The road to forgiveness: A meta-analytic synthesis of its situational and dispositional correlates

175 studies on forgiveness: apology r = .42, anger r = -.41; situational constructs explained more variance than victims' dispositions.

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(5), 894–914.

Type

Journal article

Find it

doi.org/10.1037/a0019993

Checked

Against the abstract, 16 September 2026

Why it is on the list

A meta-analysis of 175 studies and 26,006 participants on the forgiveness of a single offender by a single victim, testing 22 constructs. Among the notably sized effects: intent (r = −.49), state empathy (r = .51), apology (r = .42) and state anger (r = −.41). Gender was non-significant (r = .01) and age negligible (r = .06).

Situational constructs accounted for greater variance in forgiveness than victims’ dispositions. Week 5 uses this to focus on what happens during repair, rather than treating forgiveness as a fixed trait of the person receiving the apology. The anger effect also sits beside Kirchhoff et al.’s finding that an apology’s completeness works through anger reduction, from an independent direction.