In Hollywood action films there is often a moment. The hero has tracked down the villain. The villain who has murdered his wife, kidnapped his children, burned down his house, and/or violated the family pet. This most heinous of monsters, a fellow human, is on his knees. The hero is looking down the barrel of his gun at the broken mess that his foe has become when the villain looks him in the eye and says, “Do it. Kill me. Become me.”
Inevitably the hero lowers his gun and walks away. I’ve always taken issue with this. First of all, let’s just admit it. Vengeance is as human as it gets. As Shakespeare put it, “If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?” Vengeance is listed as an integral human reaction. Primal and physical, instinctual. Who among us hasn’t been wronged? Who among us has not fantasized about sweet, sweet revenge?
One of the earliest examples in Western literature of ‘revenge is sweet’ is in the Iliad, a whole story about revenge. “[A]nger … that far sweeter than trickling honey wells up like smoke in the breasts of men.” That was written by Homer in the 8th century. Before Christ. Tales of revenge litter ancient literature and mythology because who doesn’t love a good revenge story? So many fictional families sacrificed, so many wives and girlfriends fridged on the altar of the revenge plot arc. Revenge feels good.
As it turns out Shakespeare was right. The desire for revenge is actually hardwired into our brains. The pleasure center, that lizard brain, lights up when merely fantasizing about revenge. According to the 2004 study, “The Neural Basis of Altruistic Punishment” people will sacrifice and endure pain in the pursuit of vengeance because “people derive satisfaction from punishing norm violations.” Enjoying revenge play out on screen or between the covers of a book can be positively cathartic. Across six studies researchers David Chester and C. Nathan DeWall from the University of Kentucky discovered that revenge can make us feel so good that we actually seek out opportunities to wreak our vengeance to make ourselves feel better.
In “Combating the sting of rejection with the pleasure of revenge: A new look at how emotion shapes aggression” Chester and DeWall ask 156 participants to write essays on a personal topic then switch with others for feedback. In the control group everyone does as requested, but the second group has a ringer. A plant pretending to be a participant leaves gratuitously cruel feedback on some of these very personal essays. Afterwards the group members are offered a voodoo poppet on which to express any emotion the feedback may have inspired. Moods are measured before the writing of the essays and after the exchange with the voodoo poppet. Even those who were most enraged by the disproportionately harsh criticisms of their essays were much happier after experiencing the visceral pleasure of shoving long, sharp needles into the likeness of the critic. For some it made them so high their moods were the same as those that had gotten positive feedback.
In another study, Chester and DeWall asked 154 new participants to swallow a placebo. The participants were told that it would improve cognition. Some were told that a side effect of the drug was mood stability- that about halfway through the test their mood would lock until the pill wore off. In the next phase of the experiment groups of three played a simple video-game involving passing a ball. Unbeknownst to the participants for some the computer allowed the ball to be passed about half the time. For others it was only about ten percent. At the end of the game they were asked to describe how they felt.
The players were then asked if they would like to play a game of torture. The players would race a previous partner to a buzzer. The first to make it would get to inflict a blast of noise into the ears of the loser. Each time a player won they were given the opportunity to up the ante by raising the volume level. Those that chose to twist the knife by pumping up the volume were those who believed themselves to be rejected by their partners in the video-game. The exception was the mood stabilizer group. Thinking that the drug would block the rush of retribution they took a pass on the torture session. Both of these studies underscore how enjoyable the sweet act of revenge can be. Revenge can quite literally make us happy.
There are, however, a few caveats. This goes back to the hero standing over the villain with his gun. From the time we are very young we are taught to be the bigger person, to let it go, even when we are in pain. This is why the hero has to walk away. But as much as that Sunday school teacher’s voice is telling us to turn the other cheek our inner kindergartner is screaming, “That’s not fair!” Our lizard brains, our id, our inner toddlers recognize that killing this bastard won’t turn us into him. More we see that he has to die. This is why the writers always have the villain take this opportunity to attempt to stab the hero in the back because the villain is not just a bad fucking guy he’s the bad fucking guy.
The tales of revenge that most capture our imaginations include an element of victory. It’s a re-balancing of the scales, a quest for justice. It ties into our longing for a just and fair world. The hero is forced to kill the villain in self-defense, but never in cold blood because that would not be fair. In the study, “Poetic justice or petty jealousy? The aesthetics of revenge,” researchers Thomas M. Tripp, Robert J. Bies, and Karl Aquino asked a group of MBA students to share two stories of revenge taken against a coworker. Stories that appealed to duty, involved sacrifice, were balanced against the offense, or, as the study notes, offered a sense of poetic justice, were best received.
In another study, Get the Message: Punishment Is Satisfying If the Transgressor Responds to Its Communicative Intent, by researchers Funk, McGeer, and Gollwitzer participants played a problem-solving game that involved “winnings” of raffle tickets. This time the ringer was instructed to skim off of the top causing an unfair distribution of the tickets. The participants were then offered the chance to penalize the skimmer by removing some of their tickets. Participants who received a message from the offender saying “Your decision to subtract my raffle tickets has probably something to do with my distribution. It was unfair, I know.” reported feeling higher levels of satisfaction about issuing punishment.
The researchers intuited that the satisfaction comes from seeing a change in the offender, in achieving a measure of fairness. A 2010 study, “What gives victims satisfaction when they seek revenge?,” by Mario Gollwitzer, Milena Meder, and Manfred Schmitt confirms that vengeance is more satisfying when the offender knows why they are being punished and admits to earning said punishment. Gollwitzer elaborates: “The finding that it is the offender’s recognizing of his wrongdoing that makes revenge sweet seems to suggest that—from the avenger’s perspective—revenge entails a message. If the message is not delivered, it cannot reestablish justice.”
Enjoyable, delicious, sweet revenge makes us feel in control. It gives us power to enforce fairness making the world more just. But what about when this doesn’t happen? What about when the offender is unrepentant? Or the harm caused by revenge outweighs the initial offense?
In a 2008 experiment, The Paradoxical Consequences of Revenge, researchers Kevin M. Carlsmith, Timothy Wilson, and Daniel Gilbert set up an experiment in which the ringer would convince group members to invest equally but then renege on the agreement. This allowed the ringer to benefit financially at the others’ expense. The experimenters then offered a chance for retribution. Everyone offered revenge took it. However results showed that the students who got revenge reported feeling worse than those who didn’t meaning students that were not offered the opportunity for revenge were happier. This despite both groups believing revenge would make them better-off.
In another study psychological and brain sciences doctoral student at Washington University in St. Louis, Fade Eadeh, ran experiments in 2016 related to the killing of Osama bin Laden by US forces in retaliation for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The outcome consistently demonstrated that we feel both happy and sad when we take revenge. Eadeh said, “We love revenge because we punish the offending party and dislike it because it reminds us of their original act.” Instead of helping us move on revenge allows us to stagnate in the pain of the offense. Which makes sense. As we plot and scheme our revenge over weeks, months, or years we are simply intensifying the original experience instead of moving past it. All that is not going to drop away once the deed is done. The problem is that once the original euphoria of reprisal ends our hurts still need healing.
Then there are the consequences. How much is vengeance worth? Sometime revenge isn’t so much about justice as it is an act of rage, pain, and/or power. Look at Buddy Pine in the first Incredibles film. His focus on an act of rejection decades in the past rots him from the inside blinding him to the fact that instead of becoming the evil Syndrome he could have been Batman, one of the greatest superheroes of them all. Instead, because he builds everything in pursuit of destruction, all he has is destroyed.
In a more relevant example there is incel culture. Sex in modern society is complicated by the internet, by apps, by deeper understandings of autonomy and consent but, sadly, it remains very much a commodity. When women feel undesirable, are locked out of the sexual marketplace, we generally blame ourselves. Unfortunately, for too many men fed the Hollywood narrative that every guy deserves a hot chick, when they find themselves blocked from the sexual marketplace they blame women. An extreme minority of these men, mostly straight and white, who call themselves “incels” for involuntarily celibate have turned their rejection by women into a sadistic political ideology that has culminated in several murderous acts including the murder of ten innocent people in Toronto and an attack on a yoga studio just last year in Florida in which two people were killed.
Worse, yes worse, revenge can be the catalyst for generations of continued retribution. From Coke and Pepsi to the Hatfield’s and the McCoy’s to modern attempts at genocide our petty act of revenge could escalate into a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions affecting families for generations. As Gandhi said, “An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.” If concern for the progeny of our progeny does not sway us then maybe something a little more personal, a little more selfish, will. Evidence shows that people who seek revenge instead of forgiving or letting go, tend to feel worse in the long run. We suffer from feelings of culpability, distress, and remorse. The type of emotional states that have a habit of lingering and becoming a heavy burden on the mind. Retaliation that costs us more than the original offense scarcely seems attractive. It all boils down to the annoyingly true cliché that the best revenge is a life lived well.
The next time we feel the insidious draw of vengeance we need to refocus. Instead of thinking of how we have been done wrong we need to thinks about us. What we want and how to go about getting it. Think about our goals, be it writing the next great novel or just getting up the next day and going for a walk in the woods. Make the pleasure principle work for us by getting that lizard brain to concentrate on the rush we will feel meeting our goals. Leave our offenders lying on the side of the roads of our past, where they belong.
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