What makes revenge sweet: Seeing the offender suffer or delivering a message?
By Mario Gollwitzer, M. Denzler. 2009
177 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract The present article investigates the conditions under which vengeful episodes are satisfactory for the victim/avenger. Two hypotheses are tested simultaneously: (1) victims are satisfied if they see the offender suffer, even if this suffering was imposed by fate (“comparative suffering” hypothesis) and (2) victims are satisfied if the offender signals that he understands why revenge was imposed upon him (“understanding” hypothesis). A laboratory experiment is described in which the source of the offender’s suffering (revenge vs. fate) and the offender’s understanding for the cause of his suffering were varied. As an implicit measure of goal fulfillment, participants completed a lexical decision task that measured the relative accessibility of aggression-related words (compared to non-aggressive words). The results corroborate the understanding hypothesis: Participants showed higher levels of implicit goal fulfillment if they decided to take revenge and if the offender signaled understanding for the vengeful response. The findings are discussed with regard to the question what people hope to achieve when they take revenge.
Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/557a2215b90ecdb468b04239b5ba279fe5b25b47
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Citations in the corpus
- Cyberbullying as an Act of Revenge? (2010, background): “Since revenge is also motivated by a desire to make it clear that one is not the kind of person to be ‘walked over’ to the offender (Gollwitzer & Denzler, 2009; Gollwitzer, Meder, & Schmitt, in press), one can expect victim sensitivity to predict the degree to which cyberbullies pick their former…”
- What gives victims satisfaction when they seek revenge (2011, background): “…‘‘revenge tastes sweet,’’ some recent studies suggest that taking or anticipating revenge activates reward-related areas in the brain (de Quervain et al., 2004; Knutson, 2004) and decreases the accessibility of aggressive thoughts (Denzler, Förster, & Liberman, 2009; Gollwitzer & Denzler, 2009).”