Project Nemesis: vindictive behavior in public and private contexts

Relational transgressions, such as infidelity, significantly challenge emotional and psychological well-being, often resulting in responses that lean toward either forgiveness or vengeance. Despite the frequency of these behaviors, little is known about how the avenger’s sex and the public or private setting of retribution influence the perceived plausibility of a vengeful act and the willingness to endorse it. Project Nemesis was designed to fill this gap with a 2 × 2 factorial design in which 908 Italian participants were randomly assigned to one of four scenarios that manipulated the avenger’s sex (male/female) and the context of the act (public/private). Perceived plausibility depended on a small but significant avenger’s sex × context interaction (η²ₚ = 0.008), with female-avenger scenarios rated as more plausible than male-avenger scenarios in public settings. The likelihood of endorsing the act showed a substantially larger and more robust pattern: female-avenger scenarios received markedly higher endorsement than male-avenger scenarios in both contexts, with the difference larger in public, and the interaction persisted after adjusting for participants’ own sex, well-being, impulsivity, forgiveness, and vengeance. The findings support a view of vengeance as a socially embedded and communicative process shaped by who enacts it, by whether the act is visible to others, and by gender-related expectations that surround it.