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Brief Report Vengeance is mine: Narcissism, vengeance, and the tendency to forgive Ryan P. Brown* Department of Psychology, University of Oklahoma, No...

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Journal of Research in Personality 38 (2004) 576–584

RESEARCH IN PERSONALITY www.elsevier.com/locate/jrp

Brief Report

Vengeance is mine: Narcissism, vengeance, and the tendency to forgive Ryan P. Brown* Department of Psychology, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK 73019, USA Available online 5 February 2004

Abstract Recent theory and research have suggested that the disposition to forgive and the tendency to seek vengeance are related but distinguishable characteristics. Although highly forgiving individuals cannot be simultaneously high in vengeance, those who are low in forgiveness could be either vengeful or not. The present study tested the hypothesis that what distinguishes unforgiving people who are highly vengeful from unforgiving people who are not highly vengeful is that the latter group is lower in narcissism. Measures of dispositional forgiveness, narcissism, global self-esteem, and vengeance were administered to 248 undergraduates. As expected, people low in dispositional forgiveness were more vengeful than were people high in dispositional forgiveness, but particularly so among those high in narcissism; among those low in narcissism, forgiveness was less strongly related to vengeance. Thus, the most vengeful people were those who were both low in forgiveness and high in narcissism, independent of gender diﬀerences and healthy self-esteem. Ó 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction 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, * Corresponding author. Fax: 1-405-325-4737. E-mail address: [email protected].

0092-6566/$ - see front matter Ó 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jrp.2003.10.003

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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 victimÕs 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 narcissistÕs 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

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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.

2. Method 2.1. Participants Participants were 248 undergraduates (180 women, 68 men) at a large, midwestern university. All participants received credit toward a research component in their introductory psychology courses. The mean age of participants was approximately 20 years. 2.2. Materials and procedure Participants completed a large packet of questionnaires relevant to several unrelated studies (see also Brown & Zeigler-Hill, in press). The relevant questionnaires described next were administered in multiple, random orders. 2.2.1. Narcissism The Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI; Emmons, 1987; Raskin & Hall, 1979; Raskin & Terry, 1988) is the most often used self-report measure of non-clinical narcissism. The scale used in the present study was a true–false version of EmmonsÕ (1987) 37-item NPI. This shorter version of the original, 54-item measure designed by Raskin and Hall (1979) reduces some of the item redundancy and measurement error of the original scale. Example items are ‘‘I am an extraordinary person,’’ and ‘‘I will never be satisﬁed until I get all that I deserve.’’ Research using this version of the NPI has supported its construct validity as a measure of narcissism (e.g., Bushman & Baumeister, 1998; Emmons, 1987; Morf & Rhodewalt, 1993). 2.2.2. Dispositional forgiveness The Tendency to Forgive scale (or TTF) is a 4-item scale designed to assess the extent to which respondents typically react to interpersonal oﬀenses with forgiveness. Example items are ‘‘I tend to get over it quickly when someone hurts my feelings,’’

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and ‘‘When people wrong me, my approach is just to forgive and forget.’’ Participants indicated the extent to which they agreed with each of the four statements on the TTF on 7-point Likert scales anchored with strongly disagree (1) and strongly agree (7), and this same response scale was used for the vengeance and self-esteem scales described below. In previous research, the TTF has demonstrated sound psychometric properties. In addition, scores on the TTF have been shown to be related only moderately to scores on a measure of attitudes about the value or virtue of forgiveness (Brown, 2003; Brown & Phillips, 2003). Thus, the TTF is designed to capture more than simply peopleÕs forgiveness beliefs or values, and it predicts variables related to mental health and state forgiveness independently of such pro-forgiveness attitudes (Brown & Phillips, 2003). 2.2.3. Vengeance Stuckless and GoransonÕs (1992) 20-item Vengeance scale was used to capture individual diﬀerences in vengeance-seeking tendencies. This scale has demonstrated convergence with related constructs in previous research (Stuckless & Goranson, 1992), as well as known-groups discriminant validity (Holbrook, White, & Hutt, 1995). Although some of the items on the Vengeance scale assess only attitudes about vengeance, others actually assess the tendency to engage in vengeance behaviors in response to being wronged. Example items are ‘‘It is important for me to get back at people who have hurt me,’’ and ‘‘I donÕt just get mad—I get even.’’ Item responses were summed (after reverse coding appropriate items) to create Vengeance scores, which produced a theoretical range from 20 to 140. 2.2.4. Self-esteem Tafarodi and SwannÕs (2001) revised Self-Liking (SL) scale was administered to assess global feelings of healthy, non-narcissistic self-worth. Scores on this 8-item measure are typically correlated above .80 with the Rosenberg (1965) Self-Esteem Scale, but do not correlate very highly with the NPI (Brown & Zeigler-Hill, in press). Example items on the SL are ‘‘I am secure in my sense of self-worth,’’ and ‘‘I am very comfortable with myself.’’

3. Results All scales demonstrated adequate internal reliabilities (as > :70), as in previous studies. Zero-order correlations revealed that Vengeance was negatively related to the TTF (r ¼ :59, p < :01), but positively related to the NPI (r ¼ :16, p ¼ :01). In contrast, scores on the SL were negatively, but non-signiﬁcantly, related to Vengeance (r ¼ :12, p < :07), although the SL was positively related to the NPI (r ¼ :34, p < :001) and to the TTF (r ¼ :30, p < :001). This pattern highlights an important distinction between healthy self-regard and narcissism. The TTF was not signiﬁcantly related to the NPI (r ¼ :08, p ¼ :20). In support of the contention that highly forgiving individuals ought to be low in vengeance, but that unforgiving individuals might be either high or low in vengeance,

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a scatterplot of the forgiveness–vengeance relation, shown in Fig. 1, revealed a generally fan-shaped pattern. Although both low and high vengeance scores were present within the lower range of forgiveness scores, high vengeance scores were absent within the upper range of forgiveness scores, as expected. More detailed statistical support for this contention is revealed by the fact that the variance of vengeance scores within each quarter of the TTF increased as a function of decreasing TTF scores, going from 0.41 in the highest quarter, to 0.48 in the third quarter, to 0.63 in the second quarter, to 1.25 in the lowest quarter of the TTF. A test of the homogeneity of variance across the four quarters of the TTF revealed that the variance of vengeance scores was, in fact, not homogeneously distributed, F (3, 244) ¼ 30.3, p < :001. To test the primary predictions, Vengeance scores were analyzed in a simultaneous multiple regression equation as a function of the TTF and the NPI, with healthy self-esteem and gender included as covariates. Because the variance in Vengeance scores did not appear to increase linearly as a function of decreasing TTF scores, this raised the possibility of a curvilinear relationship between TTF and Vengeance, with an increasingly steep slope at the very lowest levels of the TTF among highly narcissistic individuals. To test whether the TTF NPI interaction eﬀect

Fig. 1. Scatterplot of vengeance and forgiveness scores.

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contained both a linear X linear and a curvilinear X linear interaction component, I analyzed Vengeance scores in a multiple regression that included the covariates (gender and healthy self-esteem), the TTF, and the NPI, the (bilinear) TTF NPI interaction, a squared TTF term, and an NPI TTF2 term. Both the TTF and the NPI were ﬁrst centered on their respective means before creating the product terms in this analysis, in order to reduce the correlation between main eﬀects and their products (Aiken & West, 1991). This analysis revealed a main eﬀect of gender, b ¼ :25, t(240) ¼ 5.05, p < :001, such that men (M ¼ 3:14) were higher in Vengeance than were women (M ¼ 2:65). In addition, the NPI was positively related to Vengeance, b ¼ :12, t(240) ¼ 1.97, p ¼ :050. In contrast, the TTF was negatively related to Vengeance, b ¼ :62, t(240) ¼ 12.93, p < :001. However, these main eﬀects were qualiﬁed by several higher order terms. First, there was a signiﬁcant TTF NPI interaction, b ¼ :13, t(240) ¼ 2.80, p < :01, and the TTF2 term was also signiﬁcant, b ¼ :10, t(240) ¼ 2.04, p ¼ :043, revealing a small inﬂection in the TTF–Vengeance relation at lower levels of the TTF.

Fig. 2. Vengeance scores as a function of the TTF and high (1 SD above the mean) and low (1 SD below the mean) narcissism.

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However, the NPI TTF2 interaction was not quite statistically signiﬁcant, p ¼ :114. The data are presented in Fig. 2, as a function of high (1 SD above the mean) versus low (1 SD below the mean) narcissism within each quarter of the TTF. Follow-up tests of simple slopes revealed that the regression of Vengeance on the TTF among individuals low in narcissism, b ¼ :50, t(242) ¼ 7.79, p < :001, was even stronger among those high in narcissism, b ¼ :76, t(242) ¼ 10.35, p < :001. In addition, simple slope tests conﬁrmed what is apparent in Fig. 2—namely, that the diﬀerence between high and low narcissists was signiﬁcant at low levels of the TTF (1 SD below the mean), b ¼ :31, t(242) ¼ 4.22, p < :001, but not high levels of the TTF (1 SD above the mean), b ¼ :04, t < 1. Thus, participants who were low in forgiveness but high in narcissism were the most vengeful of all, but narcissism did not distinguish between vengeance levels of highly forgiving individuals, as predicted.

4. Discussion These results support previous theoretical arguments and empirical evidence that dispositional forgiveness and vengeance are not simply opposite constructs. Whereas individuals who are highly forgiving cannot be simultaneously vengeful (according to any reasonable deﬁnition of forgiveness), unforgiving individuals might or might not be vengeful. One way in which people who are low in forgiveness might diﬀer from one another is in their degree of narcissism, and this diﬀerence appears to have important implications for whether unforgiving people tend to seek vengeance when wronged by others. Both the narcissistÕs inﬂated social conﬁdence and the narcissistÕs sense of entitlement could underlie this revenge tendency; speciﬁcally, these characteristics could produce a desire to retaliate against wrong-doers and could reduce restraints against acting on this desire. The results of the present study oﬀered strong support for these hypotheses. Among individuals who were high in dispositional forgiveness, narcissism was unrelated to vengeance. However, among individuals who were low in dispositional forgiveness, narcissism successfully distinguished between vengeful and non-vengeful people. Thus, the most vengeful people were those who were low in forgiveness and high in narcissism, as expected. Importantly, these results were obtained independently of both gender and healthy self-esteem. The cross-sectional nature of these data demands caution in their interpretation, insofar as the directionality of eﬀects is inherently uncertain. Although the hypothesis underlying this study implies a causal inﬂuence of unforgiveness and narcissism on vengeance seeking, vengeance seeking could certainly impede the process of forgiveness, so the direction of causation could be either reversed or reciprocal between these variables. Further research should endeavor to examine the predictive nature of dispositional forgiveness and narcissism in a more controlled setting, perhaps one in which an oﬀense is experimentally manipulated and subsequent vengeance levels are behaviorally assessed. Researchers who attempt to do this, however, should take into account recent evidence obtained by Brown and Phillips (2003), which showed that dispositional forgiveness was only signiﬁcantly related to state forgiveness for relatively severe oﬀenses. If the same holds true for dispositional

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forgiveness and vengeance seeking, then rather serious oﬀense experiences will need to be created in the lab, which could lead to legitimate ethical concerns about such research. Nonetheless, such evidence would substantially strengthen the conclusions that can be drawn from the present correlational data. The present results add to the small but growing body of research on dispositional forgiveness and its relation to state forgiveness, mental health, and interpersonal relationships. Although most research on forgiveness to date has focused on forgiveness within close relationships, important questions remain to be asked about forgiveness, and its absence, outside of close relationships. With respect to vengeance seeking, such non-intimate relationships might be especially relevant to studies of the consequences of unforgiveness, as it is in these relationships that restraints against vengeance might be particularly low (e.g., because revenge against strangers or acquaintances would not be accompanied by the loss of a valued source of intimacy). Thus, whereas studies have shown that the intrapsychic beneﬁts of forgiveness (e.g., enhanced well-being) only occur within close relationships (Karremans, Van Lange, Ouwerkerk, & Kluwer, 2003) the most intense interpersonal costs of failing to forgive (e.g., vengeance) might occur primarily within non-close relationships. Given that vengeance can take rather severe forms, as demonstrated by the rash of school shootings in the US over the last 10 years, the study of the dispositional and situational causes of vengeance could yield important insights of both theoretical and practical signiﬁcance.

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