Forgiveness, Revenge, and Social Status in Groups

This project investigates the social factors that encourage individuals to pursue either forgiveness or revenge. Vengeful behavior harms relationships and careers, and invites retaliation or legal sanctions. Forgiveness avoids these risks, but can instead make the forgiver vulnerable to exploitation. Understanding why people pursue forgiveness or revenge is an important scientific puzzle and a pressing practical concern. To answer this question, the project investigates the conditions under which forgiveness or revenge will be valued and rewarded in groups. The survey experiment (Study 1) uses a nationally representative sample of US adults to examine the conditions under which Americans view revenge or forgiveness as worthy of social status. It does so for three different social contexts: politics, sports, and national identity. Additional lab experiments (Studies 2 and 3) complement the survey experiment.

This study was supported by funding from the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University-Bloomington and the National Science Foundation (Award #1728889)