Revenge
Revenge is defined as “an action in response to some perceived harm or wrongdoing by another party that is determined to inflict damage, injury, discomfort, or punishment to the party judged responsibly”.
Revenge is considered to have a biological, evolutionary, and instinctive basis in that its roots stem from people’s basic animal fighting instincts. Modern Western thought considers revenge taboo and encourages forgiveness instead, though emotionally and even politically it is still a potent force in society.
Moreover, researchers have suggested that forgiveness may be conditioned by culture, religiosity, and spiritual beliefs but the findings are mixed
Who’s right? As psychologists explore the mental machinery behind revenge, it turns out both can be, depending on who and where you are. If you’re a power-seeker, revenge can serve to remind others you’re not to be trifled with. If you live in a society where the rule of law is weak, revenge provides a way to keep order.
Revenge is a powerful emotional trigger that mobilizes people into action. “It’s this very pervasive experience in human lives, people from every society understand the idea of getting angry and wanting to hurt someone who has harmed you,” says evolutionary psychologist Michael McCullough, of the University of Miami, who has spent over a decade studying revenge and forgiveness.
But revenge comes at a price. Instead of helping you move on with your life, it can leave you dwelling on the situation and remaining unhappy, psychologists’ research finds.
Considering revenge is a very human response to feeling slighted, humans are atrocious at predicting its effects.
More vengeful people tend to be those who are motivated by power, by authority and by the desire for status,” he says. “They don’t want to lose face.
The emotions that fuel revenge may differ across cultures as well. Anger often drives the vengeful feelings of people in individualistic cultures, while shame powers revenge in collectivist ones.
A tale of revenge is always bittersweet. Take the sack of Troy, as depicted in Homer’s epic poem The Iliad. When Paris steals away Helen, her husband King Menelaus cannot bear the injustice and seeks to attack her seducer. He brings an entire army to Troy, waging a lengthy war that kills thousands.
It drives crime – up to 20% of homicides and 60% of school shootings are linked to revenge, studies show. And it shapes politics too. Donald Trump’s presidential victory, for instance, came as a result of “revenge of working-class whites… who felt abandoned by a rapidly globalizing economy,” according to an article in the Washington Post. The same sentiment is echoed by many other outlets.
While the topic of aggression is well-studied – its triggers include alcohol, being insulted and narcissistic personality traits – revenge is less understood. It is not easy to untangle violent behaviour, making it a difficult topic to study. David Chester of Virginia Commonwealth University was initially studying aggression but quickly realized 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. “I was curious, how do you take something like [receiving] an insult and how do you go from that to an aggressive response.
” The key, he believes, lies in the desire to retaliate. “So by the nature of trying to understand aggression I started studying revenge.”
Revenge spawns an endless cycle of retribution. It is not a long-term solution, but a quick fix. That, experts say, is part of its appeal — it gives a wronged party some gratification, even though it is only temporary.
Some people equate revenge with seeking justice, but the two are not the same. People who seek revenge are driven by anger and violence and have not thought about how to channel their negative feelings into something positive. They have not considered how they could use their negative experience — the injustice they suffered — to bring about change.
Experiences of humiliation, unjust hurt caused by another or anger naturally, elicit the desire to seek revenge and fantasies of revenge. The current study examined the associations between a history of traumatic events and feelings of injustice and levels of desire for revenge-seeking and fantasies of revenge.
Specifically, it tested whether feelings of injustice mediated the associations between the number of past traumatic events and the desire for revenge or revenge fantasies. Based on recent studies showing that retaliatory violence is gendered, sex differences in levels of feelings of injustice, desire for revenge, and the presence of revenge fantasies were explored, as well as whether participants’ sex conditioned the mediation models.
The results showed positive associations between feelings of injustice and the desire for revenge and revenge fantasies. The mediation model indicated that feelings of injustice mediated the associations between the number of previous traumatic events and the desire for revenge or revenge fantasies. Men had higher levels of revenge fantasies than women, whereas women tended to perceive revenge as pointless.
A sex effect was found for the mediation model, which revealed significant regressed models for women but not for men. The clinical implications are discussed.
Like hate, revenge is something that takes a toll on the person who feels wronged, as well as the [person’s] enemy. It is inherently unhealthy because it takes a psychological and physical toll on the person. Venting those feelings of anger and hostility does not decrease those feelings.
To test this theory, the researchers randomly divided research participants into two groups. One group imagined themselves in a neutral interaction with a colleague. The other group imagined being offended by a colleague, and then imagined either forgiving the colleague or taking revenge against them, depending on which scenario they received.
They found that participants who imagined taking revenge against the colleague remained dehumanized (e.g., rating themselves as feeling less refined, emotional, and intelligent, and more superficial, cold, and animalistic) relative to those who imagined no offense occurring. On the other hand, participants who imagined forgiving the colleague felt just as human as those who imagined no offense occurring.
Regardless of whether the victim has an emotional connection to the perpetrator, the level of the desire for revenge depends on the severity of the transgression toward the victim. The level of the desire for revenge also impacts the behaviour of the victim toward or in the presence of the perpetrator.
This can range from attempts at total avoidance to an obsession with the perpetrator and the hurt. However, when the victim knows the perpetrator and has an emotional attachment, the level of revenge is thought to be contingent upon the desire to preserve the relationship with the perpetrator and feelings toward him or her.
The greater the desire to preserve the relationship, the greater the tendency to either deny the hurt or forgive the perpetrator.
The revenge subscale from the transgression-related interpersonal motivations (TRIM) inventory was used It consists of five items assessing the respondents’ desire to seek revenge against someone, who committed a specific transgression (e.g., “I will make him or her pay.”).
Participants are asked to rate their level of agreement with each item from strongly disagree to strongly agree. This subscale has been shown to exhibit positive correlations with offense-specific rumination, negative affectivity and self-deception, and negative correlations with empathy and relational closeness. The internal reliabilities are reported to range from 0.85 to 0.93, with test-retest reliabilities in the range of 0.44–0.65. The internal reliability in the current study was 0.91.
The perception of the utility of revenge appears to be widespread; indeed, even a brief review of a wide array of media, including literature, popular entertainment, and religious and legal writings, suggests that revenge is a natural response to perceived offenses. Additionally, revenge appears to be highly motivating, even to the extent of motivating and justifying extreme amoral behaviour.
For example, an estimated 20% to 40% of homicides in the United States appear to be motivated by revenge, suggesting that revenge is a widespread social phenomenon that impacts the lives of millions of people. While individuals often come to regret their revengeful actions, within the present moment, the act of revenge appears to “feel good” by eliciting positive emotions as one presumably rectifies an angering situation.
Thus, while revenge‐seeking behaviours are often the product of anger toward a situation, revenge‐seeking behaviours are manifested out of a desire to experience a rewarding feeling of gratification, which often occurs when simply knowing that one can seek revenge against an offender.
However, the neural mechanisms associated with the pleasurable aspects of revenge‐seeking have received relatively little research. The present research was designed to understand the neural underpinnings of emotional reactions to winning the opportunity to partake in revenge, as well as further offense.
Revenge refers to a desirable aggressive reaction in response to harmful action. More specifically, revenge is a motivated act driven by the goal to see a transgressor suffer. This explicitly differs from retributive punishment, in that the goal of revenge is not to merely retaliate against the offending party to show that some behaviour is bad, but to alleviate intense negative emotions by making an offender suffer. Thus, while punishment is considered a form of justice, revenge stems from feelings of anger or vengeance toward an individual or situation.
Individuals seeking justice often believe that revenge will be a positive experience to bring after. This makes sense, given that past research has found that attaining goals results in greater cheerful responses. In the context of revenge, the individual seeking revenge anticipates feeling better and having a better mood after an aggressive response toward some offender.
Increases in positive affect after an aggressive reaction occur because the individual seeking revenge believes that justice has been distributed to an offender. Individuals appear to partake in these behaviours with the desire to increase positive affect after an angering situation.
Experiences of humiliation, unjust hurt by another or anger naturally elicit the desire to seek revenge. This desire is considered to be a universal personal response in all human cultures.
The desire for revenge; namely, to cause the perpetrator to suffer, does not cease until it is recognized and released in one way or another. The greater the harm and transgression caused to the victim, and the more the victim perceives the perpetrator’s responsibility for the harm, the greater the desire for revenge.
The desire to seek revenge first appears during childhood. Children as young as nine are capable of retaliatory decision-making. They can consider factors such as whether the harm was purposeful, the type of retaliation desired, and the age difference between the perpetrator and the victim. However, the urge to retaliate for wrongs persists throughout adulthood.
Aggression often occurs in response to some frustration. However, aggressive revenge, more specifically, is thought to be driven by negative effects such as anger in response to some transgression.
Anger is experienced as an unpleasant emotional state often associated with the approach motivational system. Approach motivation, or the impetus to move toward some goal or object, is a fundamental dimension of affective states. Much research has associated anger with approach motivation.
For example, anger is associated with approach‐motivated urges, and approach‐oriented patterns of physiological responses and relates to more approach‐motivated traits such as self‐assurance, strength, and bravery. Moreover, neural regions associated with approach motivation are activated during situational anger.
