Transgression, Forgiveness, and Revenge 197in Leary, Springer, Negal, Ansell, and Evans’s (1998) study of hurt feelings (39% of
offenders). Similarly, collapsing across same- sex (26% of offenders) and cross- sex
friends (12% offenders), friends also outnumbered all other categories of offenders
in McCullough, Bellah, Kirkpatrick, and Johnson’s (2001) study of forgiveness. As
even this limited sampling of studies illustrates, friendships are the breeding grounds
for many of the events and experiences that elicit offense, injury, and upset and there-
fore common contexts in which issues of forgiveness and revenge arise.
Second, there are strong conceptual grounds for believing that wrongdoings
may cause more harm, be more difficult to forgive, and inspire greater desire for
vengeance when they occur between friends than when they involve at least some
other kinds of interaction partners. For instance, in observing, “It is easier to for-
give an enemy than to forgive a friend,” William Blake (1757– 1827) highlighted
the fact that, because we care about them and expect them to care about us, friends
often have the power to hurt us in ways that even those against whom we harbor
strong antipathies do not. Friendships may not be bound by formal rules systems as
some other relationships are, but they are nevertheless guided by unwritten expec-
tations or codes of conduct that are socially observed (Argyle & Henderson, 1984;
Bryant & Marmo, 2012; MacEvoy & Asher, 2012). Research clearly shows that indi-
viduals often perceive the violation of such rules of friendship as a betrayal (Samter
& Cupach, 1998), that such violations are the most common causes of friendship
dissolution (Samter & Cupach, 1998), and that their impact can be devastating,
eliciting both tendencies to forgive and to retaliate (Haden & Hojjat, 2006).
Finally, friendships differ from other significant interpersonal relationships
in ways that make them unique. Friendships are, for example, relatively free from
obligatory ties, duties, and other constraints (Oswald & Clark, 2006). In addition,
they may be more difficult to maintain over time and changing circumstances than
some other kinds of relationships at least in part because their day- to- day con-
duct rests on the kind of implicit, informal rules we discussed earlier (Argyle &
Henderson, 1984). Friendship is also generally considered a relationship between
equals, relatively devoid of the differences in status and power that typify relation-
ships between, for example, parents and children, employers and employees, and
heterosexual romantic partners (Helgeson, 2009). Taken together, such consid-
erations call into question whether it is prudent to generalize from studies of for-
giveness and revenge in family and romantic relationships to relationships between
friends and thus underscore the need for investigations aimed expressly at exploring
both constructs as they play out among friends.
Characteristics of the Victim
We begin our discussion of factors that might prohibit/ promote forgiveness and
revenge among friends by considering characteristics of the victim. A review of the