Replicating the Relation Between Punishment and

Forgiveness Using Experimental Design

Contributors: Peter Strelan

Pub. Date: 2018
Access Date: January 14, 2018
Academic Level: Introductory Undergraduate
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd
City: London
Online ISBN: 9781526436559
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781526436559
©2018 SAGE Publications Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
This PDF has been generated from SAGE Research Methods Cases.
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Abstract

In this case study, I discuss a program of research in which we tested the hypothesis that when
victims are able to punish their transgressors, they are more likely to forgive. We conducted six
different studies, five of which employed an experimental design. I focus on our efforts to
replicate the basic effect of punishment on forgiveness, using several different experimental
paradigms. I also use the context of punishment and forgiveness to demonstrate some of the
challenges involved when examining how people behave in situations that are not easily
amenable to experimental design.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this case, students should be able to

Understand the importance of testing a basic effect or relation using several different
methodological approaches
Understand the importance of critically analyzing one’s own work when developing studies
and interpreting results
Understand some of the methodological and conceptual trade-offs involved in developing
an experimental design

Replicating the Relation Between Punishment and Forgiveness Using Experimental Design

Almost everyone, at some point in their lives, experiences a transgression. Although people’s
responses differ depending on their personality and the nature of the transgression (e.g., how
hurtful it is), as a general rule people fundamentally desire justice if they have experienced
what they perceive as an injustice. Yet, at the same time, people have a basic need to maintain
connectedness—particularly with those whose relationships they value. Transgressions
threaten relationships. A large psychological literature now shows that one efficacious way in
which victims can restore relationships is to forgive. Forgiveness, however, cannot repair an
injustice. In fact, often people believe that forgiving means foregoing justice. As such, scholars
and laypeople alike have traditionally viewed justice and forgiveness as competitive constructs.
Yet, both are important for regulating relationships and societies. We cannot let offenders get
away with bad behavior, but usually we also recognize the importance of maintaining social
bonds, whether offenders are close to home (as in the case of an intimate partner) or not (as in
the case of a criminal who has offended against society). How, then, are victims able to pursue
both justice and forgiveness?

This is a question that my colleagues and I have been grappling with in recent years. We have

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employed two complementary methodological approaches. In one approach, we have

examined the extent to which people’s beliefs about and attitudes toward justice are associated
with possessing a forgiving disposition (e.g., Strelan, Feather, & McKee, 2011), or forgiving in
response to a particular transgression (e.g., Strelan & McKee, 2014). These studies locate the
variables of interest at the level of individual differences or traits; the results can tell researchers
the extent to which certain within-individual inclinations or properties are positively or negatively
related to certain other within-individual inclinations or properties. Such studies are also
distinguished by the fact that they are predominantly correlational in nature. In the case of
justice and forgiveness, we now know that, to the extent that people are “inclusively-oriented” in
their beliefs about justice, they are more likely to forgive. For example, the more that people
endorse rehabilitative punishment goals (e.g., Strelan et al., 2011), or the more they believe the
world treats them fairly (e.g., Bartholomaeus & Strelan, 2016), the more likely they are to report
that they possess a forgiving disposition. However, one limitation of correlational research is
that it does not allow researchers to draw confident conclusions about causal relations between
two variables. For example, we could also interpret the above findings in the opposite direction:
The more generally forgiving a person is, the more likely he or she is to endorse inclusive types
of justice.

In this article, I will describe a program of research in which we tackled the justice-forgiveness
question using an alternative methodological approach, and from a social psychological
perspective. Whereas research on individual differences presumes that individuals are born
with or develop characteristics that are fairly stable across time and place, social psychologists
proceed on the basis that (a) specific situations have the potential to elicit specific behaviors,
regardless of (or interacting with) individual differences, and (b) the way that people think about
and interpret their experiences has an effect on how they respond. So, for example, whereas a
person may self-report that he or she has an inclusive attitude toward justice and is also a
generally forgiving person, they may not necessarily be so forgiving when confronted with a
particular injustice. As such, taking a social psychological approach means answering a slightly
different question: How do people respond to a specific instance of injustice?

The Basics of Experimental Design

Because social psychologists are interested in how situations (and how people think about
situations) affect cognition and affect and behavior and so on, social psychological studies are
often highly amenable to experimental design. In an experimental design, researchers
randomly allocate participants to at least two conditions in their study (e.g., an experimental
and a control condition). Presuming sufficiently large numbers (determined a priori with a
power analysis that takes into account expected effect size based on the relevant literature,

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alpha of typically .05, and power of typically .80), the law of averages is such that similar
individuals will end up in different conditions, thereby canceling out potential confounding
effects of individual differences. Researchers then ensure that participants in all conditions
experience exactly the same thing in the experiment (e.g., being insulted), except the
independent variable, which the researcher manipulates (e.g., receiving an apology or not). If
there is a difference between conditions on the dependent variable (e.g., forgiveness), it can
only be due to the manipulation and nothing else (notwithstanding that random variation in
responding is possible). If they have done a rigorous job in designing and running their
experiment, researchers are able to confidently conclude that varying the independent variable
caused a change on the dependent variable (e.g., following an insult, receiving an apology
causes people to forgive).

In theory, experimental design might seem reasonably straight-forward. However, it is usually a

lot harder in practice. Often that is because of the trade-offs and decisions that researchers
need to make when developing their studies, which often require a return to the drawing board
or further studies. In the following sections, I describe the process that my colleagues and I
went through in designing and conducting experimental research on the effect of punishment
on forgiveness.

Punishment and Forgiveness

When people are transgressed against, they experience an “injustice gap,” a discrepancy
between expected treatment (“I should be treated fairly”) and actual treatment (“I have not been
treated fairly”) (e.g., Worthington, 2006). The wider the gap, the harder it is to forgive. There is
now a large and robust literature demonstrating a myriad of ways in which people can bridge
the gap. Effectively, the psychological avenues to forgiveness involve offenders engaging in
some form of post-transgression reparative effort (e.g., apologizing) and/or victims reframing or
rationalizing the event (e.g., recognizing that a valued relationship may be lost if they do not
forgive) (for a meta-analysis, see Fehr, Gelfand, & Nag, 2010). Scholars have argued that
another way to reduce the injustice gap is for victims to get justice—in other words, punish their
victims (e.g., Worthington, 2006). When we first starting thinking about testing this claim, it
seemed like quite a novel idea, because researchers tend to conceptualize forgiveness as a
compassionate, caring response. Formally, forgiveness is the process by which victims move
from being negatively oriented toward an offender (i.e., in terms of feelings, thoughts,
motivations, etc) to being at least neutral in their stance and, at most, responding positively
(e.g., McCullough et al., 1998; Worthington, 2001). It seemed almost counter-intuitive that one
way people could forgive was to first act in a way that was almost (but not quite) the opposite of

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forgiveness, that is, act punitively.

Experimental Methods of Testing the Relation Between Punishment and Forgiveness

My colleague J.-W. Van Prooijen and I published an initial set of studies that constituted the
first experimental support for the suggestion that punishing offenders facilitates forgiveness
(see Strelan & Van Prooijen, 2013). In that article, we report three studies, each utilizing a
different methodological approach. Study 1 employed a priming paradigm. Priming refers to the
phenomenon whereby researchers activate a particular construct (in other words, get
participants to be mindful of something), and then test the extent to which putting that
particular idea in people’s heads affects how they respond to another, seemingly unrelated
construct (see Galinsky, Gruenfeld, & Magee, 2003). In our case, participants came to our lab
expecting to engage in a series of apparently unrelated short studies developed by different
researchers. First, we randomly allocated participants to write about someone from their past
who had hurt them and they subsequently did something to punish them, or they had no
opportunity to punish them. This was the experimental manipulation (we borrowed it from a
well-established power priming paradigm, in which researchers ask participants to recall a time
when they had power over another, or vice versa; see Galinsky et al., 2003). We then asked all
participants (in what they thought was a different study run by other researchers) to indicate
the extent to which they would forgive someone in an unrelated hypothetical situation.

We conducted a second study that extended upon Study 1 in several ways. First, it addressed
a potential methodological shortcoming of Study 1. That is, Study 1 required participants to
recall a transgression. Although we had measured many variables that we suspected might
affect recall (e.g., closeness to the offender, transgression severity), and found that these did
not affect results (i.e., when we included them as covariates in analyses), nonetheless, recall
paradigms are “noisy.” Because all participants were responding to different transgressions, we
did not know the extent to which other (unmeasured) variables relevant to the transgressions
might be responsible for our findings. Thus, in Study 2, we standardized the transgressions to
which participants responded (in other words, everybody responded to the same
transgression). We manipulated punishment by embedding it within a hypothetical scenario.
Second, Study 2 added a third condition in which participants imagined that they had an
opportunity to punish their offender but did not (slightly but potentially crucially different to the
condition in which participants imagined they were unable to punish their offender). We did this
because being unable to punish may elicit different forgiving responses relative to failing to
punish and therefore we needed to check if that was the case. Third, the hypothetical
transgressor was a stranger, and a criminal court (rather than the victim, as in Study 1) decided
how the offender would be punished. In other words, we tested whether the effect of

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punishment on forgiveness also occurred in a different relationship context.

Fourth, we tested a possible explanation for why punishment encourages forgiveness.

Specifically, we tested the idea that just deserts mediates the relation between punishment and
forgiveness. In other words, punishing offenders gives victims the sense that offenders have
received their just deserts, and therefore, the playing field of justice has been leveled; things
are fair again. As a result, it is now ok for victims to forgive. I will discuss the concept of
mediation in more detail later.

Studies 1 and 2 provided consistent evidence for a causal effect of punishment on forgiveness.
However, we could still see some limitations. In both studies, participants indicated forgiveness
of a hypothetical other. Moreover, in Study 1, the relation between punishment and forgiveness
was abstract (thinking of punishing or not punishing someone from their past affected whether
participants forgave someone in a completely unrelated scenario), and in Study 2, a third party
(a criminal court) decided on punishment. We needed to test whether the effects we had found
were generalizable to the context in which forgiveness is most relevant: ongoing interpersonal
relationships. Moreover, we needed to test our hypotheses with transgressions that would be
highly meaningful to the partners involved. However, ecological and ethical reasons prevented
us from employing another experimental design (I will discuss these issues in more depth
shortly). Instead, we used a correlational design in which participants in ongoing relationships
recalled an instance where they had punished an offending partner, and indicated the extent to
which they had forgiven them. In so doing, we measured the degree of punishment (rather than
manipulating whether punishment occurred or not). We also extended our understanding of the
punishment-forgiveness relation by measuring the extent to which punishment was motivated
by a variable closely related to just deserts, revenge.

We replicated the results of Studies 1 and 2, including showing that just deserts mediated
between measured punishment and forgiveness, although relations were contingent upon
revenge being controlled for. In other words, if people punish out of revenge, punishment is not
related to forgiveness.

I hope that you will take away several points from this set of studies. First, one study alone is
usually not enough to demonstrate that a phenomenon exists. Replication is at the heart of the
scientific enterprise. In our case, we replicated the basic punishment-forgiveness relation
across three studies using three different paradigms, two of them experimental. Second, each
study built on the one before it. So, while replicating the effect, we were also able to add to our
understanding of its boundary conditions. For example, Study 2 tested whether we needed to
take into account the nature of a “no punishment” response (we probably don’t), Study 3 tested

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whether people’s motivations for punishing are important (they probably are; if victims are
vengeful then punishment does not lead to forgiveness), and both Studies 2 and 3 tested the
process by which punishment predicts forgiveness.

Third, we designed the studies so that they complemented each other. For example, I noted
above that one rationale for the correlational design of Study 3 (in which participants recalled
transgressions by a current partner) was the fact that in Studies 1 and 2 the person participants
forgave was hypothetical. Conversely, Study 3 would unlikely stand on its own because of the
limitations of a correlational, recall design—but its results carry more weight when considered
in conjunction with the preceding two experimental studies.

The Complexities of Deliberately Transgressing Against a Participant

Having said all that, and having published our paper, we felt we still needed to address the
inherent limitations of using hypothetical scenarios and recall designs. What people say they
will do, and what they actually do, can often be two different things (e.g., Nisbett & Wilson,
1977). In addition, when people recall a transgression by a current partner, they can be
motivated to re-interpret the impact of the transgression to reflect or rationalize their current
situation (e.g., “we are still together so I must have forgiven him”; “we are still together, and I
would experience cognitive dissonance if I did not say I had forgiven him”). One way to address
both these issues would be to test the relation between punishment and forgiveness in the
context of a real-time transgression.

When researchers are interested in behavior, then, by definition, the best test is one that
involves actual behavior. However, in the case of forgiveness, that is easier said than done. In
order for forgiveness to be relevant, a person needs to feel hurt and upset. You might have
noticed that deliberately upsetting participants was not the first thing we decided to do when we
started out—for the obvious reason that, ethically, it is not ok to make participants really upset
in the name of research (for a famous, extreme, example, see Milgram’s obedience studies).

At the other end of the continuum, we learn little about forgiveness from transgressions that are
not upsetting. Furthermore, in order for an experience to be upsetting, participants need to
think it is real. As such, researchers cannot fully disclose to participants what is going to
happen in the study, because that would run the risk that they would not feel upset (e.g.,
because they would probably suspect that would they experienced was part of the study, and
therefore not real). Thus, researchers need to engage in “deception” (or “limited deception,”
depending on how much information they provide about the “true” aims of the study).
Accordingly, for some or all of these reasons, forgiveness researchers rarely conduct studies in

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which participants experience an actual transgression.

Nonetheless, we managed to develop a transgression paradigm in which participants did feel

upset—but not too upset, and only for about 5 min (note that, after a rigorous process, we
received approval from our university’s ethics committee to use this paradigm). For her honours
thesis, Carolyn Di Fiore advertised a study to first year undergraduates as being concerned
with how they and their peers give and respond to feedback. First, participants wrote a brief
essay about their hopes and dreams for university, which they submitted online. Later they
attended our laboratory, individually, to receive feedback on their essay from a fellow student.
Actually, we wrote the feedback, and it was the same for all participants: “Ha! You won’t achieve
that. You sound LAME.” That insult constituted the transgression.

In the laboratory, Carolyn told each participant that such feedback was inappropriate and a
contravention of the University’s policy on student behavior in research studies. The participant
therefore needed to complete a grievance form. Actually, this form consisted of our measures of
forgiveness and our mediating variables (which I discuss shortly). We randomly allocated
participants to receiving one of two versions of the form. Half the participants read that they
could recommend one of four punishments (equivalent in terms of punitiveness) to the “Student
Research Grievance Committee” (e.g., the other student forfeits his/her 5% credit for doing the
study). The other half of the participants received no opportunity to recommend punishment.
After participants completed the “grievance” form, the researcher in the lab immediately
debriefed each one and made it clear the feedback was not real, and explained the rationale for
conducting such a study. In addition, Carolyn made sure to take the time to discuss each
participant’s essay and provide positive, encouraging feedback.

As we reported (Strelan, Di Fiore, & Van Prooijen, 2017, Study 1), we provided further evidence
that people who get to recommend a punishment are more likely to forgive than those who do
not get to recommend a punishment. The important thing about this particular study was that
the results were based upon people’s responses to what they genuinely believed was a real
insult. In addition, all participants received the same insult, so the transgression was
standardized, and we didn’t have to deal with the “measurement noise” we get when people
report on different transgressions. Finally, we went to a lot of effort to make sure participants
believed that the subsequent “grievance” process was also real (our debriefing sessions
revealed that only four participants were suspicious about the true nature of the study; we did
not include them in our analyses).

As such, we think this study met two of the important criteria for a successful lab-based
experiment in psychology. First, it possessed psychological realism. That is, participants’

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experiences were “real” in psychological terms, for example, the insult was upsetting, according
to student responses on the “grievance” form. Second, it possessed mundane realism. That is,
the insulting feedback and grievance process that students believed they were following
“looked” real. For example, the feedback was handwritten and the “grievance” form featured the
university letterhead, and fictional email addresses and phone numbers were provided.
Moreover, participants would not have thought it unusual to do what they thought was a study
on feedback, and a grievance process itself would have been perceived by students as quite a
natural response by the University. In short, this study provided what we think is the most
compelling test of the effect of punishment on forgiveness.

I should note that the effect of punishment on forgiveness was marginal (p = .09). On its own,
such a finding might be less convincing, but is more defensible when considered in conjunction
with the three earlier studies (Strelan & Van Prooijen, 2013) and two from another lab that had
reported strong relations between punishment and forgiveness (Wenzel & Okimoto, 2014).
Even so, after conducting the study, we realized a possible explanation for the marginal effect:
Participants in the punishment condition only recommended punishment. Perhaps they might
have acted differently if they could have actually administered punishment. Conversely,
participants in the no-punishment condition might have presumed that, since they were
following a grievance process, punishment would follow anyway.

Moreover, when we ran some additional analyses we noticed that, although participants judged
the four punishment options to be equally punitive, the participants who recommended one
particular option (that the offender forfeit all of his/her research participation credit) were
significantly less forgiving. When we removed these participants, the effect of punishment on
forgiveness became much more evident (p = .007). We reported these additional analyses
(among others) so that readers could see exactly what was going in our data set, but also for
our own sake. In this case, this particular finding encouraged us to think more deeply about the
nature of the punishing response, and to take it into account in future studies (if only to check
that the finding was not due to chance).

The Concept of Mediation: Testing a Psychological Process

Our second aim in this study was conceptual in nature. We had shown in the first paper that
just deserts mediated the relation between punishment and forgiveness. We wondered what it
was about seeing an offender get his or her just deserts that subsequently encouraged
forgiveness. We tested the idea that victims feel empowered when they see offenders get their
just desserts. So, in our first paper, we tested a mediation model that looked like this:
punishment → just deserts → forgiveness. In our second paper, we tested what is known as a

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two-step mediation model: punishment → just deserts → empowerment → forgiveness.

Mediation models enable researchers to test psychological processes. That is, they help
researchers understand how o r why two or more variables might be related (in contrast,
moderation models help researchers understand when—or the conditions under which—
Variable A predicts variable C by considering the impact of Variable B on the relation between A
and C. In a mediation model, you might think of Variable B as being part of the process that
connects A to C) (for an excellent introduction to mediation and moderation, in particular the
use of a macro to test their effects, see Hayes, 2013).

So, just as we needed to test the effect of punishment on forgiveness in several different ways
in our first set of studies, we needed to do the same thing when testing the mediating effect of
empowerment. We did this across three studies (Strelan et al., 2017), including the study I just
discussed. Studies 2 and 3 employed hypothetical scenarios. While they provided further
evidence of the replicability of our proposed serial mediation model, they also addressed
several other conceptual issues, including those that became salient in Study 1 (e.g., does the
nature of the punishing response matter?). Basically, we found that when people recommend a
punishment that is retributive in nature, they feel that justice is restored, which is empowering,
and which encourages forgiveness. When people recommend a punishment that is primarily
restorative, they feel empowered, which encourages forgiveness. Finally, when punishment is
motivated by revenge, forgiveness of course is less likely to occur. However, revenge can in fact
encourage forgiveness because revenge is also empowering. In short, we found that the nature
of the punishing response matters, insofar as it predicts forgiveness through different
processes.

Concluding Comments

Our journey to understanding the relation between punishment and forgiveness began by
testing one simple proposition: Victims who punish their transgressors are more likely to forgive.
Six studies later, we have tested this basic relation with four different paradigms (priming,
hypothetical, recall, and real-time transgressions). We have manipulated whether the
punishment is restorative or retributive (or not at all). We have manipulated whether it is
recommended, personally carried out, or mandated by a court. We have tested the relations in
the context of intimate relationships, the criminal justice system, and in organizational settings.
We have tested motivations for punishing (i.e., just deserts vs revenge). And, we have tested
the process by which punishment predicts forgiveness (e.g., through just
deserts → empowerment). Importantly, following each study, we played devil’s advocate with
ourselves, always asking, what else, methodologically or conceptually, could explain these

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results? What could we have done better? Does our testing cover the range of possible
punishment options? Have we sufficiently demonstrated the effect across different
interpersonal contexts? The more critically we analyzed our own work, the more clearly we
could see how to proceed in subsequent studies (and I have not even mentioned the hugely
helpful critiques and advice provided by journal reviewers and editors along the way). Put
another way, while each of the studies provided an answer, they also threw up new and
interesting questions. Indeed, the process does not stop. We, and hopefully other researchers,
already can think of more questions around punishment and forgiveness that need answering.
We still don’t know, for example, how much punishment is too much. Nor do we know if
punishment is sufficient in the case of highly severe transgressions.

Finally, why bother? Why go to all this trouble to show that punishing offenders causes victims
to be more forgiving? One answer is, because it’s good to know things just for knowledge sake.
Another answer is more pragmatic: Because if we can be sure that punishing really does
facilitate forgiveness, and we know something about how or why it happens, then practitioners
and policy-makers can encourage victims to realize the importance of being assertive in their
dealings with transgressors, and that such assertiveness can contribute to healthy and
functional relationships.

Exercises and Discussion Questions

1.What is the critical difference between correlational research designs and experimental
research designs, and why is this difference important?
2.Discuss some of the ethical issues involved in deliberately upsetting participants in the lab.
Is it ever ok to do it? Where do we draw the line?
3.What are some of the limitations of hypothetical scenarios? What alternative design might
you use to overcome these limitations?
4.How do you differentiate between mediation and moderation? Think of examples to illustrate
each.
5.If the research described here had stopped after the first study, how much would you trust
the claim that punishment can encourage forgiveness? Why or why not?

Further Reading

Strelan, P., & Van Prooijen, J.-W. (2013). Retribution and forgiveness: The healing effects of
punishing for just deserts. European Journal of Social Psychology, 43, 544–553.

Strelan, P., Di Fiore, C., & Van Prooijen, J.-W. (2017). The empowering effect of punishment
on forgiveness. European Journal of Social Psychology. Advance online publication.

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doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2254

References

Bartholomaeus, J., & Strelan, P. (2016). Just world beliefs and forgiveness: The mediating
role of implicit theories of relationships. Personality and Individual Differences, 96, 106–110.

Fehr, R., Gelfand, M. J., & Nag, M. (2010). The road to forgiveness: A meta-analytic synthesis
of its situational and dispositional correlates. Psychological Bulletin, 136, 894–914.

Galinsky, A. D., Gruenfeld, D. H., & Magee, J. C. (2003). From power to action. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 453–466. d o i :http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-
3514.85.3.453

Hayes, A. (2013). Introduction to mediation, moderation, and conditional process analysis: A

regression-based approach. New York, NY: Guilford Press.

McCullough, M. E., Rachal, K. C., Sandage, S. J., Worthington, E. L., Wade Brown, S., &
Hight, T. L. (1998). Interpersonal forgiving in close relationships: II. Theoretical elaboration and
measurement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 1586–1603.

Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). The halo effect: Evidence for the unconscious alteration
o f j u d g m e n t s. J o u r n a l o f P e r s o n a l i t y a n d S o c i a l P s y c h o l o g y, 35, 25–256.
doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.35.4.250

Strelan, P., Di Fiore, C., & Van Prooijen, J.-W. (2017). The empowering effect of punishment
on forgiveness. European Journal of Social Psychology. Advance online publication.
doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2254

Strelan, P., Feather, N. T., & McKee, I. R. (2011). Retributive and inclusive justice goals and
forgiveness: The influence of motivational values. Social Justice Research, 24, 126–142.

Strelan, P., & McKee, I. R. (2014). Inclusive justice beliefs and forgiveness: Commonality
through self-transcending values. Personality and Individual Differences, 68, 87–92.

Strelan, P., & Van Prooijen, J.-W. (2013). Retribution and forgiveness: The healing effects of
punishing for just deserts. European Journal of Social Psychology, 43, 544–553.

Wenzel, M., & Okimoto, T. G. (2014). On the relationship between justice and forgiveness: Are
all forms of justice made equal? British Journal of Social Psychology, 53, 463–483.

Worthington, E. L., Jr. (2001). Five steps to forgiveness: The art and science of forgiving. New
York, NY: Crown.

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Worthington, E. L., Jr. (2006). Forgiveness and reconciliation: Theory and application. New
York, NY: Routledge.

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