Can You ever Forgive Me: It Depends on How Happy I Feel about Myself

Previous research has shown that both social identity and happiness contribute to one’s willingness to forgive, but little is known about their joint impact on forgiving behaviors. This paper presents two studies that examine whether arousing one’s in-group status and increasing one’s happiness would lead to greater forgiveness. Specifically, study one showed that people in the Philippines were more willing to forgive than people in Hong Kong. Moreover, Filipinos tended to be more forgiving no matter in-group members were killed or out-group members were killed. Hong Kong people, however, tended to forgive less when in-group members were killed. This relationship between region and forgiveness was mediated by level of happiness. In Study two, when participants’ emotional states were manipulated (happy, neutral, and sad), happy emotion would bring about higher forgiveness than sad emotion, and in-group member getting hurt would bring about less forgiveness than out-group member getting hurt. Above all, happy participants tended to forgive more no matter in-group members or out-group members were hurt whereas sad participants tended to forgive less when in-group members were hurt than when out-group members were hurt.