Getting even, sometimes, could get out of hand

We try to teach ourselves to restore our emotional equilibrium via other means, learning to reflect rather than act impulsively, and consider our options

If you lose a big fight, it will worry you all of your life. It will plague you — until you get your revenge. These are Muhammad Ali’s words. Now, I’m not advocating for revenge. I believe that “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”, and any gratification from revenge is likely to be short-lived. If you’ve been raised to think of revenge as being generally immoral, feelings of guilt may offset any benefits of revenge. However, if you don’t have any compunctions against revenge, or even if you do, a recent set of studies by Chester and DeWall (2017) in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology sheds some light on how revenge works emotionally and psychologically. Of course, there are — thankfully — other ways than revenge to restore one’s emotional equilibrium after being hurt, such as working through the issue with the injuring party, compassion and forgiveness, seeing justice and reparation, punishment even, but the basic instinct to seek revenge, to become sadistic, to bully, is so strong and such a potent source of destruction in our world, it makes sense to better understand what is happening. It’s not so clear intuitively how negative action like retaliatory aggression can lead to a positive emotional outcome.

The researchers in this study sought to understand how social rejection can lead to retaliatory aggression. What motivates revenge behaviour when we feel hurt, rejected or criticised? When someone experiences negative emotions, why does this lead to aggressive behaviour? There is a great deal of violence, from intimate partner violence and stalking, to violent confrontation between one-time friends, to mass casualty events. Of course violence may come from multiple factors, but clarifying the connection between the common experience of rejection and the retaliatory aggression, which may often follow is an important step in understanding how to interrupt the cycle of injury and retaliation.

Basically, researchers found that when people feel hurt — socially rejected, insulted, humiliated, angry — we look for ways to restore our feelings to a more positive state. One common way for us to do that is to retaliate, to seek revenge and punish the offending party. They describe the following sequence: when we feel emotional injury, it causes negative emotions. When we feel negative emotions, we look for a way to restore a positive emotional state. One way to restore a positive emotional state is to strike out against the injuring party. When it is possible to do so, most experimental subjects are motivated to seek revenge, and when offered the opportunity, will do so. When their emotional state is assessed after getting revenge, it is on par with the emotional state of someone who hadn’t experienced emotional injury in the first place.

Is this motivation to use retaliatory aggression an evolutionary glitch? It appeals on a basic level, and seems to be “human nature”. The immediate impulse is when slighted to seek revenge. It might make sense in some situations where short-term gains lead to an advantage, but it doesn’t make sense when we are interdependent upon one another as we are in the modern world. We try to teach ourselves to restore our emotional equilibrium via other means, learning to reflect rather than act impulsively, and consider our options.

We can use conflict resolution approaches, third party moderators to help if need be, compassion and forgiveness-based approaches, religious models or otherwise, justice and reparation seeking, and so on. These all require more work than simply retaliating, but lead to better long-term outcomes. In order to use any of these preferred approaches, we have to tolerate feelings of injury for longer than necessary. Learning to hold on to these feelings without acting immediately takes practice.

Grant Hilary Brenner is a psychiatrist known for enabling his clients to overcome stubborn obstacles, and unleashing the entrepreneurial spirit.