The HEXACO Model of Personality, Religiosity, and Trait Forgiveness

Dispositional forgiveness and its various forms have been related to personality and religiosity. However, previous studies rarely focused on the unique contributions of personality and religiosity in predicting the particular tendencies to forgive self, others, and situations. The goal of this study was to investigate the incremental validity of religiosity over and beyond the six-dimensional structure of personality containing the factors Honesty-Humility (H), Emotionality (E), eXtraversion (X), Agreeableness (A), Conscientiousness (C), and Openness to Experience (O), known as the HEXACO personality model, in predicting dispositional forgiveness. We predicted that religiosity would have incremental validity, particularly in predicting forgiveness of others, but that it would also account for less well explained additional variance in other forms of dispositional forgiveness. One hundred seventy-six individuals participated in the study (Mage = 30.938; SDage = 4.885; 106 women). We applied the measures of HEXACO traits (using the International Personality Item Pool; IPIP-HEXACO), as well as the centrality of religiosity, religious struggles, and trait forgiveness (tendency to forgive, attitude toward forgiveness, forgiveness of self, others, and situation) scales. The hierarchical regression indicated the incremental validity of centrality of religiosity over and beyond personality in predicting attitude toward forgiveness and forgiveness of others. Religious struggles accounted for a significant portion of the variance in self-forgiveness and forgiveness of situations beyond personality. Centrality of religiosity was related to higher disposition to forgive others, while higher religious struggle was associated with lower forgiveness of self and of situations. The study demonstrated that religiosity accounted for additional variance in forgiveness beyond personality. However, depending on its dimension, religiosity may foster forgiveness of others but inhibit forgiveness of self and of situations.