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Vengeance is mine: Narcissism, vengeance, and the tendency to forgive [1]

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Date: 2004-12-01

When people feel that they have been wronged by others, they sometimes decide to exact revenge against their offenders. Other times, they choose to forgive, possibly even reconciling with their offender. Despite some situational variability, studies have shown that these responses have a degree of cross-situational consistency that suggests the influence of trait-like characteristics related to forgiveness and vengeance seeking (e.g., Brown, 2003; McCullough, Bellah, Kilpatrick, & Johnson, 2001; McCullough & Hoyt, 2002; Stuckless & Goranson, 1992). Although research suggests that offense-specific factors such as offense severity and the occurrence of an apology can have substantial effects on how forgiving victims are toward offenders (e.g., Brown & Phillips, 2003; McCullough & Hoyt, 2002; McCullough et al., 1998), dispositional factors among victims, independent of such offense-specific variables, appear to capture a unique portion of the variance in victim’s responses to being wronged.

Recent research by Brown (2003) has also shown that the dispositional tendency to forgive is both theoretically and empirically distinct from dispositional vengeance. Although highly forgiving people should be low in vengefulness, the reciprocal assertion is not necessarily valid: some people who are low in forgiveness might also be high in vengefulness, but others who are low in forgiveness might not be particularly vengeful. Thus, failing to forgive does not necessitate vengeance seeking, and not seeking vengeance does not necessitate the presence of forgiveness. Indeed, some people who typically fail to forgive others might not seek revenge for a variety of reasons. For instance, they might feel incapable of enacting successful vengeance, or they might feel morally or ethically restrained from doing so, despite a strong desire for revenge. Hence, one question that remains unanswered by past research is whether we can distinguish unforgiving people who will be likely to seek vengeance from unforgiving people who will not. The present study examined the usefulness of narcissism as a personality variable that might allow us to make this distinction.

Research on narcissists reveals a pattern of emotional and behavioral responses that suggests this disposition might be a strong candidate to distinguish the vengeful from the non-vengeful individual. Not only do narcissists entertain grandiose beliefs about their social influence and power (perhaps translating into the belief that they are capable of enacting vengeance), but they also feel that the world revolves around their needs and that other people exist to meet these needs (perhaps translating into a sense of entitlement that diminishes restraints against seeking revenge). Studies that have examined the narcissist’s responses to negative feedback (Rhodewalt, Madrian, & Cheney, 1998), social rejection (Twenge & Campbell, 2003), and personal insults (Bushman & Baumeister, 1998) have demonstrated that not only do narcissists tend to respond with self-serving attributions, but they also may respond with aggression. Furthermore, Emmons (2000) has made a convincing case that narcissism might be associated with a lack of forgiveness, and some data appear to support his arguments. For example, narcissism is positively associated with hostility and self-aggrandizement (John & Robbins, 1994; Kernis & Sun, 1994; Raskin, Novacek, & Hogan, 1991), characteristics that would seem to be at odds with the ability to forgive others (Emmons, 2000). Likewise, narcissism is negatively correlated with empathy (Watson, Grisham, Trotter, & Biderman, 1984), which appears to play an important role in forgiveness (McCullough et al., 1998). Thus, narcissism is empirically associated with both a lack of empathy and an increased likelihood of retaliation following insults, both of which are characteristic of unforgiveness.

The present study tested the hypothesis that unforgiving individuals who are high in narcissism will be more vengeful than unforgiving individuals who are low in narcissism. The expected pattern was, thus, an interaction between dispositional forgiveness and narcissism in predicting vengeance, such that among highly forgiving people, whether an individual were high or low in narcissism should matter very little—as already noted, highly forgiving people are not expected to be vengeful people, so no dispositional variables are likely to differentiate individuals at high levels of trait forgiveness. However, among those low in forgiveness, narcissism levels were expected to distinguish between vengeful and non-vengeful people, such that those low in forgiveness and high in narcissism were expected to be the most vengeful people of all. To disentangle narcissism from simple self-esteem, scores on a non-narcissistic measure of global self-esteem (Brown & Zeigler-Hill, in press) were included as a covariate in all analyses. This is a common practice in studies of narcissism, insofar as researchers are typically most interested in the correlates of narcissistic self-regard independent of “normal” or “healthy” high self-esteem (see Morf & Rhodewalt, 2001, for a review). Because gender differences have been observed on all of these variables in past studies, gender was also included as a covariate.

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[1] Url: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0092656603001247

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