The link between Empathy and Forgiveness: Replication and extensions Registered Report of McCullough et al. (1997)'s Study 1.

Abstract

McCullough et al. [McCullough, M. E., Worthington, E. L., & Rachal, K. C. (1997). Interpersonal Forgiving in Close Relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73(2), 321-336.] demonstrated that in situations of feeling hurt by an offender, empathy towards the offender is positively associated with forgiving the offender, which in turn is positively associated with conciliatory behaviour and negatively associated with avoidance behaviour. In a Replication Registered Report with a Prolific US online sample (N = 794), we conducted a replication of Study 1 from McCullough et al. (1997) with extensions manipulating empathy to determine causality and measuring revenge motivation adopted from McCullough et al. [McCullough, M. E., Rachal, K. C., Sandage, S. J., Worthington, 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]. We found that empathy was positively associated with perceived apology (r = 0.45[0.35,0.55]) and forgiveness toward the offender (r = 0.64[0.56,0.70]), and forgiveness was positively associated with conciliatory motivation (r = 0.51[0.41,0.59]) and negatively associated with avoidance motivation (r = -0.51[-0.59,-0.42]) and revenge motivation (r = -0.43[-0.52,-0.33]). Manipulating empathy, we found that participants who recalled situations in which they felt strong empathy towards the offender rated higher forgiveness compared to participants recalling situations with low empathy or compared to control (d = 0.60-0.62). Overall, this was a successful replication of the findings by McCullough et al. (1997; 1998) with the empathy model of forgiveness receiving strong empirical support. Materials, data and code are available on: https://osf.io/fmuv2/. This Registered Report has been endorsed by Peer Community in Registered Reports: https://doi.org/10.24072/pci.rr.100444.