196 Friendship and Conflict
In our view, friendships are located squarely among those relationships that
humans value most and that offer individuals the greatest benefits in terms of ful-
filling needs for intimacy, belonging, and social support (Fehr, 2004; Oswald &
Clark, 2006). Because of this, friendships should figure prominently among those
relationships characterized by the kind of interdependence that establishes the great-
est premium on the benefits of— while simultaneously raising the stakes associated
with— forgiveness and revenge. Scholars who study friendship have been rather slow
to develop an interest in these constructs, however, at least in comparison with their
counterparts who study romantic relationships. In fact, the literature on friendship
contains comparatively few articles on transgressions and provocations. Moreover,
few of those who study forgiveness and other responses to wrongdoing have designed
their investigations to shed light either on friendship per se or on how friends evalu-
ate, experience, and respond to breaches of the rules of good conduct among friends.
The present chapter is predicated on the assumption that understanding people’s
responses to the breaches of good behavior that occur in close relationships is no
less important when those relationships involve friends than when they involve
romantic partners— or family members or other important members of our social
networks. Our goal in this chapter is thus to review the existing literatures on friend-
ship, forgiveness, and revenge with the aim of revealing important gaps in our under-
standing of their points of connection. We aim, in particular, to provide an overview
of factors that previous research and theorizing suggest are likely to promote or pro-
hibit forgiveness and revenge among friends. In doing so, we focus our attention on
three kinds of factors reflecting characteristics of the person transgressed on/ pro-
voked, characteristics of the friendship in which the offense/ provocation occurs,
and characteristics of the transgression/ provocation or situation in which it occurs.
We end the chapter with a discussion of research on gender differences in forgive-
ness and revenge in friendships. Our review is necessarily speculative because, as we
indicated earlier, researchers have yet to engage in sustained and focused investiga-
tion of either forgiveness or revenge among friends. Consequently, we draw from
the broader literatures on these topics— both in relationships and more generally.
Forgiveness and Revenge in Friendship: Important
but Neglected Topics of Inquiry
Before we begin our review, we present three lines of evidence to demonstrate that
the need for systematic investigation of forgiveness and revenge among friends is
pressing. First, research suggests that friendships constitute one of the most com-
mon contexts in which people encounter transgressions, provocations, betrayals, and
related aversive experiences such as hurt feelings and hurtful messages. Friends were
the most frequently identified perpetrators in Rapske, Boon, Alibhai, and Kheong’s
(2010) study of unforgiven offenses (32.4% of offenders), for example, as well as