The Noble Motivator – Revenge

Revenge is a dish that is best served cold. It is also a coach’s tool to push his team to the edge of their performance capabilities, how body builders retaliate to those who kicked sand in their skinny, bony faces in that cool-beach-dude ad, what starts wars, gang wars and corporate takeovers. And it turns out, in cold hard experiments by the University of Zurich – from those neutral Swiss no less – that it just might be nature’s fuel to make the world go round while keeping populations in check. Yup, the need to kick evolution in the butt and climb to the top of the hill… no matter what… is often followed up by an equal and opposite reaction from those you kicked on the way up. It reignites their evolutionary zeal to remove those at the top of the hill, a feeling which is equally strong. Whoa! Hey, aren’t prison and the death penalty all about “revenge”? How many folks do you see coming out of prison “rehabilitated”? Why exactly do you think the recidivism rates are so damned high?

Tell me about those experiments, Peter. You’ll like this University of Zurich special: 14 volunteers were enlisted to cooperate with each other in a series of competitive money-earning games, but one of these players was a planted turncoat, who, using unfair advantage, glommed on to most of the cash. Players were then asked whether if they could, they would punish the perp. The October 18^th Los Angeles Times (Health section) provides this summary of the results: “All 14 volunteers chose to retaliate if they could do so at no charge, and 12 out of 14 did so even if it cost them additional money. When they decided to seek revenge, the dorsal striatum lighted up on a PET scan. Those whose brains were activated the most were willing to spend the most to punish the double-crosser, notes study co-author Ernst Fehr, whose research was published in Science in 2004.

“It's not surprising that our brains signal ‘pleasure’ at the prospect of punishing someone who wronged us, says Michael McCullough, a University of Miami psychologist and author of Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct. Although it can be a misguided, costly craving in the modern world, evolutionary psychologists believe the thirst for revenge ensured our ancestors' survival — retaliation was the only way for victims to deter aggressors from harming them or their tribes in the future… Still, the delicious pleasure anticipated from taking revenge is such a powerful drive that it appears to be hard-wired in the brain… University of Zurich scientists found that merely contemplating revenge stimulates a region of the brain called the dorsal striatum, which is known to become active in anticipation of a reward or pleasure, such as making money or eating good food.” The Times.

But actually wreaking revenge doesn’t carry the rewards one might expect. In a study by Kevin Carlsmith of Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., that sort of mimicked the Zurich test, participants were queried about their relative levels of satisfaction at actually having carried out their acts of revenge: “Although players predicted they'd feel much better after they retaliated, the reverse turned out to be true. The researchers measured their mood on a seven-point scale (with 7 being extremely satisfied) and found that avengers scored 1.5 points lower than other players who didn't get a chance to retaliate, according to results published in 2008 in the Journal of Personality and Social Technology. That's probably because they kept thinking about the ringer, while those who couldn't retaliate didn't dwell on the incident, says Carlsmith, who conducted the studies with colleagues at Harvard University and the University of Virginia.” The Times. It also seems that folks who typically stew in thoughts of revenge tend to increase their need to retaliate… folks who let go more easily didn’t get caught up in an obsessive desire to retaliate. Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, don’t it?!

I’m Peter Dekom, and whatever happened to “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”?