![]() ![]() This created a classic experimental dilemma: what’s best for the group is for all four members to donate their dollar, but what’s best for the individual is to keep the dollar and also receive one quarter of the final pot distribution, which grows through the investments of the others - in other words, as the researchers put it, to be a “free rider.”Īt the end of the trial, participants discovered that one member - secretly controlled by the researchers - had acted as a free rider. 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. Perhaps revenge is sweet, or perhaps the words of Francis Bacon are more accurate: “A man that studieth revenge, keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal, and do well.”įor 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. 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. If cathartic activity fails to dissolve hostility in general, what is to say revenge will dissolve the anger caused by one offense in particular? That doubt laid the foundation for a recent series of tests led by Kevin Carlsmith of Colgate, who conducted the research with APS Fellows and Charter Members Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia and Daniel Gilbert of Harvard. ![]() In a 2002 paper in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, APS Fellow Brad Bushman of The Ohio State University reported higher levels of aggression in people who had supposedly vented their anger than in those who had done nothing at all. But empirical research failed to validate the theory of catharsis, and some recent work contradicts it entirely. This idea, still widely held in the popular culture, suggests that venting aggression ultimately purges it from the body. Many early psychological views toward revenge were based on the larger concept of emotional catharsis. The upshot of these insights is a better sense of why the pursuit of revenge has persisted through the ages, despite tasting a lot more sour than advertised. They have also found that instead of delivering justice, revenge often creates only a cycle of retaliation, in part because one person’s moral equilibrium rarely aligns with another’s. Behavioral scientists have observed that instead of quenching hostility, revenge can prolong the unpleasantness of the original offense and that merely bringing harm upon an offender is not enough to satisfy a person’s vengeful spirit. In the past few years, psychological scientists have discovered many ways in which the practice of revenge fails to fulfill its sweet expectations. That minute before revenge is savory, as the authors of the Science study recognized but what about the days and weeks that follow? The actual execution of revenge carries a bitter cost of time, emotional and physical energy, and even lives. But while the idea of revenge is no doubt delectable - the very phrase “just desserts” promises a treat - much of its sugar is confined to the coating. It is as classic as Homer and Hamlet, and as contemporary as Don Corleone and Quentin Tarantino as old as the eyes and teeth traded in the Bible, and as fresh as the raid that took the life of Osama bin Laden. The findings, published in a 2004 issue of Science, gave physiological confirmation to what the scorned have been saying for years: Revenge is sweet.Ī thirst for vengeance is nothing if not timeless. The decision caused a rush of neural activity in the caudate nucleus, an area of the brain known to process rewards (in previous work, the caudate has delighted in cocaine and nicotine use). The researchers then gave the people a chance to punish their greedy partners, and for a full minute, as the victims contemplated revenge, the activity in their brains was recorded. ![]() These people had trusted their partners to split a pot of money with them, only to find that the partners had chosen to keep the loot for themselves. A few years ago a group of Swiss researchers scanned the brains of people who had been wronged during an economic exchange game. ![]()
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