198 Friendship and Conflict
literatures on revenge and forgiveness reveals several individual differences that
might serve as potentially important determinants of whether people respond to a
friend’s bad behavior with forgiveness or revenge. Researchers have examined such
variables both at the level of broad dispositions or traits and also at the level of nar-
rower, more circumscribed personality characteristics.
At the level of broad personality dimensions, research suggests that variation
in agreeableness, emotional stability, and honesty- humility are reliable predic-
tors of forgiveness/ revenge (Fehr, Gelfand, & Nag, 2010; Lee & Ashton, 2004;
McCullough et al., 2001; Shepherd & Belicki, 2008). For instance, the likelihood
that individuals will respond to interpersonal offenses in a charitable, forgiving
fashion has been shown to increase the more agreeable (i.e., concerned with inter-
personal harmony) and honest/ humble they are, and the less they are emotion-
ally labile (i.e., the less neurotic). Research further suggests that lower levels of
both honesty- humility and agreeableness predict vengefulness (Sheppard & Boon,
2012), endorsement of norms of negative reciprocity (Perugini, Galluci, Presahi, &
Ercolani, 2003), intentions to enact revenge (Lee & Ashton, 2012), and appraisals
of the desirability of revenge (Sheppard & Boon, 2012).
The results of other studies attest to the role that several more circumscribed
aspects of personality, such as trait empathy, may play in shaping friends’ responses
in the aftermath of transgressions/ provocations. For example, although much of
the emphasis in the forgiveness literature is on state empathy and how it mediates
the association between apology and forgiveness (e.g., McCullough et al., 1998),
a recent meta- analysis (Fehr et al., 2010) demonstrated that dispositional varia-
tion in people’s propensity to take others’ perspectives and to experience empathic
concern, commonly considered core attributes of empathy (Batson & Shaw, 1991),
were consistently and positively related to forgiveness across a number of studies.
Narcissism, too, emerges as a potentially valuable predictor of forgiveness and
revenge (Rasmussen, 2016). In particular, narcissistic entitlement, a propensity to
believe that one deserves special treatment, has been shown to associate with a con-
stellation of unforgiving attitudes and inclinations (Exline et al., 2004). Compared
with their less entitled counterparts, for example, entitled narcissists are less forgiv-
ing of those who have harmed them and more dismissive in their attitudes toward
forgiveness (e.g., less persuaded of its moral rightness and potential to bring about
benefits, more concerned about its personal costs). They are also more demand-
ing in the conditions (e.g., compensation, expressions of contrition and remorse)
they deem must be satisfied before they will even consider forgiving. Narcissistic
entitlement also predicts both a heightened tendency to perceive offense— that
is, to believe that one has been the victim of wrongdoing (McCullough, Emmons,
Kilpatrick & Mooney, 2003)— and to respond to offense/ provocation by retaliat-
ing (Rasmussen, 2016).
Finally, research suggests that people vary in vengefulness, or the extent to
which they perceive repaying harm with harm as morally justified and desirable