The road to forgiveness: A meta-analytic synthesis of its situational and dispositional correlates.

Forgiveness has received widespread attention among psychologists from social, personality, clinical, developmental, and organizational perspectives alike. Despite great progress, the forgiveness literature has witnessed few attempts at empirical integration. Toward this end, we meta-analyze results from 175 studies and 26,006 participants to examine the correlates of interpersonal forgiveness (i.e., forgiveness of a single offender by a single victim). A tripartite forgiveness typology is proposed, encompassing victims' (a) cognitions, (b) affect, and (c) constraints following offense, with each consisting of situational and dispositional components. We tested hypotheses with respect to 22 distinct…

• UD
  U.S. Department of Homeland Security
• AR
  Army Research Office

  Award: W911NF-08-1-0144
• AR
  Army Research Laboratory