I'd Rather NOT Get Even

From Jesse Bering, "Getting even versus getting over it: Think twice before enacting your revenge. Punishing your enemy is bad for your mental health (But vengeful daydreams are okay)", January 26, 2009 (visited 6 January 2013).

 

When someone is jarringly rude, obnoxious, or unfair to me or to people I care about, I take a hidden pleasure in daydreams laden with retaliatory themes that, if committed to the screen, would make Quentin Tarantino cringe and look away. In fact, punitive thoughts such as these apparently “feel good” in a neurobiologically meaningful way. For example, in a 2004 study published in Science by University of Zurich researcher Dominique de Quervain and his colleagues, people asked to think about exacting revenge on an enemy experienced measurable pleasure: their dorsal striatum (the pleasure center of the brain) lit up in a PET scan while doing so.

... thinking about getting even is one thing; going ahead and actually doing it is a different psychological story.

Recent findings by Colgate University psychologist Kevin Carlsmith and his co-authors, Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia and Daniel Gilbert from Harvard University, reveal that actually inflicting revenge on someone who has wronged us leaves us feeling anything but pleasure.

The authors summarize their findings this way: “[People] underestimate the extent to which punishment will make them ruminate about the [transgressor], and they fail to realize that this is especially true if they instigate the punishment, as opposed to seeing someone else do it.” The reason for this paradoxical finding, the authors argue, is that rumination prolongs the negative emotions that punishers are trying to escape in the first place—the act of having punished someone keeps us thinking about them.

Carlsmith and his coauthors stop short of explaining exactly why punishment makes us continue reflecting on this person we loathe, but to me it’s fairly obvious.

You may think you’ve restored justice by inflicting the punishment. But from the other person’s perspective, you’ve gone overboard and now it’s their turn to punish you.

So, guess what? Now you’ve made a real enemy and have to be vigilant about them returning the retaliatory favor. Evolutionary scholars reason that punishment is “costly” in this sense because it can rapidly escalate, placing you and your family (and thus your genes) in harm’s way.

Of course, if you’re an anonymous punisher that threat becomes minimized.

Just have a look at websites such as bitterwaitress (check out “The Shitty Tipper Database”) or RateMyProfessors.com, where underappreciated restaurant servers and disgruntled students can body slam the reputations of their antagonists while wearing the mask of an encrypted IP address. (Or for a really depressing glimpse into human nature unfiltered by fears of revenge, have a peak at some of the spirited adolescent comments left on the average YouTube video.)