In her studies, she has found that anger often drives the vengeful feelings of people in individualistic cultures, while shame powers revenge in collectivist ones.Īsk someone why they seek revenge, though, and they're likely to tell you their goal is catharsis, says Kevin Carlsmith, PhD, a social psychologist at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y. The emotions that fuel revenge may differ across cultures as well, says Gelfand.
"You just don't realize those situations are construed as very important and self-defining," Gelfand says. As a result, she says, "revenge is more contagious in collectivist cultures." To collectivists, shame to someone with a shared identity is considered an injury to one's self, she explains. Gelfand has also found that collectivists are more likely than individualists to avenge another's shame. For example, an American might be more likely to seek revenge on someone who impinges on his or her right to voice an opinion, whereas public criticism that embarrasses a Korean in front of his or her friends might be more likely to trigger revenge feelings. That distinction could fuel intercultural conflicts when one side seeks vengeance for a slight the other didn't even know it committed. She and her collaborators Garriy Shteynberg and Kibum Kim have found that different events trigger the revenge process in different cultures American students feel more offended when their rights are violated, whereas Korean students feel more offended when their sense of duty and obligation is threatened, they show in a paper in the January Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. There's also a cultural dimension to people's predilection for revenge, says revenge researcher Michele Gelfand, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Those personalities, McKee says, "tend to be less forgiving, less benevolent and less focused on universal-connectedness-type values." He found that the students whose answers showed a deference to authority and respect for traditions and social dominance, had the most favorable opinions about revenge and retribution. In his study, McKee surveyed 150 university students who answered questions about their attitudes toward revenge, authority and tradition, and group inequality. "People who are more vengeful tend to be those who are motivated by power, by authority and by the desire for status," he says. 2) linking vengeful tendencies primarily with two social attitudes: right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance, and the motivational values that underlie those attitudes. In May 2008, he published a paper in Social Justice Research (Vol. Social psychologist Ian McKee, PhD, of Adelaide University in Australia, studies what makes a person seek revenge rather than just letting an issue go. Instead of helping you move on with your life, it can leave you dwelling on the situation and remaining unhappy, psychologists' research finds.Ĭonsidering revenge is a very human response to feeling slighted, humans are atrocious at predicting its effects. If you live in a society where the rule of law is weak, revenge provides a way to keep order.īut revenge comes at a price. If you're a power-seeker, revenge can serve to remind others you're not to be trifled with. Who's right? As psychologists explore the mental machinery behind revenge, it turns out both can be, depending on who and where you are. But more than 2,000 years later, Martin Luther King Jr., responded, "The old law of 'an eye for an eye' leaves everybody blind." The Bible, in Exodus 21:23, instructs us to "give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot" to punish an offender. Historically, there are two schools of thought on revenge.
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