Forgiving Without Letting Go: Children’s Evaluations of Decisional and Emotional Forgiveness Across Two Cultural Contexts

Abstract

Forgiveness involves both outward reconciliation and internal emotional resolution, yet cultures may differ in how tightly these components are coupled. We conducted two preregistered experiments examining how relational closeness and transgressor remorse shape 6- to 8-year-olds’ evaluations of a victim’s decisional and emotional forgiveness in Germany and Japan. In Experiment 1, relational closeness (friend vs. classmate vs. stranger) was manipulated; in Experiment 2, remorse (apology present vs. absent) was manipulated. Following interpersonal transgression vignettes, children predicted the victim’s outward responses (decisional forgiveness) and internal emotions (emotional forgiveness). Remorse robustly increased both components across cultures, whereas relational closeness had minimal effects. Notably, remorse effects on attributed anger were stronger among German than Japanese children. Japanese children more frequently predicted conciliatory outward behavior despite maintaining negative emotional attributions, whereas German children showed tighter coupling between emotional attributions and outward predictions. Pooled analyses suggested that a relationship-focused parenting style is linked to children’s evaluations of emotional, but not decisional, forgiveness. These findings indicate that by middle childhood, children are highly sensitive to remorse when evaluating forgiveness, but culturally shaped scripts govern whether outward reconciliation coincides with internal emotional resolution.