Revenge and Conflict: Social and Cognitive Aspects - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 75

Revenge is an effort to compel an aggressor to increase his or her regard for the victim's
welfare—essentially, to teach the aggressor that imposing costs of the same size upon
the victim in the future (should they be detected) will be met with retaliatory costs.
(McCullough et al. 2013 ,p.4)
According to McCullough ( 2008 ), revenge allows an individual to change
other individuals' behaviors toward oneself, in terms of incentivizing benefits and
deterring the imposition of costs. Such a mechanism carries costs that can offset
its deterrence benefits, thus opening the way to the evolution of a new and more
adaptive mechanism: forgiveness. Although different, these accounts share the view
of forgiveness as a solution to revenge, highlighting the evolutionary and proximate
mechanisms of it, respectively.
In this view, deterrence becomes one of the main goals of the avenger, who
undertakes the action in order to change the cost/benefit ratio of the aggression,
thus discouraging it in the future. Once individuals discover that revenge can be
effective as a deterrent, but it can also lead to disruption of social bonds, they turn
to forgiveness as a different way of obtaining deterrence without losing bonds.
Although relevant, we do not consider deterrence as one of the motivations of
the avenger. If deterrence were the avenger's goal, a proportionate response would
be more effective in obtaining deterrence. However, this is rarely the case and
the limited importance of deterrence could partially explain why revenge is more
effective in triggering counteraggressions and feuds than in avoiding them.
There are two ways to restrain revenge: an individual may forgive the perpetrator
or a society may regulate revenge, by designing institutions aimed at addressing
aggressions. Revenge is forbidden in many countries and serious aggressions
have to be reported to designated institutions that use juridical tools to sanction
the aggression. When this is not possible, because of historical and economic
circumstances, like private enforcement of law and high probabilities of punishing
offenses, a pure vengeance system may emerge, in which conflicts are managed
through private revenge (Posner 1980 ).
This happens, for instance, in the so-called culture of honor in the southern
United States (Cohen and Nisbett 1997 ; Nisbett 1993 ; Nisbett and Cohen 1996 )
or in the inner areas of Albania, where a collection of customary laws, Kanun ,is
used (see Sect. 4.3 for a detailed description). In both countries, revenge is formally
banned and conflicts should be resolved by the criminal law enacted by the State, but
revenge is still considered as the best way to regain honor and reputation, even if this
can lead to imprisonment. In northern Albania and Kosovo, the Kanun, a customary
set of laws, disciplines people's reactions to murder (blood revenge or gjakmarrje )
and other offenses ( hakmarrje ), according to the roles and degree of kinship of all
the people involved. Blood feud is a self-governing practice that exists parallel to the
state authority and it is regulated by the Kanun. Book eight of the Kanun , entitled
Honor , addresses the topics of honor, blood, and kinship, stating that an “offence to
honor can only be paid by the 'spilling of blood'” (Article 598). Although revenge
is legally prohibited and murders and serious crimes should be reported to police,
the Kanun's rules are followed and in some areas blood feuds are still present.