Abstract
The current study sought to observe how positive personality traits, namely positive affect, empathy, and resilience, may affect an individual's willingness to forgive a friend following a transgression. This study was conducted using 107 students from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in USA and 137 students from the University of Calgary in Canada. Participants completed surveys over two sessions, in which they were asked to recall a recent transgression that was committed by a same-sex friend. Part 1 consisted of surveys measuring forgiveness on a dispositional level, while Part 2 consisted of surveys that asked the participant about the specific transgression and about their relationship with their friend. The current study used a selection of measures from a larger data set. The study also considered two different measures of forgiveness; both as a personality trait (trait forgiveness) and as a measure of the participant's feelings towards their transgressor at the time of taking the survey (state forgiveness). The results indicated that state and trait forgiveness were associated with different sets of variables. Trait forgiveness was associated with personality-level variables including resilience and empathy, whereas state forgiveness was related to relationship-level variables including offense severity, perceived apology, and length of relationship. Positive affect was the only variable that was positively associated with both state and trait forgiveness. Results also pointed to some interesting sex differences; men reported showing more benevolence, while women showed more avoidance towards their transgressor. The implications of the findings are further discussed.