The social costs of forgiving following multiple-victim transgressions.

Abstract

A single transgressor sometimes harms more than just 1 victim. We examine a previously undocumented social cost of forgiving following these multiple-victim transgressions. We find that nonforgiving victims believe that other victims who forgive the common transgressor make their decisions to withhold forgiveness appear ungenerous. Faced with this threat, nonforgiving victims report that other forgiving (vs. nonforgiving) victims have overclaimed their standing to forgive the common transgressor and consequently perceive these forgiving victims as demonstrating a lack of benevolence toward them. Nonforgiving victims also perceive forgiving victims to have relatively little integrity. We test these social costs of forgiving in the field and in the lab across 7 studies plus a meta-analysis of 5 of those studies. We also identify 1 route by which forgiving victims can attenuate the social costs they face: they can affirm other victims’ decisions to withhold forgiveness.

Forgiveness contributes to the moral licensing effect in a multiple victim context

“…And, as in Study 1, it appears that the reason the results may have been null in the team unforgiveness conditions is that the interplay between making a moral decision and experiencing an increase in authentic pride through alignment with the team was absent. And, like what may have been predicted from reading Raj et al (2019), the multiple-victim context may have created a situation where perceived disagreement between the participant and the team may have induced a socialcosts related threat. This perceived threat may have supressed both moral licensing, and authentic pride.…”

“…I investigated whether or not forgiveness would generate a moral licensing effect, and more specifically, if moral licensing would be affected when a participant was the "unique forgiver" (i.e., the participant forgives when the other victims do not). In previous research using a similar manipulation (Raj et al, 2019), there was no main effect of participant forgiveness; however, in that research, the authors measured participants' perceptions of the unique forgiver (i.e., the participant was an observer, not the forgiver), and not whether being a unique forgiver influences subsequent moral behaviour. As such, the current research added a novel twist to the existing literature on the antecedents and consequences of moral behaviour as well as the forgiveness literature.…”

“…In the current research, I used a multiple victim scenario to examine forgiveness and its relation with moral licensing. The multiple victim context is often overlooked by the forgiveness literature (for exceptions see, Raj et al, 2019), yet it had important implications for numerous social situations where one person's wrongful behaviour harms more than one person. The workplace is a potential setting for such multiple victim transgressions.…”

“…But, if the other victims do not forgive, and the participant does, then the participant should feel less proud. This would be due to the participant weighing the social costs of forgiveness (see Etxebarria et al, 2014;Raj et al, 2019). In this condition the participant may have reason to be concerned about how the other victims see them, thus feel less proud of their behaviour, and thus may not achieve the buffer to self-regard required for moral licensing to take place (Khan & Dhar, 2006).…”

“…Forgivers are more likely to experience re-offenses compared to non-forgivers (Strelan et al, 2017). Moreover, in contexts where there are multiple victims-as was the case with the transgression committed by Thomas-a unique forgiver (i.e., forgiving a transgressor when other victims do not) is typically perceived negatively by those who do not grant forgiveness (Raj et al, 2019). Despite the volume of empirical work on the antecedents and consequences of forgiveness, determining whether forgiving a transgressor has a downstream effect on the forgiver's subsequent moral behaviour has yet to be explored.…”