Many early psychological views toward revenge were based on the larger concept of emotional catharsis. This idea, still widely held in the popular culture, suggests that venting aggression ultimately purges it from the body. But empirical research failed to validate the theory of catharsis, and some recent work contradicts it entirely. If cathartic activity fails to dissolve hostility in general, what is to say revenge will dissolve the anger caused by one offense in particular?
Wilson and Gilbert have often found that people make powerful mistakes when predicting how they will feel about something in the future; with Carlsmith, they asked whether people could be wrong about the expected emotional benefits of revenge as well.
For the study, Carlsmith and his collaborators placed participants into groups of four and gave each a dollar, which they could either invest in a group pot or keep for themselves.
To entice investment, the researchers promised to add a 40 percent dividend to the group total before redistributing the boosted pot among all four members. At the end of the trial, participants discovered that one member — secretly controlled by the researchers — had acted as a free rider.
The decision to punish carried a small fee, to simulate the personal cost of revenge. Both punishers and non-punishers rated their feelings immediately after the game, as well as 10 minutes later. The findings were exactly as Francis Bacon had imagined: Punishers actually felt worse than forecasters predicted they would have felt had they been given the chance to be punishers.
Punishers even felt worse than non-punishers, despite getting the chance to take their revenge. All told, Carlsmith and company concluded in a issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , people erroneously believe revenge will make them feel better and help them gain closure, when in actuality punishers ruminate on their deed and feel worse than those who cannot avenge a wrong.
And they feel happier. That most people fail to feel good after revenge does not mean revenge can never feel good. The hunt for this pleasant side of retribution has driven the recent work of German psychological scientist Mario Gollwitzer. Gollwitzer has explored two theories for why revenge could be satisfying.
Instead, the avenger must be assured that the offender has made a direct connection between the retaliation and the initial behavior. In one recent study, Gollwitzer and his collaborators asked participants to solve anagrams and assigned them a partner who was presumably doing the same in another room.
At the end of the trial, the researchers asked participants to divide the tickets fairly. Most participants chose an equal split, but the partners — actually research confederates — assigned almost all of the tickets to themselves. About 60 percent of participants took this chance to the fullest, leaving the partner many fewer tickets than the initial fair distribution had provided. Other studies might have stopped there, but Gollwitzer took the additional step of giving avengers the chance to send their partner a message.
In response, the avengers then received one of two types of replies prepared by the researchers. Some of these, meant to test the revenge theory of understanding, acknowledged that the retaliation had come as a result of their selfish behavior. To conclude the test, the researchers asked all participants to rate their level of satisfaction with the exchange. The findings suggest that revenge can succeed only when an offender understands why the act of vengeance has occurred.
Among participants who chose to avenge the selfish action, those who received a message of understanding reported much more satisfaction than did those who received an indignant response. In fact, the only time avengers felt more satisfaction than participants who took no revenge at all was when they received an indication of understanding.
Put another way, unacknowledged revenge felt no better than none at all. Successful revenge is therefore about more than payback, the authors conclude in the April issue of the European Journal of Social Psychology ; it is about delivering a message. The reestablishment of universal justice certainly seems to be at the heart of revenge. The problem with a revenge structure based on rectifying injustice is that the definition of justice varies from person to person — and, even within a single person, from perspective to perspective.
A few years ago, a group of researchers led by Arlene Stillwell of the State University of New York at Potsdam asked people to describe two events that had occurred in their lives: one instance in which they had responded to an offense with retribution, and another in which they had been on the receiving end of revenge.
Stillwell and her collaborators found that when people were avengers they believed their action had fairly restored equity to the relationship; when they were the recipients of revenge, however, they considered the payback excessive.
This shifting viewpoint explains why revenge often occurs in endless cycles; no sooner did U. Navy Seals avenge September 11 by killing Osama bin Laden, for instance, than Al Qaeda vowed to seek revenge for his death. The long history of vengeance in art suggests a basic instinct for retribution ingrained in the human spirit. Indeed, recent facts largely confirm this age-old fiction: Revenge has been cited as a factor in one in five murders that occur in developed countries, and a report from found that between and three in five school shootings in the United States were driven by vengeance.
At the lighter end of the spectrum, the popular urge for payback has inspired some business ventures. But if revenge tastes so bad to the person, why does it remain a favorite dish of the people?
In response to this apparent contradiction, many psychological scientists have embraced an evolutionary explanation of revenge. They argue that individual acts of vengeance serve as group announcements that certain behaviors will elicit retaliation.
In other words, the purpose of revenge might be less about responding to one particular offense than about preventing several others. Seen this way, revenge provides a great cultural benefit — leading to more cooperative, and therefore productive, societies — in exchange for its great personal costs. This larger function takes three forms, McCullough and his coauthors argue.
The first is through direct deterrence. Simply put, revenge directly discourages an aggressor from subsequently performing the same offense. The second effect of revenge is indirect. By avenging specific actions, a person can establish a general definition of acceptable conduct and, in the process, avoid future confrontation.
In this sense, reputation precludes revenge. The third adaptive function of revenge goes beyond simple deterrence of negative behaviors and actually coerces beneficial ones. To understand this idea, says McCullough, it helps to envision life as an early human. Suppose in that existence you and a neighbor must take turns guarding your camps from jaguar attacks.
The threat of revenge in response to such failed cooperation — a concept known as altruistic punishment — would entice you to stay awake with the expectation, of course, that your neighbor will do the same on his watch. Pervasive as this revenge instinct may seem, modern civilization can feel fortunate that resisting the urge to retaliate is even more common.
The decision to forego vengeance is not necessary born of human kindness; on the contrary, the body may have evolved some type of internal scale that weighs the adaptive benefits of revenge against its various costs — from the potential for retaliation to the severance of important relationships.
Excellent article. Amazing how some people cannot wait to point out the negative. Thank you for supplying information that I perceive will aid in composing my next psych paper. I took my revenge and felt great! Relieved, vindicated. Immediately after the act of revenge there will be an overwhelming sigh of relief……this is immensely therapeutic for your emotional well-being.
Moreover, revenge is an unequivocal deterrent to future wrong- doings. Only consequential people resort to revenge of course within the legal framework. The revenge of Gengis Khan on the Persian empire epitomizes such consequentiality.
As Shakespeare wrote: If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? From personal experience, I can say that revenge feels incredibly good, and the effect lasts for as long as the memory. The only thing that can make the pleasure of revenge end is the discovery that it was all an illusion. God has put in each and every one of us the capacity to feel otherworldly pleasure from revenge. God truly is Just.
From reports here, it seems that there are people who feel that they gain a lasting satisfaction from revenge. And a key issue is whether revenge supplies a necessary and effective deterrent against future action. If you make signs of repeating an attack on me I might take action to prevent that without having the intention of revenge, but of simply defending my future well-being.
My friend Liam was murdered by his own brother, and I wanted so badly to pay him back, but then I realised that if i continued down that path, then I would end up being just as cruel as Liams brother. And I guess it depends on the person, but if I took revenge, then I think it would make me feel worse, not better. David Chester of Virginia Commonwealth University was initially studying aggression but quickly realised that there is often a lot more going on before a violent interaction.
He refers to the emotions involved as the "psychological middlemen" — the thoughts and feelings that come between a provocation and an aggressive outcome. He set out to uncover more about what causes it. First he, along with his colleague Nathan DeWall of the University of Kentucky, discovered that a person who is insulted or socially rejected feels an emotional pain.
The area in the brain associated with pain was most active in participants who went on to react with an aggressive response after feeling rejected. In a follow-up study he was surprised to find that emotional pain was intricately yoked with pleasure. That is, while rejection initially feels painful, it can quickly be masked by pleasure when presented with the opportunity to get revenge — it even activates the brain's known reward circuit, the nucleus accumbens. People who are provoked behave aggressively precisely because it can be "hedonically rewarding", Chester found.
Revenge it seems really can be sweet. Richard Nixon was well-known for his list of foes Credit: Getty Images. The link between aggression and pleasure itself is not new. The "father of psychology" Sigmund Freud was well aware that it could feel cathartic to behave aggressively, but the idea that revenge provides its own special form of pleasure has only become apparent recently.
To understand this further, Chester and DeWall set up a series of experiments , published in the March journal of Personality and Social Psychology, where the participants were made to feel rejected by being purposely left out of a computerised ball tossing game.
All participants were then allowed to put pins in a virtual voodoo doll. Those in the rejected camp stabbed their doll with significantly more pins. This rejection test was first done remotely online and later replicated with different participants brought into the lab.
In the lab version, rather than a voodoo doll, participants acted out their "revenge" by blasting a prolonged, unpleasantly loud noise to their opponents who were computers, not real people, which the participants were not aware of. Again, those that felt most rejected subjected their rivals to longer noise blasts.
Lastly, to understand the role of emotion in the desire to seek revenge, Chester and DeWall gave participants what they believed was a mood-inhibiting drug it was in fact only a harmless vitamin tablet. Still, the placebo effect was so strong that the participants who took the "drug" didn't bother to retaliate against the people who rejected them — whereas those that were not given the placebo acted far more aggressively.
The placebo group, it seems, did not seek revenge because they believed they would feel no pleasure from doing so. Taking these results together the team came to a startling conclusion. Not only can revenge give people pleasure, but people seek it precisely because of the anticipation it will do so. And it worked. After having the opportunity to get revenge, the rejected individuals scored the same on mood tests as those who had not been rejected. This finding, however, does need to be taken with a necessary pinch of salt.
There are currently no long-term follow up studies on how revenge feels days or weeks after the act. Preliminary — as yet unpublished results — show that revenge-seekers only get a momentary feeling of pleasure, Chester found.
That begins a cycle and it starts to look like an addiction… then afterwards you feel worse than when you started," he explains. And that might help explain why those who seek the high of revenge fail to anticipate disastrous personal consequences.
The footballer Zinedine Zidane, for instance, will forever be remembered for head-butting Marco Matterazzi in the World Cup. Comic book protagonists such as Batman and Spider-Man are motivated by a desire to avenge the death of a loved one or seek vengeance for those who are perceived as helpless — and they are two of the most popular superheroes of all time.
Quentin Tarantino's latest film, Kill Bill — Vol. Some argue that experiencing revenge, even through works of fiction, does not ease feelings of anger and vengeance. It increased those feelings of anger and retribution. So how does someone cope with a need for revenge? The first, and perhaps most important, step is taking responsibility for your emotions, like Bud Welch did. It's very important for the person to take responsibility for their anger and resentment.
Since losing his daughter in the Oklahoma City bombing, Welch has traveled around the country and given lectures on his experience and his opposition to the death penalty. He became associated with Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation, a Massachusetts-based group that helps families cope with the loss of slain loved ones. To the anger of some Oklahoma City victims' families, Welch strongly opposed the execution of Timothy McVeigh in and warned his execution would not bring anyone true peace of mind.
Two years after McVeigh's execution, Welch says some families are still searching for the sense of closure they thought his death would bring. He just went to sleep. Two objectives of the criminal justice system are to obtain retribution for the crime victim while also rehabilitating the offender — goals which can seem to clash at times. Some states have adopted victim offender reconciliation programs, where convicted offenders admit wrongdoing, have a supervised encounter with the people they've victimized and, under the guidance of a counselor, work out a restitution agreement.
Under these programs, criminals pay for their crimes while having the chance to earn the forgiveness of their victims. The pilot — or pilots — who dropped the bomb that killed Ali Abbas' parents and took away his arms have never been identified publicly and do not face any criminal charges.
Pentagon officials have said it is very difficult to match individual soldiers with the targets they hit in combat, especially when multiple strikes are involved.
But perhaps an approach similar to a victim offender reconciliation program could help Ali deal with his own need for vengeance. It's hard to say, but if the process was made clear to the boy, the pilot is making serious steps to fully understand how he impacted him, it might be easier.
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