Revenge and Conflict: Social and Cognitive Aspects - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 71

4.2 Defining Revenge

Revenge is a social behavior individuals choose with the purpose of evening the
score after having suffered an aggression by another individual. Revenge is a
counteraggression aimed to reestablish the balance of power between the actors,
disrupted by an initial aggression which has to be framed as a social damage ,
intended as an intentional (or deemed intentional) disruption of someone's power.
A social damage implies a reduction of power at the expenses of someone who can
take revenge on the perpetrator with the aim of restoring the initial balance and of
evening the score in a way that the avenger finds adequate. On the same line, Elster
( 1990 ) defines revenge as “the attempt at some cost or risk to oneself, to impose
suffering upon those who made one suffer, because they have made one suffer”
(p. 862).
Revenge is characterized by a special kind of “bookkeeping,” which is emo-
tionally loaded and ego-centered because what counts is the amount of suffering
experienced by the victim of the initial damage. This makes revenge unpredictable
and dangerous, because suffering cannot be evaluated in an objective and general
manner. Since the appraisal of the situation and the context in which the offense
takes place determine the intensity and kind of reaction, an aggression that the
perpetrator would consider as apparently insignificant can represent a serious harm
for the victim, who can become a ruthless avenger:

Vengeance actually works in equalizing the suffering. It makes part of the suffering
disappear. Not all of it—the loss and the recollection of harm remain—but some of it, the
poignancy of it, the loneliness of it, goes, the being-less-than-he or she, the thought of his
or her gain. You get even in suffering. (Frijda 1994 , p. 274)

This balance of suffering is essential for the avenger, and it can be one of its
causes. For the avenger, getting even is a way of restoring equity (Stillwell et al.
2008 ; Tripp and Bies 1997 ), and it also works as a form of stress relief and self-
affirmation. Making the perpetrator suffer is a way to mitigate the offense and
the related emotional suffering, and it can be related with the rewarding aspects
of taking revenge, which have well-defined neurological bases. De Quervain and
colleagues (de Quervain et al. 2004 ) addressed the question of whether revenge is
rewarding in a neuroimaging study using an economic game in which real money
was invested by participants. In this experiment, player B received money from
another player and had the opportunity to send something back to the donor. In
case player B did not give back anything, player A would have the possibility
to punish B by delivering penalty points and reducing him or her payoff. The
results demonstrated that participants did punish the other players even at a cost
to themselves, thus confirming previous behavioral results (Fehr and Gachter 2000 ,
2002 ), but also that punishment was associated with the activation of reward-related
areas in our brain. More precisely, the activation took place in the dorsal striatum,
which is part of the brain's reward system and is involved in many other reward-
related behaviors, such as sex, food, and addictions. This result supports the view