The Empirical Study On Justice Cognition And Its Influence On Forgiveness Of The College Students

When transgression happened, what one normally reacts is retaliating or claiming compensation for the losses or asking for an apology from the offender. One may appeal for justice, or more specifically, retributive justice is required, not forgiveness. Paradoxically, the feature of justice and human moral indicates that justice and forgiveness are positively associated, suggesting that the probability of forgiveness should be intensified by activating of justice. Although, the constructs and characters of justice and forgiveness are opposite, however, the extent to what this assumption holds depends on the kind of justice involved, and these relationships also be reliable across the social contexts that transgression happened. Based on those questions, two studies are presented in this paper.Study 1 using complementary priming methods, 360 participants from China University of Political Science and Law with an average age of 20 majoring in law and other speciality of art were randomly assigned to one of three conditions (justice prime, prosocial prime, none prime). After observing picture and completing a word-completion task, they were asked to complete the TNTF scale. To examine the effect of justice prime of the propensity to forgive, a univariate analysis of variance is performed, which demonstrated that the participants in the justice prime condition exhibited a greater propensity to forgive. There are no influences of gender and major.In Study 2, a 3 (justice prime: retributive, restorative, no prime)×2 (contextual prime: criminal justice system, interpersonal relationship) repeated-measures experimental design was used with 330 participants , reading invented transgression scenarios to test the hypothesis that people associate forgiveness more with restorative justice prime than with retributive justice prime, and that there are different relationships in two social contexts. As predicted, the main effects for justice prime were significant, which participants less likely to associate revenge and avoidant responses with restorative justice than with retributive justice and no prime, F (2, 315) =4.63, p<0.01. To explore the factors which were predicted different with interpersonal relationships and criminal justice system, two linear regression equations were conducted. We predicted these equations with five variables: gender, major, justice prime, social interest and rumination. Results suggest that social interest and low rumination may be a unique addition to efforts to help people forgive interpersonal transgressions .The association of major and gender with forgiveness are significant in criminal justice context.