REVENGE

 Gandhi said " An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind", And Jesus Christ said "Turn the other cheek ". Are these good ideas about modern life or should we seek revenge.

The link between aggression and pleasure itself is not new. The "father of psychology" Sigmund Freud was well aware that it could feel cathartic to behave aggressively, but the idea that revenge provides its own special form of pleasure has only become apparent recently.

To understand this further, Chester and DeWall set up a series of experiments, published in the March 2017 journal of Personality and Social Psychology, where the participants were made to feel rejected by being purposely left out of a computerised ball tossing game. 

All participants were then allowed to put pins in a virtual voodoo doll. Those in the rejected camp stabbed their doll with significantly more pins. 

This rejection test was first done remotely online and later replicated with different participants brought into the lab.

 In the lab version, rather than a voodoo doll, participants acted out their "revenge" by blasting a prolonged, unpleasantly loud noise to their opponents (who were computers, not real people, which the participants were not aware of). Again, those that felt most rejected subjected their rivals to longer noise blasts.

Lastly, to understand the role of emotion in the desire to seek revenge, Chester and DeWall gave participants what they believed was a mood-inhibiting drug (it was in fact only a harmless vitamin tablet).

 Still, the placebo effect was so strong that the participants who took the "drug" didn't bother to retaliate against the people who rejected them – whereas those that were not given the placebo acted far more aggressively. 

The placebo group, it seems, did not seek revenge because they believed they would feel no pleasure from doing so.

Taking these results together the team came to a startling conclusion. Not only can revenge give people pleasure, but people seek it precisely because of the anticipation it will do so. "It's about the experience of regulating emotions," says Chester. And it worked. After having the opportunity to get revenge, the rejected individuals scored the same on mood tests as those who had not been rejected.

This finding, however, does need to be taken with a necessary pinch of salt. There are currently no long-term follow up studies on how revenge feels days or weeks after the act. Preliminary – as yet unpublished results – show that revenge-seekers only get a momentary feeling of pleasure, Chester found. "Just like a lot of things, it feels good in the moment. That begins a cycle and it starts to look like an addiction… then afterwards you feel worse than when you started," he explains.

And that might help explain why those who seek the high of revenge fail to anticipate disastrous personal consequences. The footballer Zinedine Zidane, for instance, will forever be remembered for head-butting Marco Matterazzi in the 2006 World Cup. Along a similar vein, Richard Nixon is well-known for his list of foes, the goal being to "screw his political enemies". Some of his dirty tricks later led to his forced resignation.

The question then becomes, why has this seemingly destructive behaviour persisted in our evolution if it can cause us so much trouble?

The answer is that far from an evolutionary mistake, revenge serves a very useful purpose. Michael McCullough puts it this way: although people might say seeking revenge "is really bad for you" – that it might ruin your relationships, for example – the fact that it exists at all is a very good thing. Its main goal is to work as deterrent, which in turn has clear advantages for our survival. 

Consider prison or gang culture, where if you meddle with the wrong person, revenge attacks are a sure consequence. "If you have a reputation for someone who is going to seek retribution, people are not going to mess with you or take advantage," says Chester. In Leonardo DiCaprio's Oscar-winning performance in The Revenant, so powerful is his desire for revenge that it keeps him alive. With broken bones and open wounds, he drags himself through a hostile and dangerous terrain to avenge his son's killer.

Even the threat of revenge might deter an attack, says McCullough. "The individual who responds to that harm is going to do better than the individual who takes the slap on the cheek and lets the bad guy have his way." Just like hunger, he considers it a primal urge that needs to be itched. Only then can the avenger move on "because that goal has been fulfilled", in a similar way that we only stop feeling hungry after we have satiated our appetite. 

So if a main purpose of revenge is about deterring harm, it is a very good thing indeed. That is not to say, says McCullough, that we should encourage people to indulge in seeking revenge. "We can both appreciate what it's for, understand it's not the product of afflicted minds, and also have an interest in helping people curtail their desire for revenge," he says.

1. DO you think revenge can be a healing proccess?

2. Is it always negative and produces zero reults?

3. Why do people want to get involved in revenge that has absolutely nothing to do with them

4. Think about a famous story of revenge and tell the class