Ellen Phiddian
Cosmos science journalist
A US study has found men who are more concerned about seeming masculine are less likely to forgive transgressions at work.
The study is published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
According to the researchers, there’s evidence that men are generally less forgiving than women, and people who forgive more frequently tend to have more “feminine” traits.
“So, we hypothesised that forgiveness carries some gendered implications, and perhaps people who forgive are perceived as more feminine and less masculine,” says co-author Associate Professor Michael Haselhuhn, a researcher in management at the University of California – Riverside, USA.
“And if that’s the case, men who are really concerned about appearing like real men should be the people who are least likely to forgive.”
The team ran 4 different studies, each on groups of between 100-300 people, aiming to test men’s sense of masculinity and their willingness to forgive transgressions in the workplace – like missing an important meeting.
Three studies were run via online survey, with participants asked to either read hypothetical scenarios about someone being wronged at work, or asked to recall a situation when they had been wronged at work.
In one of these studies, male and female participants were asked to evaluate how masculine a fictional man had behaved, after reading a scenario where he had or hadn’t forgiven the transgressor.
In the other 2 studies, male participants were first asked to complete a measure of how stressed they felt about their masculinity, then asked their opinions on either a real time they had been wronged at work in the last 6 months, or a fictional scenario where they were wronged at work.
In the fourth, in-person study, male undergraduate students were asked to complete a task on a computer with an “online partner” (who wasn’t actually real), and told they would receive a $10 reward if both partners completed the task well.
Then, the fictional partners all made mistakes and “performed badly” in the task, meaning the participants missed out on the prize. They were then asked about the degree to which they forgave their partner as well as their concerns about their own masculinity.
“The more concerned they were about maintaining their masculinity,” says Haselhuhn, “the more they wanted to take revenge against the coworker, which you can imagine in the workplace is not such a good thing, and the more they want to avoid the coworker.”
But men were more willing to forgive their coworkers after being asked to recall memories of times they had “demonstrated themselves as ‘real men’.”
“When you forgive, it improves your mental health,” says Haselhuhn.
“It improves your physical health. Obviously, it improves your relationships with others as opposed to trying to take revenge on the person who wronged you, or just ignoring them and avoiding them, and things like that. Forgiveness has a ton of benefits.”
