Conciliatory Gestures Facilitate Forgiveness and Feelings of Friendship by Making Transgressors Appear More Agreeable

Tabak, Benjamin A.; McCullough, Michael E.; Luna, Lindsey Root; Bono, Giacomo; Berry, Jack W.

doi:10.1111/j.1467-6494.2011.00728.x

Cited by 52 publications

(54 citation statements)

References 60 publications

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“…These results suggest that apologies, offers of compensation, and other conciliatory gestures might increase forgiveness and reduce anger by making transgressors seem less threatening to their victims and more valuable as relationship partners (8,41).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 88%

“…We measured participants' perceptions of the extent to which their transgressors made conciliatory gestures at time 1 (α = 0.97) and time 2 (α = 0.97) with 39 items that were rated on a fivepoint Likert-type scale (ranging from 1 = not at all to 5 = to a great extent). These items were similar to the 19 items used by Tabak et al (41), but our list was more comprehensive. The items all began with, "Since the offense occurred, to what extent did the person who harmed you.…”

Section: Do Conciliatory Gestures Promote Forgiveness Via Their Intermentioning

confidence: 92%

“…Previous work (41) indicated that these conciliatory gestures facilitate forgiveness by causing transgressors to seem high on a personality trait known as agreeableness (42), which subsumes both high relationship value (e.g., helpfulness, generosity) and low exploitation risk [e.g., unselfishness, reluctance to start quarrels (43)]. However, it is not known whether conciliatory gestures specifically influence victims' perceptions of their transgressors' perceived relationship value, their perceived exploitation risk, or both.…”

Section: Do Conciliatory Gestures Promote Forgiveness Via Their Intermentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Because of the time delay between the occurrence of participants' transgressions and their enrollment in the study, relatively few participants provided data before 8 d after their transgressions; thus, data were very sparse until posttransgression day 8. To aid model estimation and convergence, we modeled only the data collected 8-28 d posttransgression [as in the study by Tabak et al (41)]. Furthermore, we modeled data from every other day to reduce autocorrelation and facilitate model convergence.…”

Section: Do Conciliatory Gestures Promote Forgiveness Via Their Intermentioning

confidence: 99%

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Conciliatory gestures promote forgiveness and reduce anger in humans

McCullough

Pedersen

Tabak

et al. 2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Conflict is an inevitable component of social life, and natural selection has exerted strong effects on many organisms to facilitate victory in conflict and to deter conspecifics from imposing harms upon them. Like many species, humans likely possess cognitive systems whose function is to motivate revenge as a means of deterring individuals who have harmed them from harming them again in the future. However, many social relationships often retain value even after conflicts have occurred between interactants, so natural selection has very likely also endowed humans with cognitive systems whose function is to motivate reconciliation with transgressors whom they perceive as valuable and nonthreatening, notwithstanding their harmful prior actions. In a longitudinal study with 337 participants who had recently been harmed by a relationship partner, we found that conciliatory gestures (e.g., apologies, offers of compensation) were associated with increases in victims' perceptions of their transgressors' relationship value and reductions in perceptions of their transgressors' exploitation risk. In addition, conciliatory gestures appeared to accelerate forgiveness and reduce reactive anger via their intermediate effects on relationship value and exploitation risk. These results strongly suggest that conciliatory gestures facilitate forgiveness and reduce anger by modifying victims' perceptions of their transgressors' value as relationship partners and likelihood of recidivism.cooperation | punishment | evolutionary psychology

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 88%

Section: Do Conciliatory Gestures Promote Forgiveness Via Their Intermentioning

confidence: 92%

Section: Do Conciliatory Gestures Promote Forgiveness Via Their Intermentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Do Conciliatory Gestures Promote Forgiveness Via Their Intermentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Conciliatory gestures promote forgiveness and reduce anger in humans

McCullough

Pedersen

Tabak

et al. 2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…In reality, this 'partner' was a pre-programmed computer script; without deception, this research would have been impossible (see the electronic supplementary material, section S1.3). Here, we focus only on the first 19 rounds of the game, which occurred before an experimental manipulation [30]. Participants were told they would play the game for points and would be paid 10 per cent of their total points in dollars after the game ended.…”

Section: (B) Proceduresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Harsh childhood environmental characteristics predict exploitation and retaliation in humans

et al. 2013

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Across and within societies, people vary in their propensities towards exploitative and retaliatory defection in potentially cooperative interaction. We hypothesized that this variation reflects adaptive responses to variation in cues during childhood that life will be harsh, unstable and short-cues that probabilistically indicate that it is in one's fitness interests to exploit co-operators and to retaliate quickly against defectors. Here, we show that childhood exposure to family neglect, conflict and violence, and to neighbourhood crime, were positively associated for men (but not women) with exploitation of an interaction partner and retaliatory defection after that partner began to defect. The associations between childhood environment and both forms of defection for men appeared to be mediated by participants' endorsement of a 'code of honour'. These results suggest that individual differences in mutual benefit cooperation are not merely due to genetic noise, random developmental variation or the operation of domain-general cultural learning mechanisms, but rather, might reflect the adaptive calibration of social strategies to local social-ecological conditions.

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When and how forgiving benefits victims: Post‐transgression offender effort and the mediating role of deservingness judgements

Strelan

McKee

Feather

2015

Euro J Social Psych

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For all the well‐established benefits of forgiveness for victims, when and how is forgiving more likely to be beneficial? Three experimental studies found that forgiving is more likely to be beneficial when victims perceived reparative effort by offenders such that offenders deserve forgiveness. Deservingness judgements were elicited by manipulating post‐transgression offender effort (apology/amends). When offenders apologized (Study 1; recall paradigm) or made amends (Study 2; hypothetical paradigm) and were forgiven—relative to transgressors who did not apologize/make amends but were still forgiven—forgiving was beneficial. These findings—that deserved forgiveness is more beneficial for victims than undeserved forgiveness—were replicated when forgiving itself was also manipulated (Study 3). Moreover, Study 3 provided evidence to indicate that if a victim forgives when it is not deserved, victim well‐being is equivalent to not forgiving at all. Of theoretical and practical importance is the mediating effect of deservingness on relations between post‐transgression offender effort and a victim's personal consequences of forgiving.

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Conciliatory Gestures Facilitate Forgiveness and Feelings of Friendship by Making Transgressors Appear More Agreeable

Cited by 52 publications

References 60 publications

Conciliatory gestures promote forgiveness and reduce anger in humans

Conciliatory gestures promote forgiveness and reduce anger in humans

Harsh childhood environmental characteristics predict exploitation and retaliation in humans

When and how forgiving benefits victims: Post‐transgression offender effort and the mediating role of deservingness judgements

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