A joke, yes. We will laugh in the car.
Revenge!
I'll watch you bleed
Revenge!
That's all I need
I won't cry if you die
-Black Flag
Recently I’ve noticed that I’ve been incurring the wrath of my fellow human beings but I’ll save the hypothesis for why this is occurring to me for a future Lowbar post. This recent spate of wrath has caused me to reflect on why certain people feel the need to chastise others. I remembered reading in the news recently that some study had been done somewhere about revenge so I did some research.
The study, preformed by the University of Zurich involved a game where people were able to retaliate against other players. Sometimes the game’s rules dictated a retaliation, sometimes it didn’t and sometimes there would be a cost involved (money) for a retaliation and sometimes there wouldn’t be. As players played this game the researchers hooked up the players to PET scanning devices to monitor their brain activity. The PET scans show increased blood flow to certain areas of the brain. Blood carries oxygen, which is the fuel for brain activity and the theory is that increased blood flow to a certain area indicates activity in that area.
The researchers found that as players anticipated a retaliatory move in the game that blood flow increased in the area of the brain called the dorsal striatum. Previous research has shown that this region is involved in enjoyment or satisfaction. This stimulation of the dorsal striatum occurred before the revenge moment (in those players who decided to take revenge) and not after.
The researchers noted that the majority of players elected to impose a penalty even when it cost them some of their own money. When the retaliation cost them money, a second brain region (prefrontal cortex) that helps weigh costs and benefits got involved, too, but the striatum remained key. The level of activity actually predicted which players would spend more money to get revenge.
The researchers further noted that deficits in prefrontal cortical functioning may contribute to the psychopathology (not being able to control one’s drive for revenge) by a lack of ability to weigh beneficial against negative consequences of an action. They also discovered that subjects with lower activation in the dorsal striatum punish less.
Why would we (through evolution) select to have brains that get rewarded when we dole out revenge? Why do we reprimand people who have abused our trust or broken other social rules, even when we get no direct practical benefits in return or when it even costs us something?
The researchers suggest that the feeling of satisfaction people get from meting out altruistic punishment may be the glue that keeps societies together. "Theory and experimental evidence shows that cooperation among strangers is greatly enhanced by altruistic punishment," said Ernst Fehr, director of the Institute for Empirical Research in Economics at the University of Zurich in Switzerland "Cooperation among strangers breaks down in experiments if altruistic punishment is ruled out. Cooperation flourishes if punishment of defectors is possible."
Ah so that’s it! We’ve created this ability in ourselves in order to enhance cooperation, which on the surface appears like a good idea but the problem lies in that while people are operating under the guise of altruism (cops, judges, the self-righteous, lawmakers, busy-bodies, vigilantes, war mongers) they are really just getting off in their own minds -mental masturbation in public.
So based on all the above information, it can be said that:
This is something to think about the next time you encounter someone who decides to retaliate against you when you violate a social norm -they are actually getting off doing so and they may not be able to help themselves because their brain isn’t functioning correctly.
