Personality correlates of the disposition towards interpersonal forgiveness: A Chinese perspective

Abstract

This paper presents the results of three studies that investigated the nature of forgiveness, its measurement, and personality correlates in the People's Republic of China (PRC). Study 1 involved in-depth interviews with 27 PRC cultural scholars about the concept of forgiveness and factors influencing the tendency to forgive in Chinese philosophy and everyday life. The respondents supported the relevance of this concept for Chinese societies and were able to give examples both from classical Chinese texts and their own lives. However, they also considered that preserving group harmony was the main reason to forgive and discounted the personality or religious influences commonly reported in the Western literature. Study 2 reported the adaptation of a Western forgiveness questionnaire for use with PRC respondents. Study 3 involved administering this questionnaire together with measures of self-esteem, anxiety, impression management, and culturally appropriate constructs of face, relationship orientation, and harmony to 336 college students and 432 teachers from the PRC. As predicted, it was the latter two constructs that had the strongest Correlations with the tendency to forgive in both samples. It was concluded that, in the PRC, willingness to forgive is influenced largely by social solidarity needs rather than the individualistic personality variables or religiosity reported in Western research. We hypothesize that this is due to the collectivist nature of PRC society and the results may well generalize to other collectivist cultures.