ATTRIBUTIONS OF BLAME AND FORGIVENESS IN ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIPS - A POLICY-CAPTURING STUDY

We used a policy-capturing approach to examine how people weight and c ombine various pieces of information (or ''cues'') about the nature of a transgression to draw conclusions about a romantic partner's culpab ility and their own willingness to forgive. Fifty-sir undergraduates r ead 40 profiles describing a hypothetical transgression that had occur red in their own dating relationships. The transgression itself was th e same in each case, but details regarding the severity of the offense , the degree to which it may have been avoidable, and partner intent v aried systematically across profiles. For each profile, participants r ated the partner's blameworthiness and their willingness to forgive. R esults showed that participants weighted the three cues differently wh en they judged blame than when they judged forgiveness. Nearly half of the regression equations calculated to model participants 'judgments involved interactive or nonlinear components, suggesting that many par ticipants evaluated and integrated the cue information in complex ways . Additional analyses indicated that participants were reasonably cons istent both in the way they used the cues and in the judgments that th ey made. Moreover, neither gender nor relationship status (whether par ticipants were involved in a romantic relationship at the time of the study) were associated with differences in the way participants used t he cues.