Forgiveness contributes to the moral licensing effect in a multiple victim context
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although forgiveness is often a psychologically beneficial response, in the current research, I tested a novel consequence of granting forgiveness: a moral license to commit subsequent deviant acts. I tested this possibility in a multiple victim context. I hypothesized that people would express the greatest willingness to act in a deviant manner when all victims (the participant and the other victims) grant the transgressor forgiveness. I also anticipated the feeling pride (i.e., feeling good about one's accomplishments) following forgiveness would mediate the hypothesized moderation effect. Support for the proposed mediated-moderation model was found in two studies using a multiple victim workplace transgression as context. (NStudy 1 = 359, NStudy 2 = 417) . Results contributed to both the literature on the consequences of forgiveness and moral licensing by providing evidence that granting forgiveness may, perhaps counterintuitively, result in the forgiver engaging in subsequent immoral behaviour.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".