Fairness and forgiveness: Effects of priming justice depend on justice beliefs
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Fairness and forgiveness: Effects of priming justice depend on justice beliefs Todd Lucas 1 & Caroline E. Drolet 1 & Peter Strelan 2 & Johan C. Karremans 3 & Robbie M. Sutton 4 Accepted: 29 September 2020 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Thinking about justice can enhance or impede forgiveness of others. In this study, we show that these effects crucially depend on tendencies to believe in justice. We assessed beliefs about distributive and procedural justice for self and others among university students from the Midwestern United States. We then primed participants to think about distributive or procedural justice, either for self or others. We measured general forgiveness attitudes, as well as motivations to forgive a past transgression. Among participants who strongly believed in distributive justice for others, forgiveness was attenuated by thinking about distributive justice for others (congruence-inhibition), but accentuated by thinking about distributive justice for self, or procedural justice for others (incongruence-facilitation). Among participants who strongly believed in procedural justice for others, forgiveness was accentuated by thinking about procedural justice for self or distributive justice for others (incongruence-facilitation). Results highlight contextualized rather than rote effects of justice on forgiveness. Keywords Justice beliefs . Forgiveness . Distributive justice . Procedural justice . Personal justice . General justice . Social values . Belief in a just world
Although individuals may seek revenge for wrongdoing, conflict can also be resolved through forgiveness – a social transformation that occurs when a victim converts negative responses towards a transgressor into positive responses (McCullough, Worthington and Rachal, 1997). Instead of retaliating, punishing, or demanding compensation, forgiveness addresses wrongdoing with benevolence, which can confer health and social benefit to both victims and transgressors (e.g., Brown, 2003; McCullough, Root, Tabak and Witvliet, 2009; Seawell, Toussaint and Cheadle, 2014). Given this potential, justice scholars have maintained interest in better understanding the psychological underpinnings of forgiveness (Exline, Worthington Jr., Hill and McCullough, 2003; Strelan, 2018).
* Todd Lucas [email protected] 1
Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA
2
University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, Australia
3
Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands
4
University of Kent, Canterbury, UK
Past research shows that justice cognitions can be both positively and negatively associated with forgiveness (Lucas, Young, Zhdanova and Alexander, 2010; Strelan and Sutton, 2011), and that merely activating thoughts about justice can profoundly affect proclivities to forgive (Karremans and Van Lange, 2005). Extending these lines of research, recent studies show that prompting thoughts about distributive and procedural justice for self and others affects forgiveness in predictable ways – whereas thinking
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