While the age-old adage suggests that “Revenge Is A Meal Best Served Cold,” groundbreaking research from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) indicates that human nature often leans towards a much hotter serving of vengeance. A new study reveals that individuals are significantly more inclined to seek immediate retaliation rather than patiently plotting for delayed retribution.
The study, titled “Some Revenge Now or More Revenge Later? Applying an Intertemporal Framework to Retaliatory Aggression,” slated for publication in the esteemed journal Motivation Science, delves into the temporal dynamics of revenge. Through a series of six experiments involving over 1,500 participants, researchers explored the choices people make when faced with the option of immediate, smaller-scale revenge versus delayed, larger-scale vengeance.
Across all experiments, a consistent pattern emerged: participants overwhelmingly favored immediate revenge. This inclination suggests a fundamental preference for swift justice, contradicting the notion of cold, calculated revenge as the ideal.
“[Our findings suggest] that people prefer a ‘hot-and-ready’ form of revenge, instead of a cold, calculated and delayed approach to vengeance,” explains Dr. David Chester, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Psychology at VCU and director of the Social Psychology and Neuroscience Lab. Dr. Chester’s lab is dedicated to understanding the underlying motivations behind harmful human behavior.
This image depicts David Chester, Ph.D., a psychology professor at VCU, who co-authored the study on preferences for immediate versus delayed revenge, highlighting his expertise in the field of retaliatory aggression.
However, the study also uncovered a fascinating nuance: this preference for immediate revenge is not immutable. Researchers discovered that by prompting participants to dwell on past grievances, they could effectively shift their preference towards delayed-but-greater revenge. This suggests that rumination on past wrongs can fuel a desire for more significant, albeit delayed, retribution.
“We were able to shift participant preferences toward the delayed-but-greater choices using various experimental provocations,” stated Dr. Samuel West, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow with the Injury and Violence Prevention Program at VCU Health. “Participants also exhibited this preference when we asked them to think about someone from their actual life that had hurt them to serve as a hypothetical target. Even though our participants knew that their choices wouldn’t actually result in harm to their chosen target, strong differences in these preferences were reliably observed.”
This image shows Samuel West, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow at VCU Health, another author of the revenge study, emphasizing his role in researching the conditions under which delayed revenge becomes more appealing.
In one experiment, participants engaged in a video game, believing they were competing against a real person. They were given the choice to inflict a minor noise blast on their opponent immediately or a more intense blast the following day. Another experiment involved virtual chat rooms where participants were intentionally excluded from conversations, subsequently given the opportunity to subject one of the excluding participants to the discomfort of holding their hand in ice-cold water for a duration of their choosing.
The collective findings of these experiments paint a compelling picture: while most individuals naturally gravitate towards immediate retaliation, the allure of delayed revenge can emerge under specific conditions, particularly for those who ruminate on past injustices or possess a predisposition for inflicting harm.
Interestingly, the study revealed that individuals who preferred delayed-but-greater revenge demonstrated a stronger commitment to their vengeful goals than to monetary rewards. “Participants in our studies who displayed a preference for delayed-but-greater revenge were more willing to wait for their desired revenge than they were monetary rewards,” West noted. “In other words, revenge held its value for a longer period of time than did money to these participants. Across all of our studies we found that these preferences were highly divisive, such that 42% of participants were more willing to wait to enact more severe vengeance. Making this more complex is the fact that we also found that such individuals also had greater antagonistic traits like sadism (i.e., deriving enjoyment out of the suffering of others) and angry rumination.”
Dr. Chester suggests that the preference for immediate retaliation is rooted in a desire for proportionate and timely responses to wrongdoing, aiming to deter future provocations. However, he acknowledges that severe provocations that trigger rumination, or when individuals with antagonistic personalities are involved, can indeed lead to revenge becoming a dish best served cold.
“Yet when provocations become so severe that we ruminate about them over and over again, or when people provoke the ‘wrong person’ (i.e., a person with antagonistic personality traits), revenge may just become a dish best served cold,” Chester concludes.
This pioneering study is considered the first systematic investigation into the intertemporal framework of aggression, offering valuable insights into contemporary theories of aggression and broader antisocial behavior. It prompts us to reconsider the classic proverb, suggesting that while “revenge is a meal best served cold” holds true in certain contexts, the human inclination often favors a more immediate and heated response to perceived wrongs.
