Author(s): Denisa Rovenská,Simona Kozmová / Language(s): Slovak
Issue: 3/2016
Justice is a central issue in people’s lives. Justice judgments could depend on relatively stable individual differences in attitudes, beliefs, and personality factors. For example, individuals can differ consistently across time and situations in how easily they perceive procedures or distributions as unfair (Schmitt & Dörfel, 1999). In other words, people can differ in justice sensitivity. Many studies on justice sensitivity mentioned thus far have measured this construct from a victim’s perspective. In the area of social justice research, numerous studies have shown that a considerable amount of variation in people’s reactions is due to justice-related dispositions such as justice sensitivity and victim’s perspective. As Schmitt et al. (2005) argued, justice sensitivity from a victim’s perspective represents a mixture of genuine concern for justice along with intolerance regarding its violation as well as a strong motive for self-protection. Besides, factor as a gender could be also significant, because of its effect on tendency to forgive injustice. The literature indicates that females are more forgiving than males. This may be a result of gender role socialization. Men are typically encouraged to suppress most emotions, except for aggressive ones, while on the other hand, women are expected to respond to offenses with understanding, compassion, and empathy (Gault & Sabini, 2000). The aim of this contribution was to examine relations between justice sensitivity from a victim’s perspective and forgiveness. 130 respondents (67 women and 63 men) with the average age of 22.35 years (SD = 1.83) answered the questions measuring victim sensitivity by Justice Sensitivity Inventory (Schmitt et al., 2010) and individual dispositional forgiveness (person´s tendency to forgive (1) him/herself; (2) other people, and (3) situation) by Heartland Forgiveness Scale (Thompson et al., 2005). The results showed significant gender differences in tendency to forgive (t(128) = -4.055; p <0.001). Generally, women were more forgiving than men (M(women) = 4.14, SD = 0.53; M(men) = 3.88, SD = 0.36). Furthermore, justice sensitivity from a victim’s perspective was in a relation with forgiveness. Specifically, significant negative relationship between justice sensitivity from a victim’s perspective and tendency to forgive other people was shown among men (r = -0.586; p < 0.001). Significant negative relationship between justice sensitivity from a victim’s perspective and tendency to forgive herself (r = -0.289; p = 0.018) and tendency to forgive other people (r = -0.370; p < 0.001) was shown among women.
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