Healthy to knee a jerk in the balls
The bright minds at New York Times say it's healthy to get revenge. Well, that's not exactly what they said, but we can take their results and use it as an excuse, right? Right.
Newspaper sez:
A raised eyebrow was all it took.
She waited until a year after the breakup, until after he had proposed to the other woman - a model, did he mention that? - and the new couple had begun planning the wedding. That's when she ran into a mutual friend who had spent a few days staying with her ex.
"And you were, uh, comfortable staying there?" she said to the friend.
What are you talking about? he said.
And then the eyebrow arched, and voilą, suspicions about her former boyfriend's sexual orientation were loosed.
"Yes, I'm a Scorpio, so I'm un peu vindictive," said the woman, who swore certain payback if her name appeared in this newspaper.
Vindictive, perhaps, but also fundamentally protective. Revenge may be frowned upon, viewed as morally destitute, papered over with platitudes about living well. But the urge to extract a pound of flesh, researchers find, is primed in the genes.
Acts of personal vengeance reflect a biologically rooted sense of justice, they say, that functions in the brain something like appetite. Alternately voracious and manageable, it can inspire socially beneficial acts of retaliation and punishment as well as damaging ones. The emerging picture helps explain why many people who think they are above taking revenge find themselves doing nasty, despicable things, and how *********** biases pervert what is at bottom a socially functional instinct.
"The best way to understand revenge is not as some disease or moral failing or crime but as a deeply human and sometimes very functional behavior," said Dr. Michael McCullough, a psychologist at the University of Miami. "Revenge can be a very good deterrent to bad behavior, and bring feelings of completeness and fulfillment."
Retaliatory acts, anthropologists have long argued, help keep people in line where formal laws or enforcement do not exist. Before Clint Eastwood and Arnold Schwarzenegger, there was Alexander Hamilton, whose fatal duel with Aaron Burr was commemorated this month on the banks of the Hudson River. Recent research has shown that stable communities depend on people who have "an intrinsic taste for punishing others who violate a community's norms," said Dr. Joseph Henrich, an anthropologist at Emory University in Atlanta.
In one experimental investing game involving four players, for example, people pay to punish others who contribute meager amounts to the shared investment pool. In another, a one-on-one exercise in sharing a sum of money, people often reject any offer from a partner that is not split 50-50 or close to it, denying both players a payoff. The participants are typically strangers who will not see each other again, Dr. Henrich said, so they are not penalizing others to develop an equitable relationship in the future. They are retaliating to enforce the rules that hold the game - and, theoretically, the community - together.
Using brain-wave technology, Dr. Eddie Harmon-Jones, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, has found that when people are insulted, they show a burst of activity in the left prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain that is also active when people prepare to satisfy hunger and some cravings. This increased activity, Dr. Harmon-Jones said, seems to reflect not the sensation of being angry so much as the preparation to express it, the readiness to hit back.
The expression itself is all pleasure. In one recent experiment, psychologists demonstrated that students who were ridiculed were far less likely to avenge themselves on an offensive peer if they had been given a bogus "mood-freezing pill," which they were told blocked the experience of pleasure.
"We've shown many times that expressing anger often escalates and leads to more aggression," said Dr. Brad Bushman, a psychologist at the University of Michigan who conducted the study, "but people express it for the same reason they eat chocolate."
Savoring the taste can be satisfying enough. When Kurt Raedle, 40, a salesman in Kansas City, Mo., had a new leather jacket stolen from a party, he fantasized about getting his hands on the thief. A month later, a friend spotted the rascal wearing the jacket at a bar and helped Mr. Raedle track him down. Mr. Raedle said he telephoned him. "He was guilty, and he wanted to mail the jacket to me, but I said no. I wanted him to return it, in person, to my parents' house. I wanted him to face the parents of someone he'd stolen from."
The penalty: a half-hour discourse on morals and life lessons from Mr. Raedle's father, all 6 feet 4 inches and 250 pounds of him.
