forgiveness
Definition
Forgiveness refers to a willingness to accept or excuse moral and ethical transgressions committed by others, examined in political contexts as a dimension of transgression credit toward party leaders who have violated public trust. In the 2024 UK General Election, voters across four main parties consistently showed greater willingness to forgive their own leaders than leaders of opposing parties, with ingroup bias confirmed by a large effect size (partial eta-squared = .26). This pattern was shaped by identity maintenance pressures rather than genuine trust: pre-election trust predicted forgiveness of outgroup leaders but showed no statistically significant relationship with forgiveness of ingroup leaders. Forgiveness also varied by identification, with party identification negatively associated with forgiving outgroup leaders while national identification, conceived as a superordinate identity, was positively associated with it. Notably, the post-election rise in forgiveness observed for both the winning and losing mainstream leaders did not extend to the populist anti-establishment figure Nigel Farage, indicating that transgression credit has limits even within the general pattern of ingroup leniency.
Sources: Lalot & Abrams (2025)
Related Terms
- leadership (1 shared article)
- ingroup outgroup (1 shared article)
- transgression credit (1 shared article)
- trust violation (1 shared article)
Applications
Forgiveness and Transgression Credit
Transgression credit is the willingness of group members to forgive ingroup leaders for rule violations, and forgiveness constitutes one of its primary expressions. In the 2024 UK election study, ingroup voters were significantly more willing to forgive their own party leaders for trust violations than they were to forgive outgroup leaders, with this bias holding across all four main parties tested. The boundary conditions of this credit were evident in the case of Reform UK's leader, whose anti-establishment identity meant he was not granted greater forgiveness following the election.
Sources: Lalot & Abrams (2025)
Forgiveness and Political Trust
Pre-election trust shaped post-election forgiveness differently depending on whether the target was an ingroup or outgroup leader. Cross-lagged panel analysis showed that pre-election trust was a strong predictor of forgiving outgroup leaders (β = .35 to .38, p < .001) but had no significant relationship with forgiving ingroup leaders, suggesting that ingroup forgiveness operates through identity-based mechanisms rather than through trust-based reasoning.
Sources: Lalot & Abrams (2025)
Forgiveness and Social Identity
Party identification was negatively associated with willingness to forgive outgroup leaders, while national identification as a superordinate identity was positively associated with it. These findings indicate that the level of social categorisation at which a person identifies shapes the boundaries of forgiveness, extending or contracting leniency depending on whether the target falls within the relevant ingroup.
Sources: Lalot & Abrams (2025)
