Cross-Cultural Difference in Forgiveness

Abstract

There is much research evidence on why people forgive, and what forgiveness means for the person who forgives. It is imperative that forgiveness can be studied from multiple dimensional manners, such as by including cultural influence on forgiveness, reasons for forgiving, and so on. The aim of this study was to identify the association between culture and forgiveness taking into account measure of forgiveness and culture. Four research questions were explored, included A) Do country differences predict dimensions of culture? B) Do country differences predict forgiveness and reasons for forgiving? C) Do the dimensions of culture predict forgiveness and reasons for forgiving? And D) Do the dimensions of culture predict forgiveness and reasons for forgiving after taking age and gender into account? The quantitative survey was published on the website for targeting specific countries' registers – the United Kingdom and Portugal via Prolific. There had 300 participants complete survey successfully. The CVSCALE, TRIM-18, and FFS were used to measure dimensions of culture, forgiveness, and reasons for forgiving in the research. Few major key findings were found in this study. First of all, the regression analysis showed that country is served as an effectual prediction of collectivism, masculinity, long-term orientation. In addition, reasons for forgiving can be predicted by collectivism and long-term orientation. Thirdly, country and gender are relatively better predictors for identifying the self-focus of an individual when it comes to forgiveness. Finally, cultural dimensions of masculinity and relationship focus are correlated.