The Influence Of Peer Trust And Opinion Selection On Forgiveness

As a complex social emotion,forgiveness has many influence factors and has complicated process.Forgiveness often takes place between people,usually involving two parties,one for victims and the other for offenders.In a series of factors related to forgiveness,the influencing factors from the victim’s self usually involve personal traits and demographic variables,such as neuroticism and agreeableness,trait anger,self-esteem,rumination,depression,religiosity,cultural background,age,etc.The influencing factors from the angle of the offender usually refers to offence situation such as apology and remedial behavior,intent,harm severity,harm type,recidivism,etc.Moreover,the relationship between the victim and the offender is often an important factor as well,such as intimacy,commitment and satisfaction,etc.Based on the previous studies,this study explored the impact of peer trust and perspective taking in the context of forgiving others from victim’s perspective.The first study investigates the relationship between peer trust,perspective taking and other related factors and forgiveness.The study also investigated whether perspective taking can act as an intermediary factor for the peer trust to influence forgiveness.The second study explored the effects of cognitive and affective perspective taking on forgiveness among individuals of different peer trust level through experimental methods.The results showed that: 1)Peer trust and perspective taking are both positively correlated with forgiveness.Peer trust is positively correlated with the tendency of perspective taking.2)As an intermediary factor,perspective taking partially mediated the effect of peer trust on forgiveness.Personal distress moderates the effect of peer trust on perspective taking.3)Both cognitive and affective perspective taking can significantly predict the tendency of forgiving.Compared with the control group,the tendency of forgiving was significantly increased among both perspective taking group,and there was no significant difference between cognitive perspective taking group and affective perspective taking group.4)After controlling the original level of forgiveness,peer trust and varieties of perspective taking can still significantly predict the tendency of forgiving,while the interactive effect of peer trust and varieties of perspective taking is insignificant.