While the age-old adage suggests that “revenge is a dish best served cold,” groundbreaking research from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) proposes a contrasting perspective. A new study indicates that individuals are more inclined to favor immediate acts of vengeance rather than plotting and waiting for a delayed, more calculated retribution.
The study, titled “Some Revenge Now or More Revenge Later? Applying an Intertemporal Framework to Retaliatory Aggression,” slated for publication in Motivation Science, delved into the human preference for timing when it comes to revenge. Through a series of six experiments involving over 1,500 participants, researchers explored the choices people make between inflicting a small, immediate retaliatory action and a larger act of revenge that is delayed.
Across all experiments, a consistent pattern emerged: participants overwhelmingly preferred immediate revenge. This inclination challenges the conventional wisdom associated with the phrase “revenge is a dish best served cold,” suggesting that immediate gratification holds more weight in retaliatory behavior.
“[Our findings suggest] that people prefer a ‘hot-and-ready’ form of revenge, instead of a cold, calculated and delayed approach to vengeance,” stated David Chester, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Psychology at VCU and director of VCU’s Social Psychology and Neuroscience Lab. This lab is dedicated to understanding the underlying motivations behind harmful human actions.
However, the study also uncovered that this preference for immediate revenge is not absolute and can be influenced. Researchers discovered that when participants were prompted to dwell on a past offense, their preference shifted towards delayed but more substantial revenge, moving away from the desire for immediate, albeit lesser, retaliation.
“We were able to shift participant preferences toward the delayed-but-greater choices using various experimental provocations,” explained 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.”
In one experiment designed to simulate real-world scenarios, participants engaged in a video game under the guise of competing against a real opponent. They were given the choice to administer a mild noise blast to their opponent immediately or to wait until a follow-up session the next day to deliver a louder, more impactful noise blast.
In another experiment, participants interacted with two individuals in a virtual chat room but were intentionally excluded from the majority (80%) of the conversation. Subsequently, the excluded participant was given the opportunity to decide how long one of the chat participants who excluded them would have to immerse their hand in painfully cold water. These varied experimental setups consistently pointed to the initial preference for immediate, smaller-scale revenge, but also the malleability of this preference under certain conditions.
Overall, the researchers concluded that while most people lean towards immediate retaliation, the desire for delayed revenge can surface particularly in individuals who ruminate on past injustices or those who possess a natural inclination to inflict harm. This suggests that the saying “revenge is a dish best served cold” might hold true for a specific subset of individuals or under particular psychological states.
“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.”
Chester suggests that the general preference for immediate retaliation is logical as individuals often perceive that wrongdoings necessitate a prompt, proportionate response to discourage future provocations. This aligns with a sense of immediate justice and correction.
“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 clarified. This highlights that the traditional wisdom of delayed revenge might apply in situations involving extreme offenses or individuals with specific personality traits.
This study is considered pioneering in its systematic examination of an intertemporal framework in the context of aggression. By applying the principles of intertemporal choice, typically used in economics to understand decisions across time, to the realm of retaliatory aggression, the research opens new avenues for understanding human behavior.
The findings have the potential to significantly enrich contemporary theories of aggression and broader models of antisocial behavior. By exploring the timing aspect of revenge, the study sheds light on the complexities of human responses to perceived harm and injustice.
“Human life often entails one provocation after the other. At a certain point, people decide that some antagonisms have crossed the line and are deserving of revenge. Yet how do people decide whether to seek some revenge now or bide their time and inflict more revenge later?” the researchers posed. “Across six studies, we found that people treated such intertemporal decisions about revenge like they do for other rewards — they preferred receiving some now to receiving more later. In line with major theories of aggression, these preferences were readily shifted by experimental provocation and those with greater antagonistic traits were more willing to wait to deliver a more severe blow.”
“Yet our results did not paint those who bided their time for greater revenge as impulsive, uninhibited individuals,” they added. “Instead, they exhibited the recruitment of greater self-regulation.” This nuanced finding suggests that delayed revenge, in some cases, might be associated with a degree of calculated self-control rather than pure impulsivity.
In addition to West and Chester, the study’s authorship includes VCU alumni Emily Lasko, Ph.D.; Calvin Hall, a VCU psychology doctoral student; and Nayaab Khan, a recent graduate of VCU’s undergraduate psychology program, showcasing the collaborative effort behind this insightful research into the nature of revenge and retaliation.
