Past research on interpersonal forgiveness has emphasized traits of the betrayed partner (e.g., forgivingness, empathy, narcissism) or relationship factors (e.g., relational closeness) in predicting forgiveness, but has rarely considered characteristics of offenders. The current project examined the unique contribution of offenders’ personality over and above established predictors of forgiveness (e.g., relational closeness to offender, betrayal severity, forgivingness, narcissism) as assessed by outcomes on the Transgression-Related Interpersonal Motivations (TRIM) inventory. It was expected that offender traits (such as empathy, Honesty-Humility, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness) would account for additional, unique variance in predicting forgiveness. Results for TRIM-Benevolence, Avoidance, and Revenge supported the study’s hypotheses, indicating that victim perceptions of offender personality also are important in predicting forgiveness.
Advances in forgiveness research in past years have established that forgiveness is associated with positive physical health outcomes (e.g., Waltman et al., 2009 and Witvliet et al., 2001), as well as better relational and individual mental health outcomes (Fincham et al., 2004, Lin et al., 2004 and Reed and Enright, 2006). Furthermore, not only does forgiveness help parties to reconcile following an offense, but more broadly, it could promote societal cooperation (Enright, 2001). Given the potential positive role of forgiveness in individual and societal health, it is important for the field to understand better the circumstances under which forgiveness is more likely to occur.
What constitutes forgiveness differs from author to author; however, here, forgiveness is defined as an interpersonal restorative process whose outcome is represented by distinct patterns of change in three transgression-related interpersonal motivations, or TRIMs, which are Benevolence, Avoidance, and Revenge. A forgiveness outcome is characterized by victims’ increased warmth (Benevolence) and decreased Avoidance and Revenge toward offenders (McCullough et al., 1998). In existing literature, Benevolence, Avoidance, and Revenge are considered separate dimensions of forgiveness and unforgiveness that exhibit differing predictive patterns (e.g., Koutsos et al., 2008 and Tsang and Stanford, 2007).
