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When offenders apologize to victims for a wrongdoing, they often expect forgiveness in return. Sometimes, however, victims may withhold forgiveness. Across four experimental studies, we find that offenders feel like “victims” when victims respond to their apologies with non-forgiveness. This can be explained by the fact that they interpret non-forgiveness as both a norm violation and a threat to their sense of power. Together, these mechanisms can account for the relationship between non-forgiveness and negative conciliatory sentiments in offenders. These effects of non-forgiveness emerge irrespective of whether the transgression is recalled (Study 1) or imagined (Studies 2-4). They are specific to non-forgiveness rather than a lack of explicit forgiveness (Study 3), and are not qualified by subtle prods for participants to take the victim’s perspective (Study 4). These findings demonstrate a destructive response pattern in offenders that warrants further attention.

Most psychological research has investigated victims’ forgiveness and offenders’ self-forgiveness separately, ignoring interactive and dynamic processes between them. We suggest that both parties are interdependent in their attempts to revalidate the values violated by the wrongdoing. In the present study, both partners of close relationships dyads (including 164 complete couples) were surveyed over three time-points following the report of a wrongdoing by one of the partners. Latent growth modeling showed that victims’ forgiveness was associated with growth in their perception of a value consensus with the offender. Victims’ value consensus perception was associated with growth in offenders’ perception of value consensus and engagement in genuine self-forgiveness (working through). However, directly, forgiveness was associated with decline in offenders’ genuine self-forgiveness, while offenders’ self-punitiveness was associated with decline in victims’ forgiveness. The findings highlight the regulatory function of victim forgiveness and the pivotal role of restoring value consensus in interactive moral repair.

The sincerity of an apology is often critical for it to be viewed positively by victims. For collective apologies, we argue that sincerity takes on a particular meaning: It is a function of the apology’s perceived representativeness for the offender group’s will or sentiment. Consistent with this notion, when an apologetic (vs. nonapologetic) message was democratically chosen (Study 1) or explicitly endorsed by the majority of the offending outgroup (Study 2), it was considered more sincere and, through this, led to more forgiveness. Furthermore, while disagreement about an apology within the offender group reduced its perceived representativeness and sincerity, this was less so when the dissenters could be subtyped: when disagreement was correlated with an existing subgroup within the offending outgroup (Study 3) and in line with expectations for that subgroup (Study 4). This research shows that victim group members consider intragroup processes within the offending outgroup for attributions of sincerity.