Revenge is that strong urge most people get but do not talk of, after they perceive someone has done them wrong. This urge is powerful, and though its power varies from person to person, it is present in nearly every human being, one of the few universals that connects every people from every continent; from a Russian to an American, from a remote rainforest tribe to a hunter-gatherer group surviving in Africa. It doesn’t discriminate via situation either. The urge is present both in the eight-year-old victim of a juice theft, and the Code of Hammurabi that took the adage “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” almost completely literally.
Whether it is hair pulling or severing the hand for stealing, whether you call it justice or vendetta, revenge is present in nearly every conflict, and is arguably more disadvantageous than advantageous. If this is so, though, why did we evolve to have such a strong inclination to engage in this behavior?
The overall disadvantage is the circular nature of revenge’s incitation of conflict, that being the offending act, the vengeful act creating the conflict (sometimes the conflict consists of actions and other times simple tension and relative silence), and finally the conflict’s possible end.
However, if a conflict consists of actual physical actions, such as a war, then the conflict is made-up of many instances of revenge that come after the offending action, especially if the offender does not feel that their actions should have been offensive or even happened. There is the initial offense, the revenge of the alleged victim, then another vengeful act by the offender themselves. The ogre-like strength of this instinctual push toward reprisal, then, causes the conflict to repeat, rendering a schism consisting of actions into a war of attrition.
The only way to stop this cycle being logic pushing down emotion, something that is difficult since emotion usually trumps the former, due to our existence as a social species, and emotion and gut feeling necessary to navigate complex social situations in a quick and efficient manner. Then, there is a clear winner and a clear loser sometimes but not always, and, in situations where there is one, was the cost worth it?
If the division and the ensuing acts of vengeance cost both sides so much, was the satisfaction of each revenge so great that both sides continued this fight? Is the ultimate driving force behind revenge a slight dopamine rush one gains from winning?
When one looks at the “reward system” of our brain, there are certain actions one can take that trigger a release of dopamine (a neurotransmitter chiefly responsible for pleasurable feelings). The evolutionary reason for its existence is to promote those behaviors that contribute the most to a specie’s survival like eating, sex, social interaction, hunting, and playing. Addiction and obsessive habits such as eating and self-harm are reinforced as well, however, and it then leads us to another question: is revenge in our nature or nurtured through social interactions?
To explain what I mean by revenge being nurtured through social interactions, I will give a scenario. In this scenario, two children in a preschool class are making some craft that involves glue. There is limited glue, though, so the children must share it, and there is one child who either does not yet understand how to share or simply doesn’t care to do so, and takes the glue from another child before she finishes using it.
The victim of the theft realizes she has been wronged, and probably dislikes the thief. She wants the glue back, but is powerless to achieve this by herself, so she calls on the teacher and tells him what happened. He takes the glue away from the other child and scolds her before handing her the bottle of glue. The victim, now having just felt a sense of justice (see: revenge), now associates revenge with a pleasurable outcome.
It may sound stupid that this nurtured urge is one that happens mostly by accident, but schooling is a part of our lives that happens every day, in school or out, and within this schooling is the mostly self-education of social interaction.
Consider another scenario, one between two children, but without a supervising adult handy. Two children of elementary school age are playing together during recess. They decide to run a race together. The two kids begin fairly, agreeing on a starting point and a finishing point, and even designate rules, such as no physical contact between each other and no uses of aids like a wheeled vehicle or a shortcut.
The two kids run off, but one of the children disobeys the rules to win, and pushes the other to the ground, running to the finish point. The other child is angry at having been wronged and in wanting to win the race finds a nearby rock and throws it at his enemy. The rock hits the offender in the head hard enough to stop him and the other child rushes past him and wins, secure in the fairness of his victory through the act of revenge, allowing his pride derived from his victory to wash over him, and thus associating winning, achieving a goal, and the subsequent pride with the very act of hurting the child after being wronged himself.
So, if science finds nature to not be the origin of revenge, then it is nurture that is responsible. And the nurturing of urges for revenge can then be attributed to misattribution, that is, to the misattribution of a feeling of reward with a feeling of “getting back” at someone who has wronged you.
