群体身份对人际宽恕的影响

The Effect of Group Identity on Interpersonal Forgiveness

面对不同群体身份成员给我们造成的客观损失相同的伤害,人们是更倾向于宽恕内群体成员还是外群体成员?本研究采用最大差异化群体间囚徒困境范式创造来自内、外群体成员客观程度相同的侵犯行为,考察群体身份对宽恕的影响及其机制。结果表明,面对客观损失等价的侵犯,被试报告更倾向于宽恕内群体成员,并且对侵犯者的认知评价在其中起中介作用。本研究对整合人际和群际水平宽恕研究、推进对宽恕发生的条件和机制的理解有一定意义。

The present study aimed to examine the impact of group identity on interpersonal forgiveness and its mechanism. Specifically, we attempted to answer this question： when in-group and out-group members caused the same amount of harm on us, whom do we preferred to forgive and why？ In order to reach this aim, the paradigm of intergroup prisoner＇s dilemma-maximizing difference （IPD-MD） was used to manipulate the same-level aggression committed by in-group and out-group members. Specifically, the in-group members who did not distribute to any pools were treated as the in-group aggressors while the out-group members who distributed to the between-group pool were treated as the out-group aggressors. These two types of aggression caused equal level of economic losses to the victims through allocating the same amount of chips. Fifty-one undergraduates （21 boys and 30 girls） participated in the study. After the experimental manipulation （i.e., the procedure of IPD-MD）, the participants answered the revenge motivation dimension of the transgression-related interpersonal motivation scale （TRIM; McCullough, Rachal, ＆ Sandage, 1998） measuring the forgiveness of different group members and three created items measuring participants＇ perceptions of different group members. The collected data was analyzed by SPSS 13.0. The findings showed that： （1）Participants preferred to forgive in-group members relative to out-group members, and their own decision-making had no effect during the process. （2）Participants＇ perception for the out-group aggressors were more negative than that for the in-group aggressors. （3） The influence of group identity on interpersonal forgiveness could be fully explained by interpersonal perception. The above findings imply that one effective way to facilitate intergroup understanding is to emphasize commonality between groups so that the expanded scope of in-group could include out-group members and the original out-group members could be treated better because of in-group favoritism. To our knowledge, the present study is the first one applying the IPD-MD dilemma to the research field of intergroup forgiveness. This method makes the experiment more controllable and consistent. Furthermore, the study addressed the comparison of forgiveness to different types of group members. The issue of forgiveness to the in-group aggressors needs to be paid more attention to in the future researches, so does the mechanism of forgiveness.