Synonyms
Definition
A negative personal relationship in which at least one party wishes the downfall of the other.
Introduction
Enemyship is an understudied relationship (Wiseman and Duck 1995; Adams 2005; Sullivan et al. 2010; Li et al. 2018). Many researchers have tended to focus on other types of relationships, such as friendship (Wiseman and Duck 1995; Li et al. 2018) and rivalry (Kilduff et al. 2010; Converse and Reinhard 2016). However, researchers studying enemyship have defined the term as distinct from rivalry, in which a relationship between two or more people is entirely centered around a competition between them (Converse and Reinhard 2016). Additionally, enemies are not simply annoyances (Sullivan et al. 2010), nor are they superficial friends or acquaintances (Wiseman and Duck 1995). The relationship between enemies is intimate and complex: enemies may be as psychologically close as friends (Wiseman et al. 1995).
Though research on enemyship is...
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References
Adams, G. (2005). The cultural grounding of personal relationship: Enemyship in North American and West African worlds. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88(6), 948.
Converse, B. A., & Reinhard, D. A. (2016). On rivalry and goal pursuit: Shared competitive history, legacy concerns, and strategy selection. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 110(2), 191–213.
Holbrook, C., López-RodrÃguez, L., Fessler, D. M., Vázquez, A., & Gomez, A. (2017). Gulliver’s politics: Conservatives envision potential enemies as readily vanquished and physically small. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 8(6), 670–678.
Kilduff, G. J., Elfenbein, H. A., & Staw, B. M. (2010). The psychology of rivalry: A relationally dependent analysis of competition. Academy of Management Journal, 53(5), 943–969.
Li, L. M. W., Masuda, T., & Lee, H. (2018). Low relational mobility leads to greater motivation to understand enemies but not friends and acquaintances. British Journal of Social Psychology, 57(1), 43–60.
Mead, N. L., & Maner, J. K. (2012). On keeping your enemies close: Powerful leaders seek proximity to ingroup power threats. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102(3), 576–591.
Motro, D., & Sullivan, D. (2017). Could two negative emotions be a positive? The effects of anger and anxiety in enemyship. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 69, 130–143.
Sullivan, D., Landau, M. J., & Rothschild, Z. K. (2010). An existential function of enemyship: Evidence that people attribute influence to personal and political enemies to compensate for threats to control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98(3), 434.
Wiseman, J. P., & Duck, S. (1995). Having and managing enemies: A very challenging relationship. In S. Duck & J. T. Wood (Eds.), Confronting relationship challenges (pp. 43–72). Thousand Oaks: Sage.
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Johnson, E., Rios, K. (2020). Enemies. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24612-3_1626
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24612-3_1626
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