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Spitefulness

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences

Definition

Spitefulness refers to an action in which an actor incurs some form of self-harm or cost in order to inflict harm or cost on another, even if the act will not result in any benefits for the actor.

Introduction

Spitefulness has at times been defined as any act that is vindictive or mean-spirited in nature. However, this definition is problematic because it is quite broad and does not distinguish acts of spitefulness from acts of aggression (Marcus and Zeigler-Hill 2015). This led evolutionary biologists and behavioral economists to adopt a more precise definition of spitefulness that requires that the actor must incur some form of self-harm or cost in order to inflict harm on another individual, even if the act will not result in any foreseeable benefits for the actor (e.g., Cullis et al. 2012; Fehr and Fischbacher 2005; Hamilton 1970; Smead and Forber 2013). This more specific definition is consistent with the popular expression “cutting off your nose to spite your face”...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Oakland University, Rochester, MI, USA

    Ashton Southard

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  1. Ashton Southard
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Correspondence to Ashton Southard .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Oakland University, Rochester, USA

    Virgil Zeigler-Hill

  2. Oakland University, Rochester, USA

    Todd K. Shackelford

Section Editor information

  1. Oakland University, Rochester, MI, USA

    Ashton Southard

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Southard, A. (2017). Spitefulness. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_1270-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_1270-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-28099-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-28099-8

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