiveness

Abstract

Two studies examined whether conciliatory behavior aids self-forgiveness and whether it does so in part by making it seem more morally appropriate. Participants in Study 1 (n = 269) completed an offense-recall procedure; participants in Study 2 (n = 208) imagined a social transgression under conciliatory behavior (yes, no) and receipt of forgiveness (no, ambiguous, yes) conditions. Conciliatory behavior predicted (Study 1) and caused (Study 2) elevated self-forgiveness and increased perceptions of the moral appropriateness of self-forgiveness. Perceived morality consistently mediated the effect of conciliatory behavior on self-forgiveness. Received forgiveness and guilt were considered as additional mechanisms, but received mixed support. Results suggest that conciliatory behavior may influence self-forgiveness in part by satisfying moral prerequisites for self-forgiveness.

Keywords:

• self-forgiveness
• apology
• guilt
• morality
• amends
• justice

Funding

This research was supported in part by a generous grant from the Fetzer Institute.

Notes

1. Due to an error, age and ethnicity data for these participants were not recorded.

2. Although a scale assessing self-forgiveness does exist (Wohl, DeShea, & Wahkinney, 2008), it was not used here, as items go beyond self-forgiveness as defined by Hall and Fincham (2005) and include related antecedent constructs (e.g. shame, self-rejection, and bad self-attributions). We sought to separately measure these constructs and model their relationships to self-forgiveness, and thus a narrower measure of self-forgiveness was used.

3. We chose a single-item measure of guilt over a guilt scale (e.g. as in Study 1) because guilt scales ask about the subjective experience of emotion, which participants would not experience during an imagination task.