this article explores the forms of moral repair that the wrongdoer has to perform in an attempt to make amends for her past wrongdoing, with a focus on the issues of interpersonal moral repair; that is, what a wrongdoer can do to merit her victim‘s forgiveness and achieve reconciliation with her community. the article argues against the very general demands of atonement that amount to an obliga...

Forgiveness is no simple matter either to execute or to understand. Charles Griswold explores forgiveness both in its guise as a virtue⎯I’ll call it “forgivingness”⎯and as something that’s more difficult to categorize, something like an act or process. Griswold’s Forgiveness provides a classical philosophical analysis of the act or process, “a theory of paradigmatic forgiveness⎯of what forgi...

Moral perfectionism has a long tradition in philosophical inquiry, but so far has been ignored in psychological research. This article presents a first psychological investigation of moral perfectionism exploring its relationships with moral values, virtues, and judgments. In three studies, 539 university students responded to items of the Frost Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (Frost et al...

This study examined the ways in which individuals communicatively negotiate the process of forgiveness in nonvoluntary (family) relationships. Drawing from relational dialectics theory (RDT) as well as other dialogic perspectives on forgiveness (e.g., Waldron & Kelley, 2008), we examined the complexity of communicating forgiveness in nonvoluntary relationships. Participants’ experiences support...

Reputation mechanisms have responded to the ever-increasing demand for online policing by “collecting, distributing and aggregating feedback about participants’ past behavior”. But unlike in human societies where forbidden actions are coupled with legal repercussions, reputation systems fulfill a socially-oriented duty by alerting the community’s members on one’s good standing. The decision to ...

Depression and suicide are significant public health concerns for college-age young adults. Meaning-based characteristics, such as forgiveness, a voluntary coping process involving offering, feeling, or seeking a change from negative to positive cognitions, behaviors, and affect toward a transgressor, may buffer such poor mental health outcomes. Utilizing mediation analyses, we examined cross-s...