Revenge is an activity that provides satisfaction from harming someone in return or hurting someone by whose actions we were hurt, or from the fact that we were harmed. The satisfaction comes from the feeling that we have repaid the injury or wrongdoing.
Oxford English Dictionary
Who wouldn’t know Edmond Dantès? If not from the book, then from one of the film adaptations. And who would not sympathize with him? Count of Monte Cristo, the hero of a story of betrayal and revenge, is the prototype of a man who leaves nothing to chance and after careful analysis ruthlessly punishes everyone who hurt him. He ultimately forgives his love Mercedes, who allowed all of this and effectively covered for it, and leaves forever. Because those punished were mostly villains who had committed many other misdeeds, all readers and viewers root for Edmond. The main motives for just revenge, which no one explicitly states, are captured in two axioms: first, because it is deserved (just deserts), and second, so that it does not happen again. The motive of punishment proportional to the offense is the primary one, far ahead of all others.
Edmond’s fans, however, do not realize that this expression of justice is not a sign of their refined legal awareness, their achieved ethical perfection, or a refined sense of justice; rather, it is something programmed by genetics. Alex Strobel and colleagues (2), using imaging methods, found that in an experimental economic game participants were willing, based on their own decision, to punish cheaters who deceived other participants just as harshly as if they had cheated them themselves. The motive is most likely the satisfaction experienced when fairly punishing norm violations. Scientists categorized punishment of offenders among cognitively and affectively motivated actions with personality-specific severity in its impact on that person.
The objectively registered experience is mediated by the brain nucleus called the nucleus accumbens, known as the “reward center,” and in terms of progression it appears to be indistinguishable from the experience triggered by any reward—including taking drugs—mediated by dopamine. Supplementing with genetic information showed that this experience is strongly individually modulated by the genome and that we probably each experience this satisfaction differently depending on inherited aptitudes.
A key difference, however, exists already between men and women, as shown by Singer and colleagues’ study (3), in which naive participants of both sexes were put into a similar cheating simulation. They did not differ in empathy-based pain in response to wrongdoing and rule breaking. But men’s empathetic responses were much less intense, faded quickly, and instead brain areas related to reward were activated; this objectively confirmed the second part of the response directed toward punishing the offender. Thus, men showed themselves as more active moral guardians, overturning Cardinal Richelieu’s misogynistic statement that: “With women, you can achieve anything if you can skillfully use the two passions that dominate a woman’s soul: vindictiveness and desire for sensual pleasure.” It is much easier for men who uphold social norms.
They are even willing to invest in this activity if it is clear that the culprit will be effectively hit, as shown by another experiment with a similarly set scenario (4). As the lead author of the study said: “In other words, it is possible to say that they are willing to pay, even if it costs them a win, because at that point they presumably experience the same pleasure as when savoring a dessert, having sex, or using drugs.” Satisfaction is greater when it is clearer that the person who harmed us understood the meaning of our action, as vengeance for his deed (5).
From existing neuroscience findings, it appears that actors experience the same satisfaction as in the folk saying that revenge is sweet; this quality is even directly mentioned in some papers. During its execution, greater satisfaction is felt than if the same outcome occurred through natural intervention (6). Americans celebrated the death of Osama bin Laden both as just retribution and because this criminal would “no longer meddle” in their lives. When asked the hypothetical question of whether they would feel the same satisfaction if the sought-after terrorist had his plane crash, the answer was unequivocal: no!
This widely shared view is, however, complicated by Carlsmith’s 2008 work, whose authors claim precisely the opposite—that in at least some cases, the affective consequences of revengeful activities are exactly the opposite of what people expected (7). When people think about potential revenge in the future (taking revenge on a co-player in the familiar “prisoner’s dilemma” game), they feel satisfaction from it; when it happens, however, avengers repeatedly “ruminate” thoughts about the betrayer/harm-doer, thereby generating negative emotions, while forgiving or forgetting individuals do not focus on them and continue on with their life path, and second, because revenge-seekers often lack feedback concerning the effectiveness of their action. Measurements show that although avengers expected satisfaction, they had a worsened mood immediately after the act compared to those in the experiment for whom this behavioral option was not available.
Similar conclusions about primarily negative feelings and their later reframing over time also arise in Lambert and colleagues’ study (8). This situation is also called “Mark Twain perspective,” and from the depths of history he adds: It is human to err, but madness is to persist in error. The authors are milder; they do not consider a persistent belief to be a disorder but a basic limitation of human information processing.
A newly appeared study finally addresses the ambivalent situation of the bitterness and sweetness of revenge (9). Authors from Washington University in St. Louis fully accept Carlsmith’s findings, but are not misled by the fact that a considerable amount of literature reports satisfaction from revenge. They find a solution by precisely defining affective states and separating them by their character.
Here it is necessary to reiterate where and what the difference between emotion and mood is. In his integrative review (10) on page 74, Ekman writes: “Here is an apt occasion to show the difference between emotion and mood. We all have both; though both involve feelings, emotions and mood are two different things. The most obvious difference is that emotions last much shorter than mood. Mood can last an entire day, sometimes two days, whereas emotions come and go in minutes, sometimes seconds. Mood resembles a mild but persistent emotional orientation. If, for example, it is irritability, then it is as if one is in a foul mood and in that state easily becomes angry. If it is a depressed mood, one is a bit sad and can easily slip into deep sorrow. It is important to realize that moods make us less flexible in responding to changing nuances in the environment, so we interpret situations in a distorted way. Emotions also act this way, but only for moments; mood, however, lasts for hours.”
Mood can, in other words, be understood as a current and relatively time-bounded disposition to perceive, interpret, and relate to the external environment and even to oneself in a certain way (positive to negative), whereby this current disposition reflects momentary internal resources of the person and does not necessarily—unlike emotions—have to be a reaction to an external situation (11).
But let us return to the above-mentioned work, whose authors are convinced that in the case of negative feelings both cited studies involved mood, because the researchers did not ask respondents how they felt in relation to the revenge performed, but had them fill out questionnaires that focused more on this affective level. This does not mean that it was worthless, but assessing basic emotions is also essential in relation to revenge.
Eadeh and colleagues, like their predecessors, started from the capture and killing of bin Laden. Their participants were given either a newspaper article about this event or (control) an article from the same newspaper about the Olympics. The completed mood questionnaires in a positive version (joy) and a negative affective version assembled from adjectives selected from Roget’s thesaurus confirmed the hypothesis that both types of feelings appeared as reactions. The same was true in two further experiments, which were variants of the first.
The first author, Fade Eadeh, a PhD student in psychology and neuroscience, summarized the conclusions in an interview for the media: “We have shown that with regard to revenge, people experience both positive and negative feelings; it is neither merely bitter nor merely sweet, but simply both. We love revenge because it punishes the person who harmed us, and we also do not like it because it reminds us of the original act.”
Author: MUDr. Radkin Honzák, CSc. Literature:
(1) Darley JM et al: Incapacitation and just deserts as motives for punishment. Law Hum Behav. 2000 Dec;24(6):659-83 (2) Strobel A, et al.: Beyond revenge: neural and genetic bases of altruistic punishment. Neuroimage. 2011 Jan 1;54(1):671-80 (3) Singer T et al.: Empathic neural responses are modulated by the perceived fairness of others. Nature. 2006 Jan 26;439(7075):466-9 (4) de Quervain DJ, et al.: The neural basis of altruistic punishment. Science. 2004 Aug 27;305(5688):1254-8 (5) Gollwitzer M, et al.: What gives victims satisfaction when they seek revenge? Europ J Soc Psychol, 2011;41(3):364–374 (6) Gollwitzer M, et al.: Vicarious revenge and the death of Osama bin Laden. Pers Soc Psychol Bull. 2014 May;40(5):604-16 (7) Carlsmith KM, et al:. The paradoxical consequences of revenge. J Pers Soc Psychol, 2008;95(6):1316-1324 (8) Lambert AJ et al.: How do you feel now? On the perceptual distortion of extremely recent changes in anger. J Experiment Soc Psychol, 2014;52:82-95 (9) Eadeh F, et al.: The Bittersweet Taste of Revenge: On the Negative and Positive Consequences of Retaliation. J Experiment Soc Psychol, 2016;65. DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2016.04.007 (10) Ekman P: Revealed Emotions. Jan Melvil Publ., Brno, 2015 (11) Poláčková Šolcová I, Trnka R: Contribution to the Theory of Affective Processes. Československá psychologie,2015;59(4):298-314