Perspective-taking mediates the effect of Victims’ personalities on forgiveness

Abstract

The present research examined the possibility that a victim’s perspective-taking to the perpetrator, which has been argued to be a promotor of the victim’s forgiveness, does not take effect under certain personalities. Based on the finding that perspective-taking positively correlates with two of Big Five personalities (Toto, Man, Blatt, Simmens, & Greenberg, 2015), we examined whether openness and agreeableness moderate the degree of perspective-taking’s effect on forgiveness. In the experiment, we first measured participants’ personality on the Big Five scale and presented them with a vignette describing a situation where one becomes a victim of transgression; participants read the vignette under the manipulation of perspective taking (transgressor perspective or no perspective taking). Lastly, we measured participants’ levels of forgiveness. The results indicated that the participants who took the transgressor’s perspective reported weaker motivations of revenge and avoidance specifically when they were low in openness. Furthermore, perspective-taking mitigated the revenge motivation among people low in agreeableness while not among those high in agreeableness. The results suggest that people either high in agreeableness or in openness are likely to engage in spontaneous perspective-taking while the prompt to do so takes a more strong effect among those low in such personality traits.