If you’ve lived long enough, there’s probably been a time that you’ve been wronged or felt some wrong was done deliberately against you. Whether or not you decided to retaliate against the person in question, the chances are good that you’ve at least thought about getting even with them in some way or other, if you haven’t in fact actually carried out your revenge.
Why do we do it? Depending on who you ask – successful revenge can either be sweet, or just the delight of small minds, without doing much beyond the feelings of immediate gratification it offers. So is it actually a good idea – and will it actually help our well-being for the long term?
There is in fact evidence supported by neuroscience that the first sentiment is true. Back in 2004, the journal Science published a study that had researchers scan the participants’ brains with the use of positron emission tomography (PET) as they played an economic game that placed an emphasis on trust, and the decisions made sometimes drove the players to commit vengeful acts.
Game play worked as such: two of the male players would interact with each other anonymously. We’ll call them person A and person B. Each one began the game with a total of ten units of money. Person A was allowed to make the first decision. He had a choice between giving his ten unit capital to person B or he was allowed to keep it all for himself. If he were to give it all away, the experimenter would then quadruple the amount given to person B to 40 units, so person B would then have 50 units altogether. Person B would then be given a choice between sending back half of their sum (25 units) to person A or keeping everything. If B decided to take the high road, then both players would end the game with 25 units – a win for both, as they would end with more than double what they started playing with. If B decided to keep it all, however, B would then finish the game with all 50 units, or if A decided to keep everything from B, then both players would end the game with the same money they started with.
The researchers were curious about player A’s judgements of whether it was unfair if player B kept everything for himself, and also their desire to get back at player B when they did decide they were treated unfairly. They would then weigh this against actual attempts to punish player B – and their brain activity was monitored accordingly, paying attention to any potential regional changes.
Whenever player A felt there was a breach of trust and they reported that they wanted vengeance against B, brain activity increased in the reward-related region of the brain: the dorsal striatum. Revenge, therefore, is largely sought out to make an individual feel good, to break away from any hurt feelings they might be experiencing. The researchers also learned that the test subjects who showed the strongest degree of activity in the dorsal striatum were even willing to exact revenge when it came at a more severe cost to themselves – the scenario when they ended the game the way they started.
In the past, many have argued that we seek revenge from a sociological standpoint: primarily out of an attempt to punish wrongdoing and to maintain social order. However, the fact that you can experience satisfaction when you get your revenge is a piece of the puzzle that’s hard to neglect.
A vengeful dilemma
The individual however, doesn’t always feel good after the vengeful act is committed, however. In a study published just four years after the game, scientists learned that individuals largely reported having a significantly more negative mood right after they exacted their revenge.
Yet another study offered a larger set of measures for researchers to look at the psychological effects of revenge. Besides monitoring the primary mood state of study participants just after they had planned an act of revenge, the study’s authors then worked out a computational analysis of choice language used by the participants when they wrote out their thoughts and feelings on paper about an episode where they were wronged, as well as a more thoroughly detailed introspective of what their emotional responses were like – beyond looking at just the participants’ transient mood at any given moment.
The authors concluded that their test subjects experienced a fairly mixed bag of different emotions. For these individuals, revenge isn’t necessarily always sweet. It would be fairer, perhaps to say that “revenge is bittersweet” (a phrase not quite as catchy, which makes the whole affair markedly less attractive). This underscores how revenge in fact has the capability to produce a combination of positive as well as negative emotions (such feelings include tension, uncertainty and even harboring senses of dread).
You could therefore call this a dilemma of revenge for all who contemplate it. While revenge seems so appealing for us to entertain as it lights up the brain’s reward centers, there’s still a strong degree of uncertainty about how we may feel afterwards.
The effects for the long-term are dependent on a large number of different factors that the brain is not likely to always compute in the moment. A crucial factor is whether your own feelings change about the wrong you were dealt – and whether or not you are able to empathize with the perpetrator who acted against you. There is also to consider if that person is capable of changing their behaviors before you decide to act against them – and if they are capable of admitting wrongdoing or apologizing in a way that is sincere.
Time alone can also impact how revenge can make you feel – in a way that’s not always easy to fully measure. Therefore, it’s difficult to determine if committing revenge actually works to benefit those who seek it in the long term.
Weighing your options
With a bit of age and experience, you can probably arrive at the conclusion that revenge is a bit reckless and does more harm than good – which leaves another thing to consider: What should you do if you’re wronged aside from striking back at the other person? So, what should you do instead of taking revenge when you are wronged? Should you just try to bury your feelings? This isn’t easy – as experience has also taught us – and can lead to more negative feelings down the road. Another study required its participants to document hurtful episodes within their lives, and had them focus on what personal benefits it gave them for the long term – such as what they learned, in order to see if it diminished their desire to get revenge.
In their writing assignment, the participants reported that their ordeals had allowed them to “grow stronger”, that they had “discovered unknown strengths”, and that they had also “become wiser” because of what happened, putting them on alert to similar situations in the future. They also wrote that the episodes had “allowed for new experiences”. Documenting the events with this language suggested that the individuals were capable of forgiving the perpetrator and therefore were much less likely to look for vengeance. In the long term, the subjects also reported suffering less from stress and anger, which ultimately led to improved effects upon their overall psychological well-being.
It could be that perhaps modern neuroscience is not yet up to speed with the complex nuances apparent in real-life revenge. We are still unsure of how the brain deals with it over the course of time, for one such example. It is possible that your dorsal striatum happily lights up each time you sit and plan acts of revenge over a long enough period of time. It is just as likely that the feelings of a satisfactory reward from revenge decrease in intensity over time. In that case, you could either lose interest in getting revenge or you could just as easily find yourself needing to plan more elaborate acts of revenge that outweigh the original wrongdoing to produce the same dopamine response. The data still isn’t quite there yet.
As with many other parts of the human experience, what we anticipate can often be better than the experience itself, which is something to consider if you do feel you’ve been unjustly wronged: Getting even may not be all that you hoped for.
