Forgiveness as a Prosocial Phenomenon

Abstract

The present study was finished before the beginning of Russia’s invasion into Ukraine. The obtained results showed the high-level tolerance and peacefulness of participants, that revealed the essentiality of Ukrainian ethnos and corresponded with its mental identity. Regratably, we may predict, that the military offence, made by Russian troops on the territory of Ukraine, will cause the significant changes of human atitudes in forseable future not only among Ukrainians, but worldwide. The most peaceful nations will be forced to reconsider their attitudes towards forgiveness on behaf of their future and justice. Abstract.Our research aimed to clarify the prosocial nature of forgiveness by examining its relationship with other prosocial values, and explore the intercorrelations between an individual’s proneness to forgive and the dispositional factors such as emotional closeness to the target of forgiveness and the interpersonal strategy of behavior. In our study, we considered forgiveness a part of individual’s prosociality as, despite the motives underlying the process of making a decision to forgive, it resulted in prosocial activity and had psychologically positive outcomes for both partners. The participants (N = 70) were 41 females and 29 males in their middle adulthood (the mean age =41.3). To achieve the aim of the present research, we used the questionnaire “Diagnostics of Moral Orientations”, the Tendency to Forgive Scale and the “Diagnostics of interpersonal relationship”(an adapted and modified variant of Leary’s 128-item Interpersonal Check List ) One -way ANOVA confirmed the absence of significant differences between the age subgroups F (1,68) = 1.72 p>.05. Results have shown that people in their middle adulthood have proneness to based decisions about forgiving on their prosocial attitudes. The greatest unanimity was found in relation to the closest targets. The majority of respondents (80%) chose the highest rates of the scale (М = 4.3, SD = 0.87) to demonstrate prosocial tendencies towards relatives and friends. 58.6% of respondents pointed out that “it is very important to express it to this group of people”, Altogether, the results show that readiness to forgive does not depend on the subject’s age-related features, whereas emotional closeness is an important factor, which affects the proneness to forgive. More vivid tendency to forgive is demonstrated in the close social circle. However, people tend to express prosocial attitudes and readiness to forgive even towards their enemies. It was found that the general strategy of dominance did not demonstrate a strong connection with an individual’s proneness to forgive, whereas the general strategy of friendliness seemed to have a significant correlation with all dimensions of people’s tendency to forgive explored in the present research.