Third Party Forgiveness Summary

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Introduction.
Social psychology as a definition is the scientific study of how individuals think, feel and behave in social context. In this review (Green, J. D., Burnette, J., & Davis, J. L. (2008). Third-party forgiveness: (Not) Forgiving your close other’s betrayer. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34, 407-418) I will be examining the article, Third-Party Forgiveness: (Not) Forgiving Your Close Other’s Betrayer, Jeffrey D. Green (Virginia Commonwealth University) Jeni L. Burnette (University of Richmond) Jody L. Davis (Virginia Commonwealth University) and looking at the process and major findings but also my opinion of the experiments through the interpretation of the authors. I will also discuss my reasons for the proposed
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There was three aims of this second experiment were to, replicate the third party forgiveness but in the case of the real life offenses scenario, they wanted use the hypothesis and test it with the relationship commitment and look in-depth into the role of an apology and how the perpetrator to do with the third party forgiveness. In this method, they again used introduction to psychology students. The age group was eighteen to twenty nine and they had to be currently in a relationship with someone for at least four weeks. In the first party group the relationship length average was twenty two months and for the third party group it was eighteen months. It was reported that there was more non-exclusive relationships and therefore as a control variable relationship exclusivity was used. The procedure was much like experiment one. One half of the participants worked from the perspective of a first party and the other half worked from a third party perspective. They had a questionnaire which assessed the trait level variables that we to do with forgiveness and completed an assessment about the commitment to the relationship they are in. They then wrote several sentences about an offense that was resent, either first party of third party. Then their view of the event and it was rated on a five point scale, one being a disagreement about a what colour t-shirt to wear and five being sexual infidelity. The researchers recorder if the perpetrator apologised or not. For measuring they used two scales, the forgiveness scale and the trait empathy scale. From this experiment it was similar to experiment one as participants reported less