So does this help explain some of the reactions to the news of bin Laden's death?
I actually thought the response was pretty subdued. People were not sort of savoring the bringing low or humiliation of our enemies more than the accomplishment of a really long goal, which isn't inconsistent with revenge being part of a long-planned goal. It may be that the amount of grief we've had to suffer as a nation has kind of muted our ability to enjoy our revenge too much. I think the reaction tells us a lot about human nature. Given some time and distance, that hot thirst for revenge really gets tempered by other things.
What are some of the alternatives to the impulse for revenge?
You can simply say, "I'm going to make it impossible for you to harm me" by avoiding them—you can kick them out of your camp, you can move, you can change jobs.
You can accept the abuse. You can say, "This relationship is valuable to me." You might love the person or say, "Look, I really need this job, so I'll pretty much let this person do anything they want to me"—you'll just accept a certain level of mistreatment because at the end of the day, you're still up relative to your alternative.
The final thing you can do is that you can forgive. It can signal a return to a positive attitude to the person who harmed you if they are willing to change their behavior. It's an attempt to get a relationship back without enacting revenge.
That's a dicey thing. It's saying, "Look, I'm not going to teach you a lesson. I'm going to hold this harm aside because this relationship is valuable—you're my friend and I've been watching football on your wide-screen TV for 10 years. But it requires you to change your regard for me."
With all of those cues in place, forgiveness seems like a reasonable thing to do. But it's hard. It's easy to mistake forgiveness for weakness, and that's just the hard truth of our social world today—inaction is easy to mistake for lack of nerves.
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17 Comments
Add CommentWell done. it is now scientifically proved that human have evolved as much as birds and fishes in terms of revenge.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDoes this study seperate people who beleive it was a terrorist attack from those who beleive it was a controlled demolition?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNot everbody enjoys vengance.
But it might come in handy for evolving past the droopy genes prevalent in todays society.
Maybe we shouldn't use high teck for dipping our toes in the shallow end of the gene pool.
"No diving, please".
What genius exposes its brain to MRI for such a silly purpose?
Frank'n'brain science just doesn't appeal to me. There must be more humane methods.
This, being a 'Christian' country, has me wondering wno is praying for the man's soul? After all, he was only defending his beleifs.
Is there a brain scan for that?
Evolutionary psychology = modern pseudoscience.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou can use it to prove literally anything we do has an evolutionary advantage, because 1) We do it, and 2) We're the product of evolution.
There's also a liberal amount of hand-waving involved, too. I wish SciAm wouldn't engage in this form of nonsense.
Did we not learn during the crusades and other wars,that just because we believe something doesn't make it right.Trying to justify recent acts is just as wrong as it was for those that tried to do so in the past.And because of hindsight we should understand that vengeance is always a bad idea.Bin Laden's death was necessary not as an act of vengeance,but as an on going step in the war on terror which is far from over.As long as we have an enemy killing us then we will need to continue to kill them until some kind of settlement is finally reached.I only hope that this war is brought to an end before some really terrible weapon is brought to bear.And a huge loss of life 100's or thousand's of time greater than what's already happened.Depending on how huge the attack is when it comes.It's then that we see whether or not that we turn the other cheek,or respond with a real act of vengeance.With the most likely outcome being the total destruction of Meca.Right now both sides are on thin ice,and if there are not acts of compassion and forgiveness on both sides we may be very well on the path to the end of the world.Or at the very least a world no one still wants to live in.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe 'expert' said the tendency for revenge-pleasure was designed... what a falsehood, what a joke. Evolution does not design: it is the opposite of design.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTo say the mechanism is designed to make us feel a way is like saying 'the tornado designed the carnage' in terms of intention; to say evolution by natural selection (non-conscious selection) designs things is either lying, telling a falsehood out of ignorance or playing with words... like, how Sam Harris talks about 'spirituality' when he actually means 'feeling far out & enchanted'.
No, we who know what we're talking about do not say every human behavior is explained as having a direct evolutionary advantage. I recommend Steven Pinker lectures on YouTube for insight.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this-pleasure of revenge clearly had/has an evolutionary advantage... it isn't up for reasonable debate.
Katherine:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisall the suggestions at the end are defense mechanisms for one who is at the receiving end of the revenge. Its still not clear whether revenge has any viable purpose in evolution a)as gesimsek says are we humans or still fish and birds (so basically we haven't evolved), which means we should fight as kids, b)as shaukaUVM as says, its nonsense to promote revenge. This is like exactly "when did the question change from "why are we at war?" to "who is this man joe wilsons wife".
These are things that should not be promoted scientifically. I bet if you can publish a part of this in CSM (Christian Science Monitor) promoting revenge as more than a cold sort of wrought wound that hurts both the inflictor and the inflictee and several thousands or millions affected by it (for e.g. the wars, there is probably an opinion more than a conspiracy theory that many if not all wars have a revenge motive behind that and we have several examples recently).
Why can't you come up with 2 or 3 ideas or suggestions for people with revenge motive (if you can come up with 5 defense mechanisms for the receiving end of revenge)?
Revenge might be "sweet" but it harms the inflictor way more than sweet things cause diabetes. Its probably way more than a pyrrhic victory and again "when did the question change from why are we at war to who is this man joe wilsons wife"?
Also, isn't it contradictory to the concept of what should have been the case (as David cota here mentions), closure thats all closure, not revenge. Using geronimo (a guy though ludditic yet remembered by more than american tribes and celebrated across the country for his brave fight) doesnt it sort of make laden more heroic and brave than he was (albeit accidentally).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow does it bring closure? If anything its making a seed of a small revenge atop a big revenge.
It should just be a closure thats all.
American joy struck me as shallow and cold. Yes, I understand filth was eliminated.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHowever, it must also not only be understood, but shown to be understood in a very real and caring way that our wars and our wars' unintended casualties are truly held by us to be regrettable.
You know now and then some lady or some child who have nothing to do with Bin Laden will be the victim of some misguided attack. While we can place all the blame on Bin Laden, the reality is that innocent people do get hurt or killed in our attempts at "justice".
I guess people just don't love their mother or child the way I loved mine, and I guess people just can't understand the anguish others may have over losing their mother or child in some misguided drone attack.
You fools can celebrate all you want. Alls I will do is say how sorry I am for the casualties that really are tragic and always part of war.
I can not be happy knowing that no matter how necessary our fighting is, that innocent people are unnecessarily killed by it.
You can have your joy. I see unbearable anguish born by those not responsible for the acts that we say justify our violence. Will they be justified in the future taking revenge on the US? Perhaps Bin Laden was justified in his revenge on the US for Western Imperialism and the crusades.
Oh I forgot, Christians are the only true people of God and so you get to kill who you want in good moral standing. Sorry to be so forgetful.
Another possible explanation on why we feel the urge to revenge, is that if you receive an agression, and don't reject or eliminate it, the agressions acts as a penalty for a fault, starts destroying you, and puts you on dependence of the offender. Even more, when God announced He will kill the firsts in the egyptians' offspring, men and beasts, the reason stated was "this way, I'll take revenge from the gods of Egypt". Did you notice that we are bad and God good ?. When criticising revenge, most times people try to protect their own revenges, and discredit or discourage that of others. Where is rule of law ?. Stucious.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@jgrosay said :
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnother possible explanation on why we feel the urge to revenge, is that if you receive an agression, and don't reject or eliminate it, the agressions acts as a penalty for a fault, starts destroying you, and puts you on dependence of the offender. Even more, when God announced He will kill the firsts in the egyptians' offspring, men and beasts, the reason stated was "this way, I'll take revenge from the gods of Egypt". Did you notice that we are bad and God good ?. When criticising revenge, most times people try to protect their own revenges, and discredit or discourage that of others. Where is rule of law ?. Stucious.
KEY PHRASE :
"When God announced He will kill the firsts in the egyptians' offspring, men and beasts, the reason stated was "this way, I'll take revenge from the gods of Egypt"
REPLY:
We cannot overemphasize that God’s superlative rightness cannot be undermined by human thinking. Egyptians put faith in useless gods. On the one hand, those impotent images could not do anything and on the other hand, the demons hiding behind those images were deceiving the worshipers of those images, degrading them by causing them to worship non existent things, and finally those demons were too weak to pretend acting for the images.
It is very normal for the living God to clear such nonsense and take revenge when impotent gods are deceitfully made to say they can save like the invisible God.
Moreover, when God brings judgment, three conditions are verified:
1 The rightness of the judgment (here the debased and deceitful worship of impotent idols)
2 The warning has been sounded (in this case by Moses and Aaron)
3 There is a way for the transgressors to escape destruction (in this case but splashing animal blood on the door posts)
Therefore, those Egyptians died of an evitable death.
@jgrosay said :
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnother possible explanation on why we feel the urge to revenge, is that if you receive an agression, and don't reject or eliminate it, the agressions acts as a penalty for a fault, starts destroying you, and puts you on dependence of the offender. Even more, when God announced He will kill the firsts in the egyptians' offspring, men and beasts, the reason stated was "this way, I'll take revenge from the gods of Egypt". Did you notice that we are bad and God good ?. When criticising revenge, most times people try to protect their own revenges, and discredit or discourage that of others. Where is rule of law ?. Stucious.
KEY PHRASE :
"When God announced He will kill the firsts in the egyptians' offspring, men and beasts, the reason stated was "this way, I'll take revenge from the gods of Egypt"
REPLY:
We cannot overemphasize that God’s superlative rightness cannot be undermined by human thinking. Egyptians put faith in useless gods. On the one hand, those impotent images could not do anything and on the other hand, the demons hiding behind those images were deceiving the worshipers of those images, degrading them by causing them to worship non existent things, and finally those demons were too weak to pretend acting for the images.
It is very normal for the living God to clear such nonsense and take revenge when impotent gods are deceitfully made to say they can save like the invisible God.
Moreover, when God brings judgment, three conditions are verified:
1 The rightness of the judgment (here the debased and deceitful worship of impotent idols)
2 The warning has been sounded (in this case by Moses and Aaron)
3 There is a way for the transgressors to escape destruction (in this case but splashing animal blood on the door posts)
Therefore, those Egyptians died of an evitable death.
"[T]he reward center—where the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine is lodged".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPlease get your facts straight. Dopamine is not a "feel-good" neurotransmitter. There have been a bunch of highly cited reviews published in the past 10 years discussing the role of the mesocorticolimbic dopamine system in reward processing. Most of them make mention of the current thinking in the field--namely, that reward is probably processed separately from pleasure.
Rewards drive action. Pleasure just "feels good". It's a subtle distinction, but one worth splitting hairs over.
An stupid reply to Fabrice Loty: you take the burden of the unnecesary task of protecting God from being accused and damned. We all know that the gods of Egypt were devils and it's to be pointed that the symbol of an eye inside a triangle probably refers to Horus, an egyptian god that claimed having lost the other eye in a fight with a devil from which it took the testes. The symbol of the seal of Salomon, also known as the star of David, is considered by some as a solar symbol, like the svastica was a solar symbol -svasti means in sanskrit wellfare or wellbeing-. The cult of Apollo was formerly a solar cult, and the Bible says that Apollo is the same as Abbadon, the exterminator; one must be careful in choosing the corporate image. The seal of Salomon can also be exploded into two triangles, one pointing up, as the masonic triangle with an eye, and the other pointing down, as the rosicrucian symbol for universal conscience. My note however, was addressed to the rule of law. Some facts are difficult to explain in the rationale of rule of law, and the consequences can be many. For example, an scenario is the one depicted in a book by Stanislaw Lem, the official poet of the polish communist regime, entitled "The congress of futurology". Some kind of conflicts do harm specially the innocents, and although the number of victims is not too high, they severely touch the mind of many. There is even people that do not distinguish between the September-11 terror attack, and the bombings of Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Si vis pacem para bellum, is a dangerous approach to peace and safety today and ever
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe real question is: "Who designed these revenge mechanisms into us, and the other animals who possess them?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe author repeatedly asserts that the mechanisms are the result of design, which is a horrendously bad position for an article nominally about science to make.
Evolution is not a design process. There is no 'design' in the makeup of living organisms.
Scientific American needs to do a better job of prohibiting slipshod, sloppy, lazy writing like this.
Other than that, I completely agree that revenge exists because it has multiple types of values. I'm unabashed to acknowledge my personal desire for revenge when someone has harmed me, my child, or someone I am responsible for. The revenge impulse is tempered by social considerations, some of which people are free to interpret as morality, but the impulse is still there. And I'm happy it is.
"the Bible says that Apollo is the same as Abbadon, the exterminator "
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI need to give a sound reply when the Bible is cited. You make mention of the Bible book of Revelation, chapter 9, verse 11 : "They have over them a king, the angel of the abyss. In Hebrew his name is A•bad´don, but in Greek he has the name A•pol´lyon. "
Abaddon and Apollyon both mean destroyer. This angel is God’s executioner. But God’s judgements are always prefaced by an explanation of motives, warning signals and a way to escape.
You seem to say that Apollo is known in the Bible and therefore there is no need to separate strict monotheism from polytheism. The name Apollyon means destroyer for the average greek in the first century. If this name was commonly associated to the worship of a certain god, it does not mean its basic meaning disappeared. Similarly, the greek word Hades and the Hebrew word Scheol both refer to the grave. But, in a different context, one would take Hades to be the god of Death.
Simply, some ancient societies were so permeated with idolatry that everyday words also had a religious coloration.
homeostasis
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