Forgiveness within the Big Five personality model

doi:10.1016/S0191-8869(00)00185-9

Personality and Individual Differences

Volume 32, Issue 7, May 2002, Pages 1127-1137

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0191-8869(00)00185-9 Get rights and content

Abstract

Research has begun to explore the relationship of dispositional forgiveness to personality traits [McCullough, M. E., Rachal, K. C., Sandage, S. J., Worthington Jr., E. L., Brown, S. W., & Hight, T. L. (1998). Interpersonal forgiving in close relationships II: theoretical elaboration and measurement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(6), 1586–1603.]. Personality research has generally focused on the Big Five model of personality, but there is evidence that prediction in personality is aided by using the underlying primary factors of the Big Five. This study examined, in students from religious and public universities, the relationships of five and 16 factors of personality to four dimensions of dispositional forgiveness — forgiveness of others, receiving others’ forgiveness, forgiveness of self, and receiving God’s forgiveness. The results confirmed that personality, particularly neuroticism versus emotional stability, correlates with many aspects of dispositional forgiveness, and that the use of a greater number of personality factors aids in understanding dispositional forgiveness.

Section snippets

The Big Five model of personality

Personality research has centered upon five factors, termed the Big Five (Cattell, 1956, Digman and Inouye, 1986, Goldberg, 1990, Gorsuch and Cattell, 1967, Hogan, 1986; McCrae & Costa, 1987; Norman, 1963, Tupes and Christal, 1961). This model proposes that personality consists of five factors which summarize more detailed personality traits: Neuroticism versus Emotional Stability, Surgency/Extraversion, Openness to Experience/Intellect, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness.

The Big Five model

Hypotheses regarding personality and forgiveness

Forgiveness theorists have suggested that the experience of forgiveness is different if one is forgiving another, receiving another’s forgiveness, forgiving oneself, or receiving God’s forgiveness (Enright and The Human Development Study Group, 1996, Wahking, 1992, Walker and Doverspike, 2001). However, across each of these dimensions, forgiveness is generally considered to be a combination of affect, cognition, and behavior that motivates an individual to seek reconciliation following real or

Participants

In an effort to avoid a restriction of range on the forgiveness variables, participants in the current study (n=180) were taken from religious and non-religious universities in southern California. The sample consisted of 137 females and 43 males ranging in age from 18 to 55 (M=23.20, S.D.=7.56). The following religious denominations were represented: 113 Protestant, 27 Catholic, nine Christian Scientist, two Mormon, five Buddhist, two Eastern Orthodox, two Jehovah’s Witness, three Jewish, nine

Personality

Goldberg (2000) developed a 165-item self-report scale as part of the International Personality Item Pool that can be scored for both the Big Five as well as 16 factors used to represent constructs similar to Cattell’s 16PF. Goldberg (2000) developed the scale using 501 adult participants from the Eugene-Springfield Oregon area. Reliabilities for the 16 scales using Cronbach’s alpha have ranged from 0.73 to 0.86 (Goldberg, 2000). Convergent validity is supported by correlations between these

Procedure

The students were invited to participate during a class session in a study of personality and relationships, and told that they would complete a questionnaire about themselves and their relationships with other people. The students gave informed consent, and then completed the questionnaire materials either individually or in groups ranging in size from 2 to 34. To avoid demand characteristics, the participants completed the personality questionnaire first, followed by the forgiveness scales.

Results

Means, standard deviations, and coefficient alphas were calculated for all scales used in the analysis (Table 1). Prior to running regression analyses to test the hypotheses, correlations were calculated between the demographic variables of age, sex, religion (measured with the item “how important is your religious faith to you?”), and spirituality (measured with the item “how spiritual do you consider yourself?”), as well as the Big Five and the 16 primary factors underlying the Big Five (

Discussion

The central hypothesis of this study was that dispositional forgiveness would be correlated with personality variables. Consistent with this hypothesis, the findings indicate that all four aspects of dispositional forgiveness measured in this study were indeed significantly related to personality. These results are particularly robust with respect to Neuroticism versus Emotional Stability. The finding that Neuroticism versus Emotional Stability (and all but one of its underlying primary

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The study also calculated whether the relationship between forgiveness and SWB differs in the following ways: Walker and Gorsuch (2002) found that men do not easily give or receive forgiveness, whereas, under the same conditions, women are more likely to choose to forgive than men. They thought it may be because women are more emotional and empathic toward their problems, whereas men are more rational, and their attitudes are not as easygoing as those of women.
This article reports a meta-analysis on the relationship between forgiveness and subjective well-being. After searching and screening the literature, a total of 83 studies involving 39,104 participants were included in the analysis. Using the random-effects model, results indicated that people with forgiveness had higher subjective well-being, greater life satisfaction, more positive emotions, and fewer negative emotions. The relationship between personality tendency forgiveness and negative emotion was regulated by gender. Specifically, the higher the proportion of females in personality tendency forgiveness, the weaker the relationship between personality tendency forgiveness and negative emotion.
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Balliet's (2010) meta-analysis showed a small correlation between forgivingness and conscientiousness (r = 0.14). Some studies (e.g. Brose et al., 2005) showed a positive correlation between extraversion and forgivingness, while Walker and Gorsuch (2002) did not find any relationship. Steiner et al. (2012) found that emotional stability and agreeableness partially explain the positive association between age and forgivingness cross-sectionally.
While forgivingness has been associated with health and psychosocial variables, previous cross-sectional studies could not address the temporal characteristics of their relationships. To overcome this limitation, the present study investigated longitudinally the antecedents and consequences of forgivingness, as well as the association of mood states and Big Five personality traits with forgivingness. We obtained complete data on forgivingness, Big Five personality traits, and moods across three waves of surveys over six years from 294 participants, and from more participants who completed only one or two waves. Structural equation modelling for the cross-lagged longitudinal analysis was applied, controlling for auto-correlations and effects of external variables. Our data revealed a weak link from conscientiousness to later forgivingness. More importantly, forgivingness predicted emotional stability, agreeableness and less negative moods longitudinally. Our findings challenged the previously-assumed causative roles of Big Five personality traits in forgivingness but corroborated the desirable predictive effects of being forgiving in developing more positive moods and personality characteristics.
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This is because forgiveness of a specific event is the result of a causal sequence in which personality and contextual factors play an important role (Riek & Mania, 2012). As personality traits affect every human reaction and behavior, including stress response, the Big Five and five-factor models were often applied in research on forgiveness, both dispositional and episodic, showing many significant associations (e.g. Kaleta & Mróz, 2018; McCullough & Hoyt, 2002; Walker & Gorsuch, 2002). The best documented domains related with episodic forgiveness are agreeableness and neuroticism.
Links between contextual variables and forgiveness have been widely acknowledged in the literature. From the layperson's perspective, receipt of an apology is one of the most important reasons to forgive the offender, while lack of apology is a major reason not to forgive (Younger et al., 2004). The effect of apology or remedial behaviors on forgiveness has been confirmed by many studies. However, more in-depth analyses of the associations have been undertaken very rarely. The aim of the present study was to examine the relationships between apology and forgiveness moderated by the personality variables, such as the Big Five dimensions and trait anger. Two cross-sectional studies were conducted in Polish samples consisting, respectively, of 259 and 236 individuals aged 15–79. Polish versions of the Decision to Forgive Scale, the Emotional Forgiveness Scale, the Abridged Big Five Dimensional Circumplex, and State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory-2 were used. Perceived apology was rated using a five-point scale. The results showed that apology was positively related to both emotional and decisional forgiveness. Agreeableness, as the only personality dimension, moderated the link between apology and decisional forgiveness. Participants with average and higher levels of agreeableness showed a greater decision to forgive their offenders.
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Reconciliation is the restoration of both partners' feelings of closeness and commitment following a transgression (McCullough et al., 1997) and serves as a potential outcome to forgiveness. As explained by Walker and Gorsuch (2002, p.1128), forgiveness “motivates the individual to seek reconciliation following imagined or real wrong.” Although the role of reconciliation as an outcome of forgiveness is well established in the psychology, sociology and theocratic literatures (Enright, Gassin, & Wu, 1992; Fincham & Beach, 2001; Freedman, 1998; Toussaint & Jorgensen, 2008), market researchers have not explored reconciliation as an outcome of forgiveness following service recovery.
Service failures occur when the service provided is less than adequate or fails to live up to the customer's expectations. When service failures inevitably occur, providers implement recovery strategies such as apologizing, offering compensation, or allowing customers to voice their concerns. However, such strategies do not always lead to desired outcomes such as repatronage intentions, reduced negative WOM, or reconciliation. The current research explores the very rich concept of forgiveness with regard to service recovery and empirically examines the links among recovery strategies, customer forgiveness and recovery outcomes. Although differences in terms of optimal recovery strategies depend on industry type, forgiveness is demonstrated to mediate the relationship between recovery strategies and desirable outcomes, suggesting that forgiveness be included in all future models of service recovery.
Self-forgiveness, self-exoneration, and self-condemnation: Individual differences associated with three patterns of responding to interpersonal offenses
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If this is the case, then one could expect hedonic end-state measures of self-forgiveness—even if they capture both individuals who genuinely self-forgive and individuals who self-exonerate—to be correlated with individual differences associated with hedonic well-being. Indeed, assessed using hedonic end-state trait measures, self-forgiveness has been found to relate to personality and individual difference variables through positive associations with agreeableness and self-esteem (Strelan, 2007) and negative associations with neuroticism, anxiety (Walker & Gorsuch, 2002), and proneness to shame and guilt (Strelan, 2007). These studies may suggest that self-forgiveness measures tap into a certain dispositional imperviousness to negative feedback, and a resulting presence of more positive affect than negative (Lyubomirsky & Ross, 1999).
Studies examining individual differences associated with self-forgiveness have tended to include measures that confound self-forgiveness with other hedonic traits, that is, the ability to release negative emotion following failure. In this paper we used cluster analysis to distinguish genuine self-forgiveness from simply letting oneself off the hook via self-exoneration. Cluster analysis revealed three patterns of responding to interpersonal offenses: self-forgiving (high responsibility and end-state self-forgiveness and low self-condemnation), self-condemning (high responsibility and self-condemnation and low end-state self-forgiveness), and self-exonerating (high end-state self-forgiveness and low responsibility and self-condemnation). Comparisons among the clustering solution groups allowed for examination of personality traits associated with individual differences in responses to transgressions. The self-forgiving and self-exonerating clusters largely did not differ on traits (e.g., self-compassion, neuroticism) associated with hedonic wellbeing. However, interpersonal functioning personality traits did distinguish the three response patterns. The self-forgiving cluster had lower vulnerable narcissism compared to the self-exonerating and self-condemning clusters. In addition, the self-exonerating cluster had lower empathetic concern compared to the self-condemning cluster. Our findings provide evidence for three types of responses to transgressions and insight into the individual differences associated with each of these response patterns.
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Forgiveness within the Big Five personality model

Abstract

Section snippets

The Big Five model of personality

Hypotheses regarding personality and forgiveness

Participants

Personality

Procedure

Results

Discussion

Evolution and Human Behavior

Attitude-behavior relations: a theoretical analysis and review of empirical research

Psychological Bulletin

A contrarian view of the five-factor approach to personality

Psychological Bulletin

Second-order personality factors in the questionnaire realm

Journal of Consulting Psychology

The Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire

Applied multiple regression/correlation analysis for the behavioral sciences

Further specification of the five robust factors of personality

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Counseling within the forgiveness triad: On forgiving, receiving forgiveness, and self-forgiveness

Counseling and Values

An alternative description of personality: the Big-Five structure

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Factor analysis

Second stratum personality factors defined in the questionnaire realm by the 16 P.F

Multivariate Behavioral Research

Hogan Personality Inventory manual

The five-factor model in personality: a critical reappraisal

Journal of Personality