Revenge and Conflict: Social and Cognitive Aspects - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 77

goal—usually under threat of punishment—of abstaining from doing the action
that has triggered punishment again.

• The focus of the reaction refers to the agent himself or herself (as it is in revenge),

another agent (as it is in punishment), or a norm (as it is in sanction).

We are aware of the fact that, although the underlying sets of beliefs and goals
are deeply different, as well as the resulting state of the world, at least from the
involved actors' perspective, a punisher and an avenger could perform the same
action. However, if we are able to pinpoint the distinctive mental representations
of revenge (see below), we will also be able to advance our understanding of this
behavior and to try to resolve the tension between the individual desire to take
revenge and the social prescription against it.

4.3.1 The Defining Features of Revenge

The initial aggression must trigger some kind of suffering, physical, psychological,
or both, and this “harm” has to be perceived as intentional. Suffering triggers a
need for compensation , and this focus on the wrong suffered leads the avenger
to concentrate on the goal of compensating her pain, with little or no regard for
the risks of future aggressions. Equity restoration is a primary motive, but it can
become extremely dangerous, because the avenger has “nothing to lose,” as clearly
expressed in the words of an old tribesman from Montenegro:
Revenge means a kind of spiritual fulfilment. You have killed my son, so I killed yours; I
have taken revenge for that, so I now sit peacefully in my chair. (Boehm 1984 ; p. 56)

An avenger can keep destroying material and immaterial goods until he or she
finds herself happy with the outcome, no matter how disproportionate this can be
in the eyes of the target, and this may lead to feuds. It is hard to assess how
commensurate two damages are, since the same wrong can be perceived in two
different ways, implying that compensation can be interpreted in very different
manners (Kim and Smith 1993 ). This drive toward achieving compensation can
be interpreted as coming from a broader need to believe that the world is a just
place in which individuals get what they deserve, the so-called belief in a just
world (Hafer and Bègue 2005 ; Lerner and Simmons 1966 ; Lerner 1977 ). Equity
restoration (Walster et al. 1978 ) is linked to fairness and justice as behaviors that are
not uniquely human and that may have played a role in the evolution of cooperation.
Brosnan ( 2013 ) explores behaviors related with justice and fairness in human and
nonhuman primates, showing that negative responses to inequity can be found in
many species. Having a sense of fairness allows individuals to correctly discriminate
between cooperative and uncooperative partners, thus providing useful insights
for partner choice. According to this view, justice and fairness evolved to help
individuals to correctly evaluate the value of their potential partners in cooperative
interactions (Brosnan 2011 ; Fehr and Schmidt 1999 ).