Revenge and Conflict: Social and Cognitive Aspects - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 76

4.3 A Cognitive Theory of Revenge

Punishment is generally found in animal societies (Clutton-Brock and Parker 1995 ;
Lorenz 1966 ), whereas revenge is restricted to human societies (Zaibert 2006 ) and
to some nonhuman primates (Jensen 2010 ; Jensen et al. 2007 ). Both in human and
nonhuman primates, revenge stems from an immediate reaction to a social damage,
i.e., to an arbitrary reduction of power, but there are some features of human revenge
that require a sophisticated cognitive machinery. If we want to identify the defining
features of revenge, we should start from the desire of making the other suffer,
because he made us suffer, as stated by Elster ( 1990 ). Psychological accounts of
revenge usually focus on the “desire for revenge,” stressing the importance of
inflicting an evil, thus equalizing the suffering and regaining self-esteem and public
image damaged by the aggression (Frijda 1994 ).
Furthermore, the desire for revenge is usually considered as an effective means to
repair negative mood and relieve the victim's distress, although some experimental
results show that people tend to overestimate the positive consequences of exacting
revenge (Carlsmith et al. 2008 ). When asked to forecast how they will feel after
taking revenge, individuals often fail to predict their emotional states, exaggerating
the positive emotions due to fairness restoration and underrating the negative
feelings they actually experience. This does not prevent people from exacting
revenge and from trying to even the score in terms of pain, with little or no regard
for how difficult, risky, or costly it can be. The costs can be really high, especially
because the counteraggression is aimed at canceling the pain suffered, but the
perception of it is absolutely subjective.
Baumeister ( 1997 )usestheterm magnitude gap to refer to the difference between
the avenger and the victim in the perception of scope, importance, and consequences
of an aggression. The victim of the initial aggression wants to restore equity, but in
doing so, he or she creates another inequity and so on and so forth, in an endless
chain of revenge.
Identifying the distinctive configuration of beliefs and goals motivating revenge
is essential to set it apart from other forms of reaction to a wrong, like retaliation,
punishment, and sanction (for a detailed discussion of the three phenomena,
see Giardini et al. 2010 ). Although there are several overlapping areas among
retaliation, revenge, punishment, and sanction, Andrighetto et al. ( 2012 b) proposed
to differentiate among them on the basis of few relevant dimensions, namely:

• The wrong suffered: evaluation of an offense depends both on (attributed)

intentionality and on the value of the goal(s) frustrated by the aggressor.

• The purpose of the reaction: when deciding how to react to an aggression,

individuals consider the goal(s) they want to achieve and then select the
appropriate reaction.

• The type of cognitive influencing, i.e., the kind of intended changes in the mind-

set of the victim. For instance, the avenger aims at changing the target's and
audience's beliefs about himself or herself, whereas the punisher aims to act both
at the epistemic and motivational levels, by generating in the victim's mind the