Past research generally suggests that highly agreeable individuals are more forgiving and less vengeful. While such findings are robust, recent studies have also indicated that agreeable people are actually more judgmental of those who violate communal norms. As such, the current study tested the hypothesis that agreeable individuals are more vengeful in response to communal norm violations. By contrast, they should view agentic norm violations as unintentional and forgive such actions. To test this idea, participants took part in a public goods dilemma in which either a communal, agentic, or no norm violation occurred. Then participants had the opportunity to exact revenge against the norm transgressor. It was predicted that highly agreeable participants would exact revenge more in the Communal Norm Violation condition. The results of the study did not support this prediction. Across all conditions, highly agreeable participants were less aggressive than less agreeable participants. The author speculates that this may have been due to the low-status position participants were assigned. Several non-hypothesized effects also occurred with other personality traits, and possible theoretical explanations for these effects are discussed.
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