Does Compassion Always Lead to Forgiveness? Impact of the Mechanism of Compassion Before Service Failure on Consumer Forgiveness

There are few studies involving the mechanism of the emotions that consumers experience before a service failure on their willingness to forgive. This research intends to explore the effect of two different types of compassion on the willingness to forgive under uncontrollable and controllable service failure, examine the mediating role of empathy and the moderating role of the type of service failure. This research designed two experiments. Experiment 1 involved 450 voluntary participants and adopted a between‐group design (spontaneous compassion vs. neutral emotions) × (controllable service failure vs. uncontrollable service failure). Experiment 2 involved 431 voluntary participants and used a between‐subject experimental design (merchant‐induced compassion vs. neutral emotions) × (controllable service failure vs. uncontrollable service failure). Results demonstrated that consumers with spontaneous compassion still “treat others as themselves” and showed a higher willingness to forgive. However, the compassion induced by merchants is a “double‐edged sword”, which will have positive and negative effects on consumers' willingness to forgive under uncontrollable and controllable service failure situations. This research deepens the research on the impact of compassion as a self‐transcendent emotion on consumer forgiveness and provides empirical support for the transformation of service recovery from “after‐the‐fact recovery” to “pre‐intervention”.