Forgive or complain: Interpersonal distance modulates reactive attitudes
and neural responses toward wrongdoers
Abstract
While the effect of interpersonal distance on forgiveness has been
investigated over the past few years, it remains unclear whether this
facilitating effect holds even when measured implicitly. Meanwhile,
though cognitive control and the corresponding prefrontal cortex play a
prominent role in forgiveness processing, the neural mechanism
underlying forgiveness toward varied wrongdoers is largerly unexplored.
Here, forty-two participants initially underwent noise offense either
from their friend or stranger, followed by a word identification test to
examine their reactive attitude, during which they were presented with
word-name combinations and required to categorize forgive- or
complain-label words while ignoring the names of their friends or
strangers below. A shorter reaction time reflects more congruence with
one’s implicit attitude. Electroencephalogram was recorded during the
word identification test. Behaviorally, while individuals reacted faster
to forgive-friend relative to complain-friend pairings, no such reaction
bias was found for the stranger-wrongdoer, which suggests that
individuals were more inclined to forgive someone close. Regarding the
EEG/ERP results, forgive-friend elicited lower alpha oscillation and
more negative frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA) value than complain-friend
combinations, suggesting increased and dominant activity in the right
prefrontal network during forgiveness toward friends. Whereas complain-
relative to forgive-stranger combinations elicited larger P3 amplitudes,
suggesting a neural encoding bias to information associated with
complaints about stranger-wrongdoer. These findings provide objective
evidence for the benefits of closeness on forgiveness, which broaden
previous findings depending on explicit measures into situations where
forgiveness was measured implicitly and thus minimized confounding
factors such as social desirability.