When Revenge Goes Public: Study Reveals Gender Shapes How We Judge Vengeance

When a romantic partner betrays our trust, the path forward usually forks in two directions: forgiveness or vengeance. Psychologists have long treated these responses as deeply personal choices, rooted in personality traits, emotional regulation, and attachment history. But a new study suggests that our judgments about revenge are far more social than we might like to believe. In an ambitious experiment involving 908 Italian participants, researchers found that whether a vengeful act is seen as plausible—and whether people would endorse committing it themselves—depends strikingly on who carries out the act and whether it unfolds in front of an audience. The findings, published in Current Psychology under the evocative name Project Nemesis, paint revenge not as a private impulse but as a communicative performance shaped by gender expectations.

The study, led by Claudia Chiarolanza of Sapienza University of Rome together with Stefano Isolani of Guglielmo Marconi University and Danilo Garcia of the University of Stavanger, drew its inspiration from Greek mythology. Nemesis, the goddess of retribution, embodied the outrage that follows perceived violations—a fitting metaphor, the authors argue, for the emotional and social forces that swirl around revenge in romantic relationships. Betrayal within a couple is not merely a private wound; it is a violation of a relational contract, and the response it elicits carries both private and public dimensions. The researchers set out to test whether the perceived legitimacy of a vengeful act depends jointly on the sex of the avenger and the visibility of the act itself.

To do so, the team designed a controlled 2 × 2 factorial experiment. Each of the 908 participants, all Italian adults recruited through social networks and community circles, was randomly assigned to read one of four scenarios depicting a marital betrayal and a subsequent act of revenge. The scenarios varied the sex of the avenger—male or female—and the context of the retaliation—public or private. In the public conditions, the vengeful act unfolded before an audience: one male avenger posted about his wife’s affair in a town’s Facebook group, while one female avenger publicly humiliated her husband and his lover at a company dinner. In the private conditions, the retaliation was directed at the partner alone, such as a message to a small WhatsApp group or throwing a spouse’s belongings out the window. Participants rated how plausible they found each scenario and how likely they would be to act as the avenger did, on five-point scales.

The design was carefully controlled. An a priori power analysis had indicated that at least 299 participants would be needed to detect a medium effect with 90 percent power; the final sample far exceeded that threshold. Randomization checks confirmed that the four groups did not differ in age, education, relationship status, or any of the psychological variables measured. The researchers also collected data on participants’ own sex, mental well-being, impulsivity, dispositional forgiveness, and dispositional vengeance, using well-validated instruments including the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale, the Bolton Forgiveness Scale, the Vengeance Scale, and the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale. Internal consistency was acceptable to excellent across all measures, with the Vengeance Scale reaching a McDonald’s omega of 0.91. All analyses employed robust standard errors and bootstrap estimation with 5,000 samples to guard against violations of normality.

The results on perceived plausibility were subtle but telling. Neither the avenger’s sex nor the context alone significantly shaped how believable participants found the scenario. Instead, the two factors interacted: in public settings, scenarios featuring a female avenger were rated as more plausible than those featuring a male avenger, with a statistically significant difference corresponding to a small effect size (partial eta-squared of 0.008). In private settings, no such difference emerged. The Female/Public condition received the highest mean plausibility rating of 3.48, while the Female/Private condition received the lowest at 3.18. The authors caution that this interaction, though significant, represents a modest variation in social perception rather than a dramatic practical effect.

The picture changed dramatically when participants were asked whether they themselves would act as the avenger did. Here the overall model explained a substantial 20 percent of the variance, and a large main effect of the avenger’s sex emerged: female-avenger scenarios received markedly higher endorsement than male-avenger scenarios in both contexts. Crucially, the gap widened when the act was public. In the public condition, the difference between female and male avengers corresponded to a large effect (d = 0.91), nearly double the moderate effect observed in the private condition (d = 0.44). Descriptively, the Female/Public condition again topped the ratings at a mean of 2.61, while the Male/Public condition sank to the bottom at 1.42. In other words, participants were most willing to imagine themselves taking public revenge as women, and least willing to do so as men.

Perhaps the most important finding is that this pattern survived statistical adjustment. When the researchers re-ran the model controlling for perceived plausibility, participants’ own sex, well-being, impulsivity, forgiveness, and vengeance, the avenger’s sex by context interaction remained significant, with effect magnitudes essentially unchanged. Among the covariates, dispositional vengeance, perceived plausibility, and impulsivity each predicted endorsement, whereas participants’ own sex, well-being, and forgiveness did not. This persistence indicates that the contextual and gendered contribution to vengeance endorsement is not reducible to stable individual differences. Something about the situation itself—who acts and who watches—shapes how acceptable revenge appears, above and beyond the psychological profiles of the people doing the judging.

The authors interpret these results through a communicative-signaling framework. Drawing on work by Boon and Yoshimura, they argue that a vengeful act simultaneously delivers three messages: that an injury has occurred, that the avenger is willing to defend their standing, and that future violations will carry a cost. When the act is enacted before others, this signal becomes more legible and more consequential, because the audience to whom it is implicitly addressed expands. Social media platforms amplify this dynamic further, extending the reach of a retaliatory act far beyond the immediate circles of the avenger and the target. On this view, the public versus private context of revenge is not a peripheral detail but part of what the act means—and the finding that visibility amplifies the difference between female and male avengers suggests that gendered expectations about who may legitimately perform retribution in front of others are woven into those signals.

The study is not without limitations, which the authors acknowledge candidly. The convenience sample was recruited in Italy, limiting generalizability to other cultures; the study lacked a formal manipulation check confirming that participants interpreted the public and private conditions as intended; it was not preregistered; and written scenarios may not capture the emotional intensity of real betrayal. The researchers also note an ethical concern: the scenarios may inadvertently reinforce stereotypical portrayals of the sexes, and future work should incorporate counter-stereotypical narratives and direct measures of gender identity and gender norm endorsement. Still, the practical implications are tangible. Because impulsivity predicted vengeance endorsement, clinical conversations about betrayal may benefit from attention to emotion-regulation strategies of the kind used in cognitive-behavioral interventions. And because the visibility of a vengeful act shaped its acceptability, therapists may want to explore how clients construe the audience and reputational dimensions of their own potential responses to infidelity.

What Project Nemesis ultimately offers is a reframing of one of humanity’s oldest impulses. Revenge, the study suggests, is not simply retaliation—a raw discharge of hurt. It is a socially embedded, communicative process that depends on who enacts it, who witnesses it, and the gendered expectations that surround both. The perceived plausibility and endorsement of vengeful acts arise from the joint contribution of situational cues and dispositional tendencies, consistent with a biopsychosocial model in which fast, emotionally driven reactions are tempered by slower, intentional character processes. As the authors conclude, perceptions of vengeance are not purely reactive but reflect the dynamic interplay of personal characteristics, social context, and the audience to whom the act is, at least implicitly, addressed. In an era when a single post can broadcast a betrayal to thousands, understanding how visibility and gender shape the social calculus of revenge has never felt more urgent.

Subject of Research: Gender and context effects on the perceived plausibility and endorsement of vengeful behavior after relational transgressions

Article Title: Project Nemesis: vindictive behavior in public and private contexts

Article References: Chiarolanza, C., Isolani, S., & Garcia, D. (2026). Project Nemesis: vindictive behavior in public and private contexts. Current Psychology, 45(18), Article 1545. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10082-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10082-z

Keywords: vengeance, revenge, relational transgressions, infidelity, forgiveness, gender differences, public and private contexts, social signaling, impulsivity, social psychology, Project Nemesis, Current Psychology