Forgiveness in an Age of Terror: The Political Psychology of Forgiving the Perpetrators of the 9/11 Attacks

This dissertation examines potential psychological predictors of forgiveness of the September 11th, 2001 perpetrators. The present study tests the role of cognitive coping factors including seeking and finding meaning, benefit-finding, time orientation, religious orientation and assumptive worldviews as contributors to the decision to forgive the 9/11 terrorists. Hypotheses were tested using two waves of a nationally representative, longitudinal panel survey of Americans' psychological reactions to the 9/11 attacks, using multinomial logistic regression. Results included finding meaning, benefit-finding, present-centered time orientation, and intrinsic religious orientation as having significant positive associations with forgiveness of the perpetrators, while assumptive worldviews of a world governed by randomness or chance significantly and negatively predicted forgiveness. Results must be treated with caution, however, as degree of fit between the data and full predictive model was comparatively low.