Transgression, Forgiveness, and Revenge 205around securing justice and obtaining fairness in relationships (Gilligan, 1994).
Accordingly, in the face of a transgression women are motivated to maintain their
relationships by forgiving, whereas men may be inclined to exact justice by seeking
revenge (Miller et al., 2008). Moreover, past theorizing and research indicating that
generally women demonstrate greater empathy and emotional investment in their
close relationships (Taylor et al., 2000) has fueled the assumption that women are
more forgiving than men. Research findings regarding the role of gender in forgive-
ness, however, have been mixed.
In a meta- analysis of forgiveness in close relationships (Miller et al., 2008), for
example, women were found to be more forgiving than men, and men more venge-
ful than women. Moreover, no effect of type of relationship (friendship or roman-
tic relationship) on forgiveness was found. However, a more recent meta- analysis
(Fehr et al., 2010) with a larger sample (including unpublished dissertation data)
and different methodology found no evidence of gender differences in forgiveness.
The findings of this meta- analysis dismiss the notion that gender exerts a general
(main effect) influence on forgiveness. However, an important possibility may
be that a more nuanced relationship between gender and forgiveness exists. For
instance, gender might moderate the effects of forgiveness’s correlates (Fehr et al.,
2010). One such correlate is state empathy.
Empathy has received a great deal of attention from forgiveness scholars, and
some have even suggested that empathy may partly explain the association between
gender and forgiveness (Swickert, Robertson, & Baird, 2015). In particular, studies
have reported that empathic processing leading to forgiveness may involve different
paths for men versus women (Exline & Zell, 2009). One study (Root & Exline,
2011) found that encouraging study participants to think empathically about the
transgressor facilitated forgiveness in men but not in women. The authors suggested
that women did not respond to the prompt because they had already taken the step
of thinking carefully about empathic reasons to forgive prior to their participation
in the study. Further, forgiveness for women involves a long- term healing process
as opposed to a one- time decision (Root & Exline, 2011). Future studies should
explore if indeed empathic thinking plays out differently in the way in which men
and women approach forgiveness. Other studies have investigated the relationship
among gender, empathy, and age in the forgiveness process. In one recent study
(Swickert et al., 2015), empathy served as a mediator between forgiveness and
gender, but only for younger individuals. In other words, younger women were
more likely to show empathy and forgive the transgressor than were younger men.
However, empathy did not play a strong role in explaining the association between
gender and forgiveness for older adults. Clearly, the interrelations among gender,
forgiveness, and empathy are more complex than previously imagined and warrant
further investigation.
As discussed earlier, friendships are distinctive close relationships and differ
from other types of close relationships in a number of important ways. The few