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Interpersonal transgressions and psychological loss: Understanding moral repair as dyadic, reciprocal, and interactionist

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2021.08.018Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Interpersonal transgressions lead to loss of agency and social-moral identity.

  • Victims and offenders respond to each other as interdependent actors.

  • Moral repair needs to be understood as reciprocal, dyadic, and dynamic.

Abstract

Following interpersonal transgressions, both victims and offenders can experience psychological loss owing to threatened needs for agency and moral-social identity. Moral repair is the process by which these losses are restored. Rather than involving only intraindividual static processes, research is starting to recognize that moral repair is dyadic, reciprocal, and interactionist. It involves the victim and offender coengaging with one another, reciprocally responding to the other's psychological needs, and coconstructing a shared understanding of what has occurred, their relationship, and a way forward. Each of these steps represents periods of vulnerability where the losses of a transgression can be repaired — or exacerbated.

Section snippets

What is lost in the act of an interpersonal transgression?

Relationship research has long highlighted the negative implications of relationship conflict, transgressions, and betrayals, in terms of attachment insecurity [8] and/or feelings of rejection and diminishment [9]. Correspondingly, the broader literature on the psychology of justice and morality has argued that, in addition to material losses (economic, bodily harm, and so on), a transgression involves symbolic losses referred to as psychological threats, needs, or concerns [5,10]. Paralleling

Repairing what was lost: the dyadic-interactionist nature of moral repair

Given the interdependence of victims and offenders in recovering psychological losses after a transgression, moral repair needs to be seen as a dyadic process. This dyadic process can be understood as ‘interlocking systems’ [22]. Mendoza-Denton and Ayduk [23] identified three principles (extrapolated from Buss [24]) that characterize the dyadic-level processes of interlocking systems: coengagement, coevocation, and coconstruction (Figure 1).

Conclusion

Ultimately, to repair what is lost in a transgression, the victim and offender need to re-establish a shared reality on which their relationship will be based moving forward. Both parties can be motivated by a concern for the restoration of value consensus, assuming they are sufficiently committed to their relationship [10]. Recent studies of victim-offender dyads illustrate the capacity of the involved parties to facilitate a shared process of moral repair. However, as our discussion shows,

Conflict of interest statement

Nothing declared.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [grant number DP190102283].

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