Kevin M. Carlsmith, Timothy D. Wilson, and Daniel T. Gilbert, ‘The Paradoxical Consequences of Revenge’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95 (2008), 1316-24.

In a recent post I wrote about research into ‘Impact Bias’, the human tendency to imagine that emotional consequences will be greater, and better, than they actually are. One of the examples in the Miloyan and Suddendorf article featured there is revenge: they turn to a study by Carlsmith et al. for its conclusion that ‘people mistakenly think that taking revenge will make them happier than it actually does’.
      Now, there’s revenge and there’s revenge. Carlsmith et al. cite examples of extreme revenge in fiction and in reality. Their essay is well aware of philosophical and literary traditions. In order to create an ethically appropriate experiment, however, they don’t recreate the plot of Hamlet or the Oresteia in the laboratory. Instead, they created a money-based computer game in which players cooperate or betray one another. They then allowed players to punish those who had behaved selfishly with financial penalties within the game, and evaluated expected and actual consequences. As I say, there’s revenge and there’s revenge, and not all the issues involved seem scaleable.
      Nevertheless, the outcome is interesting and suggestive. People expect that retaliatory punishment will make them feel better, but it does not – it seems to enhance, rather than resolve, their brooding on the culprit-victim. My sense is that this is not surprising, and nor would the opposite conclusion be (and it’s worth noting that the paper and the experiment have various nuances). When it comes to revenge, we are contradictory, and we know it. In keeping with the Miloyan and Suddendorf piece, however, it seems that the role of ‘Impact Bias’ is to influence the present – short-term fixes – than to think long-term.

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As usual, I want to make some sort of transition into thinking about literature, which should be easy given how much revenge there is to be found. What struck me, though, was that I did not quickly come upon examples of ‘affective forecasting’. How does Hamlet think a successful revenge will make him feel? How does Orestes think it will make him feel? In these key examples, what struck me was the absence of attempts to imagine a future emotional state. We might presume that they both expect to be a little less tormented than they are now, which doesn’t really happen, unless death counts. But maybe that is enough. What we don’t get is some sort of projection into happiness: ‘if I could just kill Claudius, then I could settle down into contented life with Ophelia, and the occasional condescending visit to my dear old Mum’.
      Of course there are cases in literature where characters look interestingly towards hedonic reward from revenge, and either get it or don’t. I am struck instead by the grim assumption that such questions are not really relevant. Perhaps an expectation of happiness might mask the grim inevitability of the burden; but we don’t even get that.