Program: Why revenge feels good — and what it costs

Sana Qadar: Revenge is a dish best served cold. That's how the saying goes, right? But as delicious as the dish might be, for the server anyways, usually you're better off not serving it at all. Where are you in New Haven at the moment, James? Where are you?

James Kimmel Jr: In Pittsburgh, actually, today.

Sana Qadar: When James Kimmel was 12, his family moved from the suburbs of Philadelphia to his grandfather's hobby farm in central Pennsylvania.

James Kimmel Jr: We had about 200 acres. We had maybe 10 to 15 black Angus cattle and some pigs and chickens.

Sana Qadar: Despite how big a change the move was, he loved his new pastoral setting.

James Kimmel Jr: It was a fabulous wonderland to be in. One of the things that I wanted to do as part of that was befriend and hang out with the neighboring kids on their much larger farms. So they lived on working farms. My farm was not.

Sana Qadar: This might seem like a minor detail, but to the neighborhood kids, this was an unforgivable character flaw. Their dads were all farmers, and James' dad was an insurance agent. That meant James was different.

James Kimmel Jr: And so they resisted my overtures to befriend them and didn't want to admit me into their community. And as we grew older, their shunning of me moved towards bullying. And the bullying started with verbal attacks at first, then more physical types of attacks.

Sana Qadar: This would continue for years. And it escalated dramatically one night when James and his family were awakened by the sound of a gunshot.

James Kimmel Jr: We raced to the windows to see what was happening outside, and I saw a pickup truck owned by one of the guys who had been bullying me. And the truck took off down the road away from our house. And we looked around the house to see if there was any damage, didn't see anything, and eventually went back to bed. But one of my jobs in the morning was to feed and water our animals. And those animals included not only the cattle and the pigs, but this sweet little hunting dog, a beagle named Paula. And when I went to her pen that morning to feed and water her, I found her lying dead in her pen with a bullet hole in her head and a pool of blood.

Sana Qadar: That is awful. How old were you?

James Kimmel Jr: Yeah, um, about 16 or 17, somewhere in that range.

Sana Qadar: This wasn't the moment that James snapped, though. That would come a little bit later. James and his family reported the shooting to the police, but they weren't much help. And so a few weeks passed, and then again, late one night, when James was home alone, he heard a sound.

James Kimmel Jr: I hear a vehicle pulling to a stop in front of our farmhouse. So I got up to see what was going on, and as I'm looking outside the window, I see this same pickup truck. And then there's a flash and an explosion. And the truck tears off down the road, leaving behind our mangled mailbox, our post office box, that's kind of blown off of its post. You know, with that explosion, that detonated as well my own self-control. I mean, I had never really seriously confronted these guys. There were many more of them than me. And so I, you know, my strategy for putting up with this bullying was to just do that, you know, put up with it, try and avoid them. At this stage, though, I thought, I can't really let this go any further.

Sana Qadar: James wanted revenge. And what he did next changed the course of his life.

Sana Qadar: This is All in the Mind from ABC Radio National. I'm Sana Qadar. When someone wrongs you, it's natural to crave revenge. It feels instinctive, hardwired even. But revenge often backfires, hurting you as much as the other person.

James Kimmel Jr: We know this from studies that show that revenge seeking usually makes you feel more angry, not less. It makes you more anxious.

Sana Qadar: And it can lead to a potentially endless cycle of tit-for-tat revenge seeking.

James Kimmel Jr: It's pretty conclusive now from public health, law enforcement data and behavioral studies that revenge is the root motivation for almost all forms of human violence. That goes for intimate partner violence, youth violence and bullying, as I experienced, street and gang violence, mass shootings, violent extremism, terrorism, genocide and war. In other words, all of the violence that we see in the news.

Sana Qadar: So how do we square the self-destructive potential of revenge with how gratifying it can feel? Like if you've ever fantasized about getting back at someone who's wronged you, you'll know it can feel good. So why does it feel good and does that feel-good element lend it an addictive quality? Today, what the science tells us about the desire for revenge.

James Kimmel Jr: Hi, I'm James Kimmel Jr. I am an assistant clinical professor in psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine.

Sana Qadar: James is also the author of the book, The Science of Revenge, understanding the world's deadliest addiction and how to overcome it. But on that fateful night, decades ago now, when his bullies blew up his family's mailbox, he was just a teenager in a blind rage.

James Kimmel Jr: I had been trained to shoot guns since I was probably eight years old on that farm. My dad kept a loaded revolver in his nightstand. So I ran upstairs, I grabbed that gun and I ripped outside, jumped in my mother's car and I took off down the road, chasing after these guys and just, you know, shouting and screaming. I eventually caught up with them and cornered them by one of their barns.

Sana Qadar: Awash in the bright lights from James's car, his bullies climbed out of their truck, squinting to see who was there.

James Kimmel Jr: What was particularly clear for me was that they were unarmed. So I had the element of surprise and just this fabulous opportunity to get revenge.

Sana Qadar: So James grabbed his gun and started to climb out of the truck.

James Kimmel Jr: But at the last second as I was doing that, I had this just brief flash of insight that if I went ahead and did what I wanted to do, then I'd been, you know, just craving to do for years, but especially in the weeks since they shot and killed the dog. I would not be the same person who left their farm. I'd have to know myself as a killer. I might or might not survive. Maybe the police would have come. Lots of bad things can happen when you're full of rage and you know, you want revenge and there are guns around. That was just enough that insight to get me to stop and I put the gun back down. I wanted revenge. I just wasn't willing to pay that heavy price to get it. I pulled my leg back in the car, closed the door and I drove home.

Sana Qadar: That incident had a profound impact on James. And instead of ruining his life, it sparked a curiosity about the nature and power of revenge. As he got older, that led him into a career in law.

James Kimmel Jr: I learned that I could become a professional revenge seeker. I could get into the professional revenge business and that's by becoming a lawyer, right? I mean, we're the only people in society that have this special license, unique license, to be able to prescribe, manufacture and distribute revenge to the masses. We just call it by a different brand name. We call it justice. And I spent about 20 years as a litigator and I found that the gratification that I was receiving by getting revenge for my clients, justice in the form of revenge, was just incredibly powerful. But as I continued doing it, it started taking over my own personal life as well. So I wasn't able to keep it just in a professional setting. I found myself becoming a private revenge seeker in my home life with my wife and kids and neighbors and people in society in general. I began to wonder and descend into this really bad patch in my life. And I began to wonder whether I was hooked on revenge seeking and whether we can become addicted to revenge. And that started phase three of my life, which was to become a violence and revenge and forgiveness researcher at the Yale School of Medicine to figure out what is going on inside our brains when we feel wronged and we want to hurt the people who hurt us.

Sana Qadar: Revenge has long been a topic of discussion in philosophy or religion, but not so much in neuroscience. That started to change in the early 2000s when a group of scientists at the University of Zurich decided to study what happens in the brain when people feel the desire for revenge and why they might be inclined to enact revenge, even if it could cost them dearly and bring no tangible benefit. Was the benefit emotional, they wondered? Is that what drove us towards revenge? To find out, they put participants of the study in PET scanners.

James Kimmel Jr: While giving them a grievance to fuel their desire for revenge, in that case it was economic games in which other players, usually computer-generated players, were cheating or betraying them during these games and watching their brains to see what happens when they're given the opportunity to retaliate and punish the person who wronged them. And that's what we're talking about with revenge. We're always talking about punishing someone for wrongs of the past. It's never about self-defense to prevent an imminent threat of present or immediate future harm. It's about punishing people for wrongs of the past.

Sana Qadar: And so what the researchers found was that when participants were given the chance to retaliate after someone had wronged them in the game, the dorsal striatum became activated. That's important because the dorsal striatum is a part of the brain's reward and satisfaction circuitry. It's also associated with goal-directed behavior and habit formation. And so the findings supported the idea that people get satisfaction from anticipating or getting revenge. And they found that the participants who had stronger activations in this part of the brain were willing to incur greater costs in order to punish the person who had wronged them. The research made news around the world when it was published in 2004, with headlines like Brain scans reveal that revenge is sweet. The name of the actual paper is a lot less catchy. It's titled The Neural Basis of Altruistic Punishment, and we'll link to it in our show notes.

James Kimmel Jr: In later studies, neuroscientists have found that the nucleus accumbens, which is most strongly associated with pleasure and craving in the brain, that area of the brain is solidly activating, and that's been reproduced in study after study, which is telling us that we're getting enormous pleasure from thinking about and or carrying out revengeful acts. And it's that very circuitry, that plus the dorsal striatum, that are flooded with dopamine, so it's giving us that bit of pleasure before it disappears.

Sana Qadar: These findings are part of the reason why James argues revenge can be an addiction, especially if your prefrontal cortex, which usually stops you enacting your worst impulses, isn't working properly. It's definitely a new idea to think of revenge in this way as potentially addictive, but here's how he sees it.

James Kimmel Jr: There's two parts to this. So the fact that it activates the reward circuitry alone doesn't make it an addiction. What moves anything, and that's the same for drugs and alcohol as well, what moves us from experiencing a pleasure or euphoria, as we do with drugs, to having an addiction, is when we are unable to control the desire to take that drug or engage in that vengeful act, despite knowing the negative consequences. That's when doctors can diagnose you as having an addiction. We see, and I explain this in detail in the book, with all sorts of examples, individual examples and up through population level examples, of instances in which revenge seeking becomes so compulsive and overwhelming that people who were non-violent initially become incredibly violent people and sometimes can't control that and perpetrate it over and over and over again. And they act in every way and have the same brain structures that other addicts act. And so that's why I call it an addiction and a brain biological or brain disease. If you think of it this way as well, you know, with opioids or alcohol, 100% of people are going to experience euphoria and drunkenness from, you know, drinking alcohol or taking an opioid. We all experience that. But only a certain percentage of people who have that experience a few times move on to being unable to control it and spending their entire lives trying to seek the drug over and over and over again. And it appears that that's also the case with people who are trying to seek revenge over and over and over again. Mass shooters are known, at least here in the States, the FBI and the Secret Service have identified mass shooters as people who are grievance collectors. They are highly, acutely sensitive to grievances. Sometimes they imagine them. And that's all that matters. A grievance can be real or imagined, and it still triggers the same very real life revenge desires. And they're unable to control, ultimately, their desire to avenge those grievances, including by, you know, gunning down or driving through a crowd and killing 10, 20, 100 people.

Sana Qadar: There has been pushback on some of James' ideas, which he does acknowledge in his book, because while there has been work looking at the links between revenge and the reward circuitry in the brain, as we described a moment ago, research that explicitly investigates the idea of revenge addiction is thinner on the ground. And in fact, this whole area of behavioral addiction has been controversial over the past few decades, with live debates over the extent to which things like Internet use and sex, which are behaviors, not substances, can be addictive. But James is passionate about conceptualizing revenge as a potential addiction because he says our current methods of addressing revenge-fueled violence aren't working.

James Kimmel Jr: We need to treat revenge addiction as a public health problem that has real, measurable public health solutions now, so that we can reduce violence beyond where we have it now, which is just based on police forces and a threat of incarceration, which has only gotten us this far. I mean, if we want to make it better than this, we'd have to move into the public health realm. And that means that you could use, and societies can use, standard prevention and treatment measures like, for instance, public health education about the dangers of grievances and grievance-triggered revenge desires, and begin teaching that to kids in schools the way we teach children about other cravings like drugs and alcohol and even sex. But we don't spend any time in our schools warning kids about the dangers of the revenge desires that they're going to experience sometimes almost daily in their schools. We could begin there.

Sana Qadar: You're listening to All in the Mind from ABC Radio National. I'm Sana Qadar. James Kimmel Jr. is an assistant clinical professor in psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, and he's the author of the book The Science of Revenge. And so we've covered how neuroscience has shown why fantasizing about revenge feels good and pleasurable. It activates parts of the brain involved in reward and motivation. But that feel-good element, it doesn't last.

James Kimmel Jr: You can think of it this way visually. Think of a hammer striking a nail. You know, the hammer hits the nail and we think, oh, poor nail, it just got clobbered. But we don't think about the hammer had to experience that exact same blow at the same level of force that the nail did. And that's the way it is as well in human life. You can't inflict pain and suffering on other people without experiencing the pain and suffering that you're inflicting. And we know this from studies that show that revenge seeking usually makes you feel more angry, not less soon thereafter, even though you got this quick dopamine hit. It makes you more anxious. You become more fearful often because you know that your act of justice just became the person who you applied it against as their injustice, and therefore more desire by them to retaliate against you, creating these endless types of revenge cycles.

Sana Qadar: And this, James argues, is how justice can sometimes end up as a Trojan horse for revenge.

James Kimmel Jr: Yeah, the way that happens is that we humans have given justice two opposite meanings. So justice means two very different things to us depending on what our goals are. So justice in the form of social justice, we think means fairness, equity, seeing the other person as ourselves and acknowledging and wanting for the other person the same rights and responsibilities that we have. On the other side of justice, we also use justice to mean things like a just war, to mean executing convicted killers. It means any type of revenge seeking, it turns out, when we think that it's fair because we are the victim of a grievance and we want to hurt the people who wrong us. So justice means revenge much of the time. But by having this dual meaning situation, it means that when we're seeking revenge, if we call it justice, we're able to sanctify it and essentially trick ourselves and others into believing that, well, this act of revenge here, this is a just act. This is the kind of fairness and equity act that we all laud when we think of people like Jesus or Gandhi or the Buddha or Martin Luther King, those types of people. And it sanctifies things like genocide and police brutality and terrorism and warfare. So it's a really devious game that humans are playing with the word justice in order to have it be a synonym for revenge when we also want it to mean fairness. And we use it in this way and so do our leaders. The example I give in the book, for instance, is Osama bin Laden for the 9-11 attacks used the word justice to convince his countrymen to go and fly planes into the World Trade Towers in the Pentagon. And after that occurred, President Bush for the United States came out and said,

News archive: Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.

James Kimmel Jr: And we all know, we all knew then and we know now that he didn't mean we're going to bring terrorists fairness, equity and brotherly love. He meant that we're going to go out and kill terrorists. And that's exactly what the United States did and killed an awful lot of other people in the process and spent trillions of dollars to do it. All by calling it justice, because if he'd have said we're going to get revenge against the terrorists, it had a much more difficult time carrying out that war because people don't like revenge sounds very harsh because it is. And we need to acknowledge that we ought to use the word we mean instead of calling it justice to trick ourselves into doing really horrific acts.

Sana Qadar: When you talk about revenge like this and revenge addiction, the contemporary example I can't help but think about is, you know, Israel's actions in Gaza following the October 7th attacks. Actions that many leading scholars and human rights groups have now called genocide, although the Israeli government has repeatedly denied this. But based on what you know about the psychology of revenge, the neuroscience of revenge, how do you make sense of what's happening there?

James Kimmel Jr: Yeah. You know, if you and I'm no expert of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but the start of this most recent cycle, the October 7th attack by the Palestinians, was clearly a revenge seeking binge, an act, not because of any real present threat to any of them, but because they were avenging, it looks like, wrongs of the past perpetrated that they believed by the Israelis. Then Israel turns around and goes, wow, we're going to essentially wipe you out for doing what you just did. And I think that it would be fair to say that at the beginning of that Israel was acting in self-defense because they had an adversary right across the border that was still threatening to kill Israelis and had, you know, a huge number of hostages. And so that looks at least at the beginning more like self-defense. But as that progressed and as the Israelis began killing non-combatants, you know, at scale and continuing it and continuing it, that begins to look much more like revenge seeking. And throughout the, you know, Israeli-Palestinian relationship, there's just been this endless cycle of revenge seeking that, you know, it gets quiet for a while and then it flares up and this one is just the most. So there's lots of revenge craving and revenge seeking going on. And all of these victims that both sides have created, they want revenge. And it's a very natural thing to do and it's very hard to get that to stop.

Sana Qadar: Yeah, it sounds like a very difficult cycle to stop once it's in flow.

James Kimmel Jr: But I would say we have examples of even far worse being stopped. And it gets stopped actually through forgiveness. You know, the example I describe in the book is the end of World War II. At the end of World War II, you know, the Germans had perpetrated the Holocaust. They had killed millions of people. The Japanese had done the same thing. And the Allies had done the same thing to the Germans. So there was a lot of victimization to go around in the world. Yet, today, we've been amazingly strong allies with Germany of all people and with Japan of all nations. And the way that that became possible wasn't because of the military conquest, which a military conquest can stop the instant hostilities. But a military conquest, very difficult for that to maintain the peace for a long period of time. And, you know, there is no—we don't have troops in Germany to pacify Germans or in Japan. There's peace on all sides there. How did that occur? That occurred because the people of all those nations decided to forgive what had happened. And it's only through forgiveness that the peace has been truly secured.

Sana Qadar: James argues in the same way we're hardwired to feel revenge, we're also hardwired for forgiveness.

James Kimmel Jr: Yeah, what I mean by that is that inside your brain, even if you simply imagine forgiving a grievance, you know, you don't even have to go and talk to the person who wronged you. You don't have to pardon them. You don't have to say that you're forgiving them. If you simply imagine it, what happens inside your brain, the pain network, the anterior insula, deactivates. It shuts down. And the pleasure and craving circuitry of addiction, that nucleus accumbens and the dorsal striatum, they shut down. So you're no longer craving revenge. And then that prefrontal cortex that gives you self-control, that activates.

Sana Qadar: These findings come from studies of economic games, where research participants make fair and unfair offers to one another, and researchers look at how their brains respond to those offers. So there is a bit of extrapolation happening here, taking brain activity based on scenarios in the lab and applying them to real world situations. But that's also partly because it's pretty hard to study people's brains as they move through real life.

James Kimmel Jr: So we have this hardwired experience inside our heads that comes from forgiveness, that, you know, really has never been talked about in human history because it's only a recent discovery that has revealed it. We have religions and spiritual groups have talked about forgiveness often in terms of piety or maybe getting into heaven and things like that, and also sometimes as a social good, you know, a better way of handling your grievances than avenging them. But we've never had the ability to know what really happens inside your head when you do it, and that it has this direct brain biological benefit that makes it look like a human superpower or a wonder drug. I mean, where can you get a drug that will do all of that for you? You were born to forgive. All you need to do is start doing it.

Sana Qadar: I do reckon some people would find that quite challenging, though. Like, you know, if you've been a victim of something horrible that's happened to you or to your child, you know, some people can forgive and others are like, this act is so heinous, I could never forgive it.

James Kimmel Jr: Well, first, psychologists identify two types of forgiveness, and one is easier to complete than the other. So there's decisional forgiveness, which is a decision to move on from the wrong. I'm going to put this in my past now. I'm no longer going to try and hurt the person who hurt me. I'm doing this as an act of healing for myself. People usually want to heal. They just often maybe don't know how. Once you're presented with this idea of forgiveness as an act of self-healing, it's something that you give yourself, there's a greater interest in at least trying that. The other form of forgiveness is emotional forgiveness. That's the kind that you—much more difficult to carry off, particularly after a serious grievance, because it involves, you know, sort of communicating with the other person to try and repair and restructure the relationship and the grievance that tried to break it apart. You don't need to do that one. If you do decisional forgiveness, you're going to get these neurological benefits without trying to repair the relationship at all. It's nice to get to that next level if it works for you, but I recommend that people don't even try that at first. Just try decisional forgiveness and see how that works for you, and then perhaps move on to the next stage if you feel like doing that.

Sana Qadar: A really incredible example of forgiveness that made the news recently involved one of the victims of Erin Patterson, the woman who has been convicted of murdering three people by serving them a lunch laced with poisonous death cap mushrooms. Ian Wilkinson was the sole survivor of that lunch, and in a victim impact statement, he said while he didn't have the power to forgive Patterson for her crimes against the others, which included his wife, and in their cases he felt compelled to seek justice, in his own case he said, quote, I encourage Erin to receive my offer of forgiveness for those harms done to me. I bear her no ill will. My prayer for her is she will use her time in jail wisely to become a better person. Now I am no longer Erin Patterson's victim, and she has become the victim of my kindness.

James Kimmel Jr: So it doesn't mean if you forgive someone that you're condoning what they've done to you. Not a bit, not a shred. The gift of forgiveness is to yourself as the victim because it takes away your pain and it takes away these endless cravings to retaliate that can kind of sabotage your life.

Sana Qadar: As for his own past as a self-described revenge addict, James says he's now quick to forgive.

James Kimmel Jr: Yes, I use that type of forgiveness now as fast as I can every time I have a grievance. I try and bury it with forgiveness as quickly as possible, and it has freed me to do things like write this book and shift my career from being a lawyer to a researcher at a medical school. And in all destinations in between it's improved my relationships with family members. And some people have asked, so did you forgive the guys who shot and killed your dog? And my answer is yes, I have forgiven them. I didn't go and talk with them about it. I don't even remember their names. It happened so long ago. But in my mind, they've long since been forgiven and I've long since been able to move on from that pain.

Sana Qadar: That is James Kimmel Jr., assistant clinical professor in psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. James is also the author of the book The Science of Revenge, understanding the world's deadliest addiction and how to overcome it. That's it for All in the Mind this week. This episode was written and edited by me, Sana Qadar. Our senior producer is James Bullen and producer is Rose Kerr. Thanks also to sound engineer Simon Branthwaite. Now, this is my final episode for a couple of weeks because I am off on holiday. But in the meantime, we are going to be playing you an excellent series called Brain Rot. It's from our sister show Science Friction and Brain Rot goes into basically all the themes that we cover here on All in the Mind. It's about how the internet and social media and technology is messing with our memory and our attention spans and generally rotting our brains or not. That's going to play for the next five weeks and then I'll be back with all new episodes of All in the Mind. Thanks for listening. I will catch you next time.