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Chapter 4
Revenge and Conflict: Social and Cognitive
Aspects
Francesca Giardini and Rosaria Conte
4.1
Introduction
In December 2012, 60,000 l of valuable Brunello di Montalcino produced by
Gianfranco Solera were destroyed overnight by an angry former employee who
wanted to get back at his boss for the recent firing. The former employee considered
the firing as an unfair reduction of his power, and he wanted to make his boss suffer
in a way that he considered comparable, that is, by imposing on him a substantial
monetary loss (in addition to the fact that six vintages of Solera were definitely
lost and nobody will ever be able to taste them). Are worth a lost job 60,000 l of
Brunello?
The answer is “yes,” because when an individual wants to take vengeance on
someone there is only one account rule: “make him suffer as much as you (i.e.,
the victim) suffered.” This makes revenge unpredictable and dangerous because
it is grounded on a subjective perception of what is right and what is wrong.
This feature, we posit, might provide an explanation for the fact that human
societies condemn revenge and alternative forms of reaction, such as punishment
(Gardner and West
2004
; Henrich and Boyd
2001
; Henrich et al.
2006
) or sanction
(Giardini et al.
2010
), evolved to solve coordination problems (Andrighetto et al.
2012
a). Nevertheless, revenge is still part of our everyday life, and everyone has
experienced, surely more than once in a lifetime, a desire or an urge to make
someone suffer because they made us suffer.
Hence the paradox of revenge: how could a risky, costly, and disruptive behavior
have survived in human societies? How to reconcile the individual desire to get even
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