Lukas Neville

Thanks for taking part in our study!

Rabeya and I are interested to learn about how experiences early in life might influence people’s tendency to forgive in workplace situations.

In this study, we asked participants about whether they had experienced various forms of trauma and adversity in their childhood years. We then asked participants about their attitudes toward forgiveness, their “forgiveness aversion” (sense of the risks and costs of forgiveness), and their forgiveness of their most recently experienced workplace transgression.

There is a growing body of research that shows that early adverse experiences can affect workplace behaviours — even as adults in the workplace, we can sometimes live in the shadows of our early formative experiences.

For forgiveness in particular, we expect that traumatic experiences may lead people as adults to be particularly attuned to the risks of forgiving. They might, for instance, have learned through these formative experiences to be careful to avoid behaviours (like forgiveness) that might lead them to be seen as an easy target.

Of course, all of this is currently just our own speculation and theorizing. Once our results are in and have been analyzed, we’d be happy to share with you what we’ve found.

If you’d like to get an update once our research is complete, please fill out the form below (it will not be connected in any way with your responses to the survey, and you can still receive the results even if you chose to withdraw from the study).