Perceptions of relationship value and exploitation risk mediate the effects of transgressors' post-harm communications upon forgiveness

Abstract

Principles of adaptive design suggest that the decision-making systems tasked with regulating a victim's behavior in the wake of interpersonal harm should modulate forgiveness based at least in part on perceptions of the transgressor's relationship value and exploitation risk. We extended this framework with three experiments that tested whether conciliatory and antagonistic gestures influence forgiveness by altering these perceptions. We used an online sample from the United States (N = 1019), a laboratory sample from the United States (N = 318), and an online sample from Japan (N = 186). Across all three experiments, relationship value mediated the effect of antagonistic gestures (vs. control messages) on both behavioral and self-reported forgiveness, and exploitation risk mediated the effect of antagonistic gestures upon self-report (but not behavioral) forgiveness. For conciliatory gestures (vs. control messages), relationship value and exploitation risk emerged as significant mediators only in the American online sample.