Promoting Forgiveness Through Psychological Distance

We examined whether psychological distance from interpersonal transgressions can promote victim forgiveness via high-level construal. Participants responded to conflict vignettes. In Experiment 1, we found a positive effect of temporal distance on forgiveness, mediated by construal level. In Experiment 2, we found a positive effect of physical distance on construal level (2a) and a positive effect of construal level on forgiveness (2b). In Experiment 3, we found that construal level promotes forgiveness via reduced perceptions of transgression severity. Together, our experiments demonstrate that increasing victims’ psychological distance from interpersonal transgressions promotes forgiveness due to high-level construal. Implications for construal level theory and for research on forgiveness are discussed.