The mediating effects of attribution styles on the relationship between overt-covert narcissism and forgiveness

The aim in the current study was to investigate the causal relationships among the variables of covert-overt narcissism, causal attribution, responsibility attribution, and forgiveness based on the entailment model. Our aim was to differentiate between overt and covert narcissism in terms of their relationship with forgiveness. First, our findings in this study demonstrated that only covert narcissism was associated with forgiveness, whereas there was no association between overt narcissism and forgiveness. Second, path analysis revealed that both causal attribution and responsibility attribution mediated the relationship between covert narcissism and forgiveness, but this was not the case for overt narcissism. In addition, responsibility attributions mediated the relationship between causal attributions and forgiveness. Study implications are discussed.