347. The psychology of revenge

00:00:04
Speaker 1: Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they mean for our psychology.

00:00:23
Speaker 2: Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. New listeners, old listeners. Wherever you are in the world, it is so great to have you here. Back for another episode as we of course talk about the psychology of our twenties. Today we are going to be talking about the psychology of revenge. What some of us might think of as an ugly feeling, but what is actually one of the most complex, layered human emotions that we can have. So of my absolute favorite movies and books are written about this concept. Think like kill Bill or promising young women or Taken. And I find our human need for like an eye for an eye so interesting. It's one of those universal human impulses that we all get, whether or not we've acted on it, whether or not we've acknowledged it or not. You know, if only I could make my ex hurt the way that they hurt me, If only I could get back at that friend who betrayed me or that person who cut me off on the road. Sometimes it almost feels satisfying to either enact revenge or to daydream about all the ways we could Is that a good thing? Why do we feel such like a weird pleasure around hurting someone who hurt us? Here's the paradox as well. Revenge promises satisfaction, but more often than not you might not know this, you probably do, but it actually leaves us feeling emptier than it might feel good initially. Is it really worth the cost? And how do you navigate feeling such a messy bit of feeling that maybe goes up against your more inherent desire to be a good person. Why is the drive towards revenge so strong? When should we act on it? When should we avoid it? These are all the kind of questions that we're going to be answering today's episode, as well as looking at some listener stories of people who have sought revenge and what the consequences were. There is so much pettiness, so much drama in this episode, so many good stories, and also so much psychology. It's almost unbelievable. So without further ado, let's get into the psychology of revenge. I feel like the idea of revenge is almost romantic at this point. It's like this driving force for so many dramatic moments. Some people would even call them poetic moments. So what exactly is it about revenge that makes it so powerful and so hard to resist? To understand revenge, we really have to start at the origin, feeling at what is going on before we even decide to get back at someone. When someone wrongs us, that's the beginning of this process. Our brain obviously interprets it as a threat not just to our safety, but also to more high level cognitive values, so things like social status. It's a threat to social status, it's a threat to our sense of fairness. It's also a threat to our identity. Now, when you have a healthy ego, there is this like invisible protective boundary or shield around you. It kind of represents like a limit of what you will and won't tolerate. And when someone oversteps that boundary, when the shield is penetrated, that's when something pretty us is triggered. Now, some people's boundary shield is quite small and close to them, and some people's is quite wide. Regardless, it is actually completely subjective, but studies in the field of neuroscience have shown that when someone crosses that boundary, there is this specific area in our brain called the dorsal striatom that immediately lights up. Interestingly, it's also the same area that lights up when we eat chocolate, when we win money, when we receive praise from somebody. In other words, the anticipation of revenge after someone has hurt us, harmed us, betrayed us literally does feel initially quite pleasurable. This from an evolutionary perspective, makes a lot of sense. We are wired to respond to injustice. If we think about early groups of humans, we pretty much relied on this elusive concept of fairness to survive being having your resources stolen, having your reputation undermined, having your partner taken that could and would threaten your survival, and so revenge served as a signal to others that this kind of behavior was unacceptable. So in a way it actually worked to reinforce social rules and to deter people or others from betrayal or from hurting people. Basically, it's like the classic idea of punishment, punishing the offender, teaching them a lesson restoring harmony, and also signaling to the wider group that this is not okay, but also that you are not an easy target, and this kind of reputational enforcement that you are not somebody to be messed with was really adaptive in smaller communities where reputation affected access to mates, to protection, to resources, So long before laws or social contracts, this instinct was really really helpful. It's actually what psychologist would call altruistic punishment. Basically, yes, the outcome of revenge might not be necessarily positive for the other person, but it also has a greater good in that it used to maintain group cooperation and it actually used to be good for social harmony, knowing that there was this balance between giving people respect and knowing that if you overstepped your boundary you would also receive some kind of punishment that taught you not.

00:06:38
Speaker 1: To do that.

00:06:38
Speaker 2: So it is a very very old feeling. That's what we need to understand, especially if you feel a lot of guilt around wanting to enact revenge against someone. The question that we kind of get into is why would it therefore still be useful in modern life. You know, when we have laws and law enforcement, when we have rules, when we have a legal system, why do we still feel the feeling if technically there are other systems that are meant to, you know, take care of that for us. The most obvious driver for revenge is this need for justice. And I know I just mentioned the legal system and law enforcement system. What if that system is broken. What if that system doesn't work in your interests? What if the thing that someone did wasn't necessarily illegal but still really hurt you deeply, Like what if it was someone who cheated, or something really petty and small that you couldn't necessarily sue someone for, but which still really annoyed you and hurt you. I remember when my ex was secretly dating someone whilst we were having like discussions of like do we get back together or not? And we're having all these talks about like, no, we definitely have a future together, give me a second chance, and the whole time he was dating somebody else. And when I found out, I had never felt that surge of adrenaline before that like it to be honest like desire to hurt him, and it honestly like it shocked me, like it made me see myself differently as an individual. This is like the classic they must pay kind of motive, the belief that for fairness to be enacted, retribution is somewhat required. Revenge also allows us to reassert control if we've been betrayed, humiliated, or made to feel powerless. Like fantasizing about payback gives us this sense of agency, even if we don't do anything about it. There's this idea of like, yes, this person stepped all over me. Yes, this person hurt me, but I know I could get back at them if I wanted to, and therefore I actually do have some level of control in this situation. So it kind of serves as this like emotional moral like psychological recalibration that stops us from being additionally hurt by this idea that we are powerless to what people do to us. Many people also believe that revenge actually helps people get closure. There's this perception that if you retaliate and make someone feel the way that they made you feel, that is when you can walk away. That is when the door is closed. Unsurprisingly, maybe surprisingly, research shows that revenge actually rarely provides closure. In fact, according to research published in the Journal of Personality in Social Psychology, those who enact or engage in revenge actually tend to ruminate even more about the initial event, and they tend to actually feel that their negative emotions are kept alive. In comparison, people who resist revenge, even resist fantasizing about it, often recover faster emotionally from the event and from the person and the act that hurt them. Just something to keep in mind. The final driver towards revenge is just plain old impulsivity. It's like this knee jerk reaction to feeling disarmed by someone else's action. We just have to lash out. That's a really crucial thing about revenge is that it often isn't planned. It is so primal and emotional that it's not strategic. You just want to hurt the other person, which is why it also tends to backfire or to not feel as good as we initially think it will. This might be like the angry text that you send that you really regret later on when you know you're meant to be the person who like rises above things, or like the public call out on your Instagram stories the heat of the moment reaction you know, I gosh, I like remember I remember when a group of my closest friends all went on this overseas trip together when I was nineteen, and they didn't tell me, and they kind of asked other people around us not to tell me either, and I ended up finding out from someone else. What was my reaction to that? It was to post this like really cringe Instagram story that was like when someone shows you who you are, like believe them, Like it's so awkward to think about right now, Like that I did that, And obviously I ended up having a conversation with them, but like that was my first reaction. I feel so cringe, but in the moment, like that was the only way, the impulsive way to restore balance in that situation. So this kind of impulsive revenge is driven by the limbic system. We speak about that a lot. It's this emotional center in your brain that has evolved to keep us alive in dangerous situations by being extremely reactive. Specifically, the amicdala is the key actor here. This is the part of your brain responsible for processing fear, anger, threats, humanly hurt. So when we do experience those things, the amygdala fires pretty instantly and it sends signals to our body that you know, we need to be on high alert, we need to be doing something, we need to be acting, and when it's an emotional situation where we can't necessarily fight back or run away or freeze, we lash out. I guess we fight back psychologically and emotionally and cognitively by trying in some way to be in control of the situation, even if it ends up being kind of ridiculous. This does not necessarily help us in the modern world. It has the potential to be very destructive. The tricky thing here is that impulsive revenge is incredibly fleeting. Once the adrenaline fades, I promise you, the satisfaction fades as well. What's left behind is often regret and shame. Studies again, neuroscience studies have found that impulsive acts of aggression, they do produce short bursts of reward related activity in our brains, followed by increases in negative self referential processing. What does that mean? It's basically that like, oh crap, what have I done? Feeling? They're like what does this say about me? Feeling? I thought I was better than this feeling, and that feels awful. Of course, we also have planned revenge. This is the colder, more deliberate kind that comes from higher up in the brain's hierarchy. It involves the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex and the amigdala are like the same but different. They are incredibly integral in how our brain operates. But the prefrontal cortex is all rational, it's long term planning, it's impulse control. You would think that it would and it is there to kind of mediate the amigdala. But when like our instinct for revenge gets shifted into that space, suddenly, as the injustice lingers and the hot headedness and the rage goes down, there's like this new colder dimension to how we're thinking about hurting people. We're incredibly strategic. It's not chaotic. It's yeah, it's planned. We're thinking it through sometimes for months on end, and it can feel quite cathartic, considered soothing. One story I heard from a listener was about how she got revenge on a boss who had harassed her by slowly keeping track of receipts and like basically indications that he was stealing money from the restaurant that she was working at. So how she did this and I'm in a paraphrase what she said, but basically she was always offering to close the tills at the end of the night and she would count all the money, and she would count all the credit card transactions or whatever it was, and keep like doubles of the receipts, take photos of the receipts, take photos of her count because she knew that the boss was taking like three hundred to four hundred dollars off what she had put in and off her like calculations in claiming to his boss that like, you know, they've made less for the day. And one day she was like, I waited for six months doing this slowly and slowly because you wouldn't do it every day. And eventually I went to like my boss's boss and I got him fired.

00:15:43
Speaker 1: See, I don't know.

00:15:43
Speaker 2: How I feel about that. I kind of love that for her. Another more I guess sinister story was from a listener whose partner cheated and she did have evidence. He didn't know that she knew, but again she stayed with him for another three months. She was like, I just went all I felt nothing towards him, but I like convinced him that I wanted to get married, that he should like propose to me and we should move in together and then one weekend he went on like a boy's trip, and she packed up half the house left left over that weekend and literally had gotten a job out of state. Mood states no contact, never spoke to him again, and I was like, this is Curl, this is crazy, Like, you know, you built him up and you like made him feel so in love and then she just like cut it off and she was like, that's what he made me feel. And I was like, honestly, power to you if it made you feel better. I guess it kind of sounds like he deserves it. But if you've never felt this way, if you've never been able to plan this, sometimes it actually does come down to our personality. For me, like my form of revenge, revenge has always been very impulsive. But you know, in the cases where not necessarily these cases, but people where they go really intense on someone over something petty, there is actually something probably different about how their brain operates and about their personality that sociologists and psychologists and neuroscientists have been trying to figure out. So there's one particular social psychologist called Ian McKee at the University of Adelaide who is looking into this. I think still at this very moment, and according to him, people who are more vengeful in the planned sense tend to actually score higher on two traits right wing authoritarianism. Basically, they're very willing to submit to authority figures, and they're willing to act aggressively in their name and social dominance orientation. They want their group to be at the top of the hierarchy. These individuals are motivated by power, by hierarchy, by the preservation of status. They don't want to lose face. They are much more likely to seek out planned revenge. His research also showed that these personalities tend to be less forgiving, less benevolent, and more driven by authority and tradition rather than empathy or understanding. There's also a cultural dimension to this as well to seeking out revenge. Michelle Gelfand another psychologist in this area.

00:18:30
Speaker 1: Her and her.

00:18:30
Speaker 2: Colleagues found that what triggers our need for revenge actually differs across cultures in the US, in Australia, in the UK, and other individualistic societies. Revenge is often fueled by anger and the violation of personal rights, the violation of things like property rights like this is mine, it belongs to me, do not take it. You're not allowed it, and if you try, I'm going to enact revenge on you. But in collectivist cultures, people aren't so fussed by that stuff. It's more about and more triggered by violations of duty and honor and violations against the community. Gelfan also noted that revenge can actually be more contagious in collectivist cultures as well, whereby when you harm a member of someone's in group, so a family member or close friend, that actually, for those individuals feels more like harm to oneself than others who are living in individualistic societies. It's not just my pain like it's our pain. So revenge in these situations isn't about personal temperament. It's more about cultural and social belonging and maintaining the fabric of the collectivist society rather than protecting what's yours. We're going to return to this idea I mentioned before, which is that on some level revenge is actually really satisfying. What about the costs? If you are sitting there thinking, I'm kind of tossing up what I do in this situation, someone has hurt me, I want to act on it. Let's talk about what you should actually do practically, what should you do after this short break. Revenge feels amazing, There is no other way to say it. It activates the brain's reward centers. It gives us a surge of control, a surge of pleasure. The hidden cost is, of course, that fades. But also that the more we plot and rehearse revenge, the more we anchor our emotional state to the person who has hurt us. The more invested and intertwined our stories become. The more we make our peace conditional on something, and what it's conditional on is their pain. And this is where this can get a little bit tricky. There's a really interesting piece of research from Iowa State conducted in twenty twenty two which basically looked at six hundred participants. They partnered them up for this experiment and the researchers asked them to write just a really basic essay, and they were told that these essays would be reviewed by their partner. What was actually happening was that every single person in this study had the same partner. It was a research assistant, and that research assistant, slash. The research team gave every single one of these people or at least half of these people sorry really bad feedback. They were like, this is really bad, this is poorly written, this is terrible, you don't have any talent for this, and they were trying to anger the participants. So all of the participants were in this condition, all of them had the bad feedback. But then participants were then split into three different groups. The rumination group, these participants were asked to hit a punching bag whilst looking at the photo idea of their supposed partner, a distraction group, where they were shown a picture of an athlete whilst being asked to think about becoming super fit and punching the bag, and finally a control group, where participants just were asked to sit quietly for a little while after receiving their results. What's really interesting is that the participants in the control group, the ones who were just like sick quietly think about the situation, They got over it faster. They showed the lowest levels of anger and aggression compared to the groups of participants who vented their feelings in some way processing the pain individually. Counter to what we think encounter to what our limbic system is going to tell us is the best option, even the most calculated revenge came at a psychological cost, and comes at a psychological cost. It keeps you entangled with the person who hurt you. It actually prolongs your emotional dependence on them, meaning that they still have power even in their absence. This idea that you want to get back at them still allows them to exist within your mind. Someone described it to me as like emotional quicksand the harder you struggle to make someone else feel what you feel, the deeper you sink into the very pain that you are trying to escape. This echoes what a lot of emotional regulation theories will tell us. When we feel anger, we reinforce its neural pathways. Every time we replay the story, every fantasy that we have of getting even, our brain strengthens the association between pain and vengeance as the only solution. Here's also what's strange about revenge. Sometimes we do get exactly what we want it. You know, the apology never can. So we did get even. They felt the sting, the balance in theory was restored, and yet afterwards you don't actually feel righteous, You don't actually feel better. Sometimes we actually feel worse about ourselves. This has nothing to do with the other person. It has everything to do with us. There is this idea in psychology of effective forecasting. Essentially, it's our human tendency to mispredict or falsely predict how future events will make us feel. In the moment, we think that revenge is going to make everything feel better, that justice will be restored, everything's going to feel great. We think it will cancel out our hurt, but we overestimate the emotional payoff and we underestimate how terrible we're actually going to feel. In particular, when we act on our desire for revenge, it actually changes how we perceive ourselves. In that instance of payback, you are no longer just the person who was wronged. In this situation, you also become the person who has wrong someone else. And that moral dissonance is really uncomfortable because it blurs the boundary between victim and perpetrator. It splits us. That's how this is described. It splits you between the person you were before the pain, the victim, and the person who you became in response to it. Not necessarily the villain, but not necessarily the victim either. This neuroscientist and experimental psychologist Molly Crockett at Princeton. She has shown that this kind of moral decision making, such as do I seek revenge or not, feels good because it activates the reward network. It also activates the empathy network, especially this area called the ventromedia or prefrontal context that like almost immediately makes you see someone else's pain and feel it yourself, even if you don't like them. Like, every single person has this structure of their brain, whether it's as active as someone else's or not. But you know, when you retaliate those empathy circuits, they don't switch off. They keep processing the other person's pain. And the human brain really struggles to feel pleasure and pain at the same time, to feel empathy and pleasure at the same time. So you have this like really uneasy like juxtaposition of satisfaction and whether you acknowledge it or not, a sense of sadness. This is part of why people often describe revenge as like leaving a bad taste. A bunch of social psychologists, one in particular, called rosen hadeit. They have written about the different domains of disgust and how yes you feel disgusted at like, oh this food is off ah like this bad. You also feel moral discussed, moral discussed at, having gone down to someone else's level, feeling kind of dirty because of it. That's why when people say things like I just I can't understand how they could hurt me, can't understand how they could treat me like this, that's actually a really good thing. Of Course, you can't understand why they did that to you because you're not like them at all. That's a really great thing. Of Course, you can't empathize or try and recreate the situation that made them hurt you because you're not them. You're better than them in this situation. Like it feels weird to say that, but you are. So should we ever take the low road over the high road? Is it ever acceptable morally to do unto others what they've done to us? Human reality has wrestled with this question, for literal like for thousands of years. So there's not really anything new I can bring to this conversation other than just summarize the two kind of arguments. On one hand, there's that very ancient law of retaliation, you know, it's famously captured in the Old Testament. Life for life, Eye for eye tooth for tooth. In its original context, this wasn't actually meant to encourage revenge. It was actually meant to discourage cruelty. It didn't say, you know, don't seek revenge. It was basically trying to say, like, there are boundaries around vengeance that it needs to be proportional. You can't kill someone because they stole your cow. You can't you know, burn their house down because they knocked over your like carrots Tand I don't know what my analogies are, but you know what I mean. In its early form, yeah, revenge was totally normal ads. But justice, in this early sense, it meant balance, It didn't mean escalation. However, as human ethics have evolved, so does our understanding of justice. More than like two millennia later, Martin Luther King Jr. He reframed that same principle when he said, the old law of eye for an eye, tooth through a tooth leaves everyone blind and toothless. Right, And his point was that vengeance multiplies suffering. It doesn't actually restore harmony, it corrodes it. So what's changed in how we think about doing onto others? Well, modern psychology really suggests that revenge just exists because there is a tension between two competing moral systems. We are taught that we need to seek justice. I feel like that words come up a lot. We're also taught to care about other people. Care says we should forgive. Justice says they should go what they deserve. That is also why revenge feels so kind of delicious at times, because that moral friction is interesting and doesn't have a right answer, so it's fascinating. We go back and forth and back and forth. We don't really know which one we should do because both feel equally important. Some philosophers, for example, a manual can't have argued that justice does actually require retribution and to maintain a moral society we need to do that. But counter to this, like a lot more humanist traditions do say that it doesn't produce good, Like, the highest moral act isn't to mirror someone else's behavior, it is to rise above it. Researchers who specifically study empathy and moral reasoning, they describe this as moral elevation. You will feel better when you witness, or encourage or perform forgiveness. So if you are you know something just terrible has happened to you, and you want to get revenge, and you want to get revenge because you think it will make you feel better. You might not like to hear it, but you will experience more reward from not necessarily forgiving somebody, but trying to maybe understand why they did it, trying to maybe not justify it, but just trying to make peace with it without them being involved at all. Forgiveness actually gives us, neurologically a deeper sense and kind of reward and sense of dignity and sense of empowerment. Doesn't mean that forgiveness is easy, doesn't mean that it's even possible. Sometimes choosing not to retaliate isn't about moral superiority. It's just about refusing to hand over more of your peace and power to a person who already took more of it than they deserve. So maybe the real question we're getting to here is whether revenge is acceptable, but whether it is useful? Is it useful for you? If we think about more productive options, radical empathy is like one that's probably going to come up a lot. Radical empathy is like the unconditional empathy and forgiveness that we have for other people's actions. Doesn't mean permitting them, doesn't mean letting them do it again, doesn't mean forgetting. It's just a piece that we restore within ourselves that you know, we're not We're going to release the pain that we feel about this. We're going to have empathy for them. It's about actually really acknowledging like how someone else may have been hurt into their hurt, may have been harmed into harming, may have been driven to cruelty through ignorance or fear, And it is, without a doubt, I think personally, a much more freeing approach. We have seen it again with neurope, like with with studies and with neuroimaging, like people who have this radical empathy approach are actually happier, Isn't that like the best revenge isn't success and happiness and peace the best revenge of all? Probably, So maybe it's uncomfortable to get that that might be the way to go about it. I think that this approach personally is one that it is one that I've adopted in the last year, and it has made me just feel a little bit less mad about the world. You know, I got into such a rut this year thinking about the world as just like full of terrible people who rule our lives and do terrible things that we just have to watch and observe, and that people are cruel and everybody is mad and angry all the time. It wasn't a nice place to be. But I started doing this exercise where when I felt this way, I had to think about someone who I was angered by or mad at, that I was going to forgive and I was going to think positive things about someone in my life in that day, in this month that I really wanted to like be angry towards who I could just in that moment symbolically forgive and wish well. And that wasn't for them, even though of course in some ways it was. It was for me. People doing bad, hurtful things will have us believe that there is no good in the world, But how can that be true if we demonstrate good and if we choose the love. So it actually does, I think, change how you just view the balance of good and evil in a way that's always going to mean that, I don't know, it's always going to mean that you have a more positive outlook. Obviously, not everyone deserves empathy, but this again is not about these people. This is about you. This is about you being able to be free of whatever pain this person has called you caused you. In one possible way, I think it's this like weird experience that you have, which is that when you stop needing someone else to suffer in order to feel okay, like you actually really start to move on, which is again annoying and it's frustrating. I love like this idea again of like success is the best revenge, or like karma will take care of it for you. I truly believe that. And the interesting thing is that, like obviously I love the science and I love the psychology, I don't have any scientific research or scientific backing to prove that like karma will take care of it for me. But anecdotally, I just feel like everything kind of evens out eventually, and it just stops you from having to labor over how you're going to get them back. It just stops you from giving them more of your energy. Like they've already done something bad to you that's bad enough. Don't let them then, like take all these precious moments that you could be spending giving love to others or doing other things obviously easier said than done, if like everything we talked about today is easier said than done, But I do think that it's the more peaceful approach, and I do think that like having had like real grudges like about people in the past and at times like not being able to let it go for many, many years, the best thing that I've done is to just like seriously and vigorously and aggressively focus on myself and to just put everything into being successful, everything into being a good person, so that like on the off chance they come to check in on me, or they start watching or whatever it is, or you know, they follow me on Instagram, like I don't know, on the off chance they try and side back in, like they can just see that they try their best to like kind of bring me down, and it like never worked. And the thing is is that it actually doesn't matter whether they ever do notice that I'm happy, or do notice that I'm successful, or do notice that my life is good, because when I started focusing on that stuff, I just started stopped caring about them completely, and it was like incredibly incredibly liberating, and it was just like so much better than any form of retaliation. I feel like I've done both, but silence and just like silence, no contact, completely focusing on my own lane was the most empowering thing that I could do. So those are my amusings on revenge. That is the psychology of revenge and why we seek it, why we want it, whether it's actually worthwhile, and this like radical empathy success is the best revenge charmatic kind of response to it. That it's kind of a form of like acceptance therapy as well. Accepting that you can't control other people, you can control your response, Like that's really what's empowering about it. I'm gonna stop going on and on about this because I feel like I've drilled it into you by now. But I hope you enjoyed this episode if you have made it this far, to leave a little olive emoji down below, to like symbolize an olive branch, symbolize forgiveness, not necessarily the olive branch that you need to extend to anybody, but like just the symbol of what we're asking for for ourselves, forgiving ourselves, for giving somebody else in our mind, not through actions, and just being able to move forward without seeking revenge. I want to thank our research assistant Libby Cobbert for her contributions to this episode, and I want to thank you guys for listening. This episode was actually on YouTube, so it's not something I've talked about a lot, but yeah, we now do YouTube episodes. If you want to go and I guess rewatch it probably not, but if you want to watch other episodes like this one, you can go to YouTube a that's Psychology of Your Twenties. You can also subscribe to us on substack if you would like the transcript of this episode, it's free. I'll leave a link in the description, and also follow us on Instagram. If you want to see behind the scenes or an episod so breakdown, or what we're planning for the next year, or just want to keep in touch with the podcast, that's the best place to find us. But with all that said, with all that done, I'm going to close the episode by saying thank you again for listening. Until next time, be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself, don't always go after revenge. It might not be as satisfying as you think. And we will talk very very soon.