While the age-old adage suggests that “vengeance is a dish best served cold,” new research from Virginia Commonwealth University challenges this notion, indicating that people are more inclined towards immediate retribution.
A study titled “Some Revenge Now or More Revenge Later? Applying an Intertemporal Framework to Retaliatory Aggression,” slated for publication in Motivation Science, delves into the human desire for revenge. Through six experiments involving over 1,500 participants, researchers explored the choice between swift, minor retaliation and delayed, more substantial vengeance.
The findings consistently pointed towards a preference for immediate revenge.
“[Our findings suggest] that people prefer a ‘hot-and-ready’ form of revenge, instead of a cold, calculated and delayed approach to vengeance,” stated Dr. David Chester, Ph.D., Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at VCU and Director of the Social Psychology and Neuroscience Lab. The lab focuses on understanding the motivations behind harmful behavior.
However, the study also revealed that this preference for immediate vengeance isn’t absolute. Researchers discovered that by prompting participants to dwell on past provocations, they could shift their preference towards delayed but greater revenge.
Dr. Samuel West, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow with the Injury and Violence Prevention Program at VCU Health, explained, “We were able to shift participant preferences toward the delayed-but-greater choices using various experimental provocations. 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, 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 louder blast the following day. Another experiment involved participants in a virtual chat room where they were intentionally excluded from the majority of the conversation. Subsequently, they could choose the duration for which one of the excluding participants would have to immerse their hand in painfully cold water.
Overall, the researchers concluded that while immediate retaliation is generally favored, the desire for delayed revenge can emerge in individuals who ruminate on past grievances and those with a natural inclination to inflict harm.
“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 preference for immediate retaliation is logical, as people tend to view a swift, proportionate response as a necessary deterrent against future provocations.
“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 elaborated.
This study is considered groundbreaking as the first systematic investigation into an intertemporal framework for aggression.
The research offers valuable insights into contemporary aggression theories and broader antisocial behavior theories.
“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.”
The study’s co-authors include VCU alumni Dr. Emily Lasko, doctoral student Calvin Hall, and recent graduate Nayaab Khan.
Original Article Source: VCU News
