A Tale of Two Tweets: What Factors Predict Forgiveness of Past Transgressions on Social Media?

Abstract

As more of our lives take place online, it is increasingly common for public figures to have their current image tarnished by their mistakes and transgressions in what is often the distant past. Three experiments (N = 2,296) found that judgements of a public figure who tweeted racist statements in the past were less harsh when more time had passed and when the public figure was younger at the time of the tweet. However, politics also played a powerful role. Independent of time and age, liberals allowed less possibility of redemption for anti-Black tweets, while conservatives were less forgiving for anti-White tweets. Such partisan differences extended not only to moral judgements of the individual, but also general moral principles and participants’ subjective perceptions of the situation itself, including subjective temporal distance from the tweet, the subjective age of the public figure, and the current relevance of the past statements.