Document Type
Undergraduate Thesis
Publication Date
Spring 5-1-2023
Journal
Undergraduate Honours Theses
Abstract
Extant research indicates that infidelity is highly prevalent within close romantic relationships (Thompson et al., 2020). Moreover, research suggests that individuals who have experienced an act of infidelity typically seek the support and advice of close others when contemplating forgiving an offending partner (Maynard et al., 2016). These close others can have many reactions to the transgression committed against their friend, but two of the most common responses are validation or minimization of the victim’s experience (Eaton & Sanders, 2012). The present study considers the effect of closeness with the offending partner, as well as the victim, on the decision to validate or minimize an act of online infidelity. Further, this experiment considers if this potential relationship is mediated by individual moral judgements of the transgression, referred to as justice beliefs. Participants were assigned to read one of two scenarios, one where they were made to be close with the transgressor and one where they were not. They then responded to various questionnaires that evaluated their moral appraisals of the transgression and their validation and minimization of the victim’s experience. Results indicated that closeness with a transgressor caused more minimization, but not validation of the victim’s experience of the transgression. Moreover, a measure of justice beliefs was shown to mediate this relationship. Implications of the findings are discussed.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Notes
Thesis Advisor(s): Dr. Irene Cheung