Impacts Of Apology On Forgiveness:the Moderating Effects Of Offense Severity And Narcissism

Although philosophers have argued for a long time on forgiveness, it is still a new field for psychologists. We first summarized research results about forgiveness, from the concepts of forgiveness, developmental patterns of forgiveness, classification of forgiveness to influencing factors on forgiveness. However, a great number of researchers in China believe that apology must cause more extent of forgiveness. Internal literature haven’t explained the complex relationships between apology and forgiveness. After reading external literature, we realized the matter is not so easy. The effects of apology on forgiveness would fail in some cases, because during this process, it would be moderated by other variables, such as intent, offense severity, personality and time.Nearly600college students have been asked to finish this research. Three paper-pen experiments were used for this present study. We explored elements used in apologies (Bergman&Kasper,1993; Olshtain&Cohen,1983; Trosborg,1987) and combined these elements into different apology strategies according to different sincerity. We classified four kinds of apologies: elaborate sincere apology, easy apology, no apology and false apology which is designed according to the context of collectivism culture.In experiment1(N=124),"note transgression" is used to test whether different apology strategies make significant different extent of forgiveness. According to correspondent inference theory (Takaku;2001), we also introduced character evaluation into this study to check the inner mechanism of forgiving. In experiment2(N=197), we divided offense severity of transgression into median severity and serious severity, and to test the moderating effect of offense severity with the help of "door crash transgression". In experiment3(N=267), Narcissistic Personality Questionnaire are used to separate the high narcissism group and the low narcissism group, we used "talking scandal transgression" to test the moderating effect of narcissism. The results are the followings:(1) Different apology strategies revealed a significant effect on forgiveness. The more sincere the apology, the more extent of the forgiveness. It is harder to forgive transgressor who give false apology compare to no apology.(2) Character evaluation plays mediating role between apology and forgiveness.(3) On forgiveness extent, there is no significant difference between two genders, and no significant difference between different subjects.(4) Offense severity has a moderating effect between apology and forgiveness. In the median severity offense, different apology strategies make the significant different forgiveness extent; while in the serious severity, the forgiveness extent made by different apology strategies has no significant difference.(5) Narcissism has a moderating effect between apology and forgiveness. The more narcissistic the participants, The less effect of apology on forgiveness.(6) The more severe the offense, the less the victim would forgive the transgressor; the more narcissistic the victim, the harder for him to forgive.