The Price of Revenge

Revenge often feels sweet, but what price do we pay for seeking it out? Researcher James Kimmel, Jr. proposes a radical theory: our desire for vengeance operates like an addiction in the brain. This week, how “revenge addiction” plays out in our everyday lives — and on a global scale.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In February 1945, as World War II was nearing its end in Europe, the leaders of the three major allied powers, the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union, met at the Yalta Conference in Crimea to discuss the terms of Germany's surrender.

• 0:22Shankar Vedantam?

  The Soviet premier, Joseph Stalin, wanted Germany to pay $20 billion in reparations, the equivalent of $333 billion in today's money. Such a demand would almost certainly have caused economic collapse in Germany. This seemed to be Joseph Stalin's goal: destroy Germany to ensure it could never rise again as a threat. In his eyes, Nazi Germany had more than earned such punishment.

• 0:51Shankar Vedantam?

  The Western allies were against this approach. They were not interested in punishing Germany. The war was almost over. They saw how the punitive terms imposed on Germany after World War I had backfired, leading to the riots of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

• 1:08Shankar Vedantam?

  The United States and Britain wanted to focus on Europe's long-term stability rather than look backwards at the death and destruction that Germany had caused.

• 1:21Shankar Vedantam?

  Today on the show, we examine these conflicting impulses. We've all heard the phrase, "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth." The idea is simple. When someone commits a terrible act, they should pay an equally terrible price. It feels fair. It feels just. But does it always make sense? For them? For us?

• 1:45Shankar Vedantam?

  This week on Hidden Brain, we examine the psychology of revenge. What causes people to prioritize the destruction of others, even if it risks destruction for themselves?

• 2:04Shankar Vedantam?

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• 2:27Shankar Vedantam?

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• 2:59Shankar Vedantam?

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• 3:33Shankar Vedantam?

  You've certainly been wronged at various points in your life. What did you do about it? How long did it take you to get over it? Some transgressions are easy to forget. Others can linger for decades. At Yale University's Department of Psychiatry, James Kimmel Jr. studies how people respond when they are wronged and ways to align our thirst for revenge with our values and long-term interests. James Kimmel, welcome to Hidden Brain.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Thank you, Shankar. It's an honor to be here.

• 4:05Shankar Vedantam?

  James, on May 25, 1993, a man named Michael Stokes walked into a crowded fast food restaurant in Connecticut with a handgun. Who was he and what did he do?

• 4:16Speaker 01

  Michael was a Navy cook on leave that day, and he entered the restaurant with a specific goal of finding a woman that he had an infatuation with, named Wanda, and a man that he believed she had been seeing on the side, named William. When he located them at the back of the restaurant, he executed them both.

• 4:43Shankar Vedantam?

  So I understand that Michael Stokes pled guilty to two counts of murder. He is currently serving a 55-year sentence in a maximum-security prison in Connecticut. Did he have a history of violent crime before this incident, James?

• 4:57Speaker 01

  No, zero. He was actually quite a peaceful young man in school and as a young adult.

• 5:04Shankar Vedantam?

  Tell me about his background. How did he come to be in the restaurant that day? What was the story, James?

• 5:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. So he and his brother were students at a Connecticut high school. He had a great deal of popularity, but he always felt like an outsider. He struggled, though, academically in school. And he was admitted to the University of Connecticut, but unfortunately flunked out in his first semester. He began doing small jobs and eventually got a job at this restaurant as a fast-food cook.

• 5:40Shankar Vedantam?

  And at this restaurant, he meets this woman named Wanda. Tell me about her. Who was she and what was the connection between them?

• 5:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, Wanda was a coworker in the restaurant, and Michael explains to me that he was immediately attracted to her. Unfortunately, she was also married at the time, but even so, they were able to begin to create a relationship, a platonic one, but one that involved going, you know, to movies and shopping together, going out to eat together, all with the consent of her husband, at least as she related it to Michael. And Michael began to fall in love with her. He became quite infatuated with her and really began hoping that maybe at some point, he'd be able to have the relationship with her that he desperately wanted.

• 6:32Shankar Vedantam?

  So after some time, Wanda took a job as a manager at a different restaurant. Tell me what happened next.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  Well, Michael continued pursuing her at the new restaurant, but Wanda refused to reply. She essentially dropped all communications with Michael, and this frustrated and upset him greatly because he wanted to continue that relationship. And Michael began to hear rumors that Wanda was having an affair with a different employee at that restaurant.

• 7:05Shankar Vedantam?

  So Michael spends a brief stint in the Navy. He goes through basic training. He's transferred eventually back to Connecticut. He reaches out and tries to make connection with Wanda again. Pick up the story. What happens then, James?

• 7:19Speaker 01

  He reaches out to her again, and again, she continues to rebuff him and not communicate with him until one night she contacts him and says that she's lost her husband or is unable to find him and asks if Michael would be willing to help drive her around and locate him. And he agrees to do this. They locate Wanda's husband. Michael waits for Wanda and her husband to have some conversation, and then Wanda comes back. Michael drives her home, leaves her there. But his expectation at this point was is that he had done all of these kind things for her.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  He had been faithful to her and was truly willing and expressed that he would be her knight in shining armor whenever she needed it. And he was hoping that this would result in a relationship with her.

• 8:11Shankar Vedantam?

  And did it?

• 8:12Speaker 01

  It did not. Soon after that event began, she ceased all communication again. And that was the kind of the final mark for Michael and the final spiral, spiraling moment because he had kind of bet everything on a relationship with her. He had seen so much failure in his life, and he needed a win. And the win that he was hoping for was Wanda. And when that didn't occur, he began this downward spiral into what he describes as depression and anger and rage. And at one, eventually, he becomes suicidal or begins to think of thoughts of killing himself.

• 8:59Shankar Vedantam?

  We don't know how all this unfolded from Wanda's perspective. Many women know all too well the anxiety and fear that can arise when they decline a man's advances and he won't take no for an answer. What we do know is what Michael did next. He went out and purchased two handguns.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that at first, his thoughts were rage and anger towards himself for, you know, not being able to find success in any part of his life. But as he, as this continued to spiral, he eventually came to a point where he decided that the next day, he would kill himself. And he saw no other way out. So he was really disappointed in himself at this point. But that next day, when he woke up with the plan to kill himself, he had a different thought. And when he began to imagine what it would be like to kill himself, he imagined how

• 10:00Speaker 01

  Wanda and the man that Michael believed he was having, she was having an affair with, how they would react to news of his death. And as he saw this in his mind's eye, he saw them laughing and just mocking his weakness and kind of celebrating that he was gone. And those thoughts, which were purely inside his head and completely made up, but they became more and more real for him. And as they did, his anger and rage toward Wanda and what Michael considered to be her unfaithfulness and betrayal, and the guy that she was seeing as well, he began to

• 10:44Speaker 01

  just draw this incredible rage and hatred toward them. And he made a new decision and a new plan, which was, instead of killing himself that day, he would kill them first and then kill himself.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  When he goes back into the back of the restaurant with his gun to carry out his plan, Wanda is standing with a male coworker. And sure enough, almost matching what he saw in his mind's eye, they were both laughing or joking about something. And when Michael appeared, you know, they continued to kind of laugh and smile. But Michael interpreted this as this, you know, complete derision and mockery of him. And that was enough for him to unleash his rage entirely. He fired first at the man, and then he fired at Wanda.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  Michael learned later that the man that he shot, William, was not, in fact, at all a person who was having an affair with Wanda. He just happened to be a coworker in the restaurant at the time.

• 12:01Shankar Vedantam?

  When the police came to arrest Michael in the restaurant, he gave a statement to them. What did he tell them, James?

• 12:10Speaker 01

  He tells them that at the moment that he shot and killed them, he felt relief, anger, and disbelief.

• 12:24Shankar Vedantam?

  So, James, you met Michael Stokes in 2019. What were the circumstances that got you in contact with him?

• 12:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, Michael actually reached out to me. He had read about in a news story some of my research on revenge and the power that it can have over us and the ability to cause people to commit acts of violence. And he wanted to ask if I could help him understand why he would have killed Wanda and William. It was about 26 years ago at the time. And I agreed to meet with him and begin to explore with him what was happening inside his mind at the time.

• 13:08Shankar Vedantam?

  How did he strike you when you talked to him? This is, of course, a quarter century after the terrible incident took place. He must have been quite a different person by that point. But how did he come across to you, James?

• 13:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was, you know, as you might be, a little concerned and trepidatious going into the prison to meet him. But Michael turned out to be an incredibly nice, soft-spoken man. He, for the past 20 years in prison, had been volunteering as a hospice worker inside the prison, helping inmates as they go through the process of dying. He had received certification as a nurse's aide, helping the medical team. He had received some awards from the warden for helping an inmate who had been choking to death by performing the Heimlich maneuver.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  And, as a matter of fact, in 2024, you know, he received, he and one other inmate, were the first two inmates in the history of the Connecticut prison system to have earned bachelor's degrees while being incarcerated. So, very different from the man who would have gunned down two people in cold blood.

• 14:23Shankar Vedantam?

  Heartache, rage, betrayal, loneliness. We've all experienced these emotions. While most of us would never act on these feelings in an extreme way, are the same mechanisms that compel Michael Stokes also lurking within our own minds? When we come back, the psychology of revenge. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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• 16:09Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 16:13Shankar Vedantam?

  In 1993, Michael Stokes walked into a fast food restaurant and shot two people dead. One of them, a woman who had rejected his advances. The other, a man Michael mistakenly thought was her lover.

• 16:30Shankar Vedantam?

  At Yale University, James Kimmel studies the science of revenge. James, you say that after meeting Michael Stokes, you reflected on how his life could have been your life. Take me back to your childhood. You grew up on a small farm in Pennsylvania, but you did not come from a farming family. And I understand this posed something of a problem in your community?

• 16:52Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, it did. So I moved to this farm. My folks moved me to the farm when I was 12 years old and I grew up on that farm. And it was a good place to grow up. We had a herd of cattle, black Angus cattle. We had some pigs, chickens. We did hunting. It was a great place to be a boy. And I had a good time there. But one of the things I wanted out of that experience was to really befriend the farm kids around me. It was a bit of an isolated experience growing up on a farm because the distances are great between

• 17:31Speaker 01

  homes. But I began to meet them in school and really tried to befriend them. I began to dress like them, wearing, you know, farmer's kinds of boots and jeans and, you know, like flannel shirts and tractor hats and all that kind of stuff and listening to country music. And unfortunately, they were not going to have me, an outsider, come into this community in that way. And that was probably exacerbated by the fact that we didn't make, my family didn't make a living from the farm. My dad was actually an insurance agent. So, you know, he was going into the local town, maybe 10 a.m., dressed in a suit. And

• 18:15Speaker 01

  their dads were up at 4 a.m. and out in the milking parlor, you know, knee deep in manure, milking the cows. So they kept me out of their community. And that was painful enough. But eventually, they took to bullying me as I got older in high school.

• 18:36Shankar Vedantam?

  So one night when you were 17 years old, you were home with your parents and brother. You were sleeping in bed, but you awoke to a loud noise. What was this noise, James?

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, that noise was a gunshot. It, you know, knocked us out of bed. We went to the windows to see what was going on. And, you know, when I looked out the window, I saw a pickup truck owned by one of the guys who had been harassing me and bullying me in school. I saw the truck taking off into the night and we checked around the house to see if there was any damage. And we didn't find any and went back to bed.

• 19:19Shankar Vedantam?

  What happened the next morning?

• 19:21Speaker 01

  So, one of my jobs before going to school in the morning was to take care of the animals and feed and water them. And, you know, I went out to the barn to feed and water the cows and the pigs. And there was also a dog pen out there where we kept this beautiful beagle, a hunting dog, named Paula. And when I went to her pen, I found her lying dead in the pen in a pool of blood with a bullet hole through her head.

• 19:53Shankar Vedantam?

  How did you feel in that moment, James?

• 19:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was terrible. Seeing your dog killed is a terrible thing to witness. Knowing who killed her and why, these are guys who were my enemies, but why would they go to such a length, a horrific length, to kill an innocent dog just to make a point with me or retaliate against me or whatever was in their heads was just absolutely shocking.

• 20:30Shankar Vedantam?

  A couple of weeks later, you were at home alone and you heard a vehicle approach the house. Describe for me what happened.

• 20:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was a vehicle that came up. And as I was getting up to look out the window and see what was happening, I saw that same pickup truck, but then there was a flash and an explosion. They had blown up our mailbox and shot it into the neighboring cornfield. That was kind of it for me. I had been putting up with their abuse for, I don't know, three or four years now. And I had never retaliated. I tried to resist what they were doing, but never in any type of a violent way. But now with everything that had happened, I decided that I couldn't deal with this any longer and I'd have to

• 21:20Speaker 01

  go to a much more extreme measure.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  I'd been on that farm since I was a young kid, had been shooting guns and hunting since I was about eight years old. And we had plenty of guns in the house. My dad had a loaded handgun in his nightstand, and I was all alone. So I ran up, I grabbed it out of the nightstand, jumped in my mother's car that night, and I drove off after them.

• 21:50Shankar Vedantam?

  What were you trying to do? What was the plan?

• 21:54Speaker 01

  Well, at that point, the plan was to confront them. And I don't think that as I was putting that plan together, I had a clear vision of what I was going to do at the stage of driving. But the plan started to formulate more closely when I was actually able to catch up to them, and I cornered them against a barn on one of their farms.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  There were three or four of them in the pickup truck. Their truck was facing away from me, so I saw its foreheads in the window with my bright beams on the back of their truck. They climbed out and started squinting through my headlights to see who had chased them down this long farm road. It had taken some time for me to catch up to them, and they probably didn't have clear visibility, so I don't think that they knew exactly who had driven there or who was behind the wheel of that car that they were looking at. But it was clear that they were unarmed, and they did not know that I had a gun.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  I started to get out with the idea that this would be my opportunity to get revenge. And as I was getting out of the car, I had this insight. I could almost see into my future, and I realized that if I did what I wanted to do, if I had gunned them down, I would be killing myself as well. If not physically, then my identity, the James Kimmel Jr. that I knew before that moment, would no longer be that guy ever again. I'd always have to know myself as a murderer.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  That was not an identity that I was willing to accept for myself. I had been raised better than that. And I could see quickly that it really wouldn't put me in a better position. It would be far worse than I was already sitting in. And that realization was just enough to cause me to put the gun back down, pull my leg back in the car, shut the door, and drive back home.

• 24:03Shankar Vedantam?

  So you and Michael Stokes in some ways shared the same impulse for revenge. You obviously handled those impulses very, very differently. But I understand that later on in life, you eventually became a lawyer, and you found that the law was a way, in some ways, to enact your capacity for vengeance and revenge?

• 24:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. Lawyers are given in our society this very powerful license to get revenge. We're the only profession that's authorized and allowed to prescribe and manufacture and distribute justice in the form of revenge. That's what we do. And we get paid a lot of money for doing that. And I love the idea of becoming a lawyer in part because what it came down to for me that night with the farm kids is that I just wasn't willing to pay the high price that I'd have to pay to get revenge with a gun illegally.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  But I still wanted revenge, and I wanted it badly against them and kind of against the world at this point as a young man. It's that male rage that everything's arrayed against you. And I think the rage that Michael Stokes felt as well, that everything is arrayed against me, and I'm going to have to do something about it, and I'm going to retaliate. I'm not going to take it anymore.

• 25:37Shankar Vedantam?

  So you found ways in the courtroom to increase the costs, the pressure, the pain that you were bringing to bear on the other side. And of course, there was a lawyer on the other side who was trying to do the same thing to you. And of course, what you then have are these cycles of retaliation.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly what litigation is. And you also have in that mix, clients on both sides who are desperately hungering for revenge. And they want their lawyers to increase the pain on the other side. That's the whole deal, right? I mean, it's revenge-seeking all the way around. And we're all trying to hurt each other to the maximum legal extent possible. And the legal system gives us many, many means to do that.

• 26:25Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm wondering how all of this affected you as a person. How did it affect your personal life? The fact that you were, in some ways, waging war in the courtroom is the picture that I'm getting. How did that affect you when you got home in the evenings?

• 26:38Speaker 01

  Very badly, unfortunately. You know, what I was doing during the day carried over into my private life in all phases. I had home with my wife and my kids, with family and friends, with people I didn't know, neighbors. Whoever got on the wrong side of me was going to be subjected to some form of threats, often legal threats, because that was, you know, that's the skill that I learned, is how to get revenge through the court system. And it worked directly against my values. I'm a spiritual person. I was raised in a spiritual family. And I believe that Jesus's teachings of forgiveness

• 27:19Speaker 01

  must have meant something important, or we wouldn't be considering them all these many years later.

• 27:31Shankar Vedantam?

  So in 2004, you read an article in the New York Times about a study that looked at why revenge feels good. What was this article about?

• 27:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's probably the first, it's the first that I'm aware of at least, neuroscience study, trying to understand what's happening inside the human brain when we have a grievance and this spools up a desire for revenge. The researchers there at the University of Zurich, they were engaged in trying to identify why humans engage in what they refer to as altruistic punishment. And that means punishing other people, other humans, for wrongs that they've committed, even when it comes at a cost to the punisher,

• 28:21Speaker 01

  but for no benefit to the punisher, no discernible benefit. And those researchers theorized, they hypothesized that there must be some form of benefit. And if there's not going to be a material benefit to us when we punish someone, there must be some form of emotional or neural benefit that we're getting from this. And they hypothesized that if that's true, that would manifest in the neural circuitry of pleasure and reward.

• 28:54Shankar Vedantam?

  So did they actually find a relationship? Did they do a brain scanning element of the study where they found the reward circuits of the brain were active?

• 29:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly right. So they used PET scans in that study, and they found that this one area of the brain that they wanted to focus on, the dorsal striatum, which is part of the pleasure and reward circuitry of the brain, that became active during the study among study participants as they were contemplating whether to punish fictional opponents in economic games that they were playing. So if the opponent in the economic game while they were under the brain scanner had cheated or betrayed them and given them therefore a Some form of a grievance, a reason to be angry and to feel wronged.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  And then the opportunity in the game to punish, which they were given by extracting money from the opponent. Then this area of the brain activated, and it even activated when the cost of punishing the opponent would result in the complete bankruptcy and loss to the study participant during the game. So they would lose the game but get to seek revenge anyway. And a good number of study participants went through with the punishment, even though they understood it would result in them instantly losing the game.

• 30:22Shankar Vedantam?

  In other words, I'm willing to bring the roof down over your head, even if it means bringing the roof down over mine?

• 30:29Speaker 01

  That's correct.

• 30:34Shankar Vedantam?

  So if revenge is so closely tied up with pleasure and with potentially ignoring the costs that come with that pleasure, it starts to look like another domain where people ignore costs in the pursuit of pleasure.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  That's correct. And that's the insight that I had. Grievances activate revenge cravings, and those revenge cravings very much look like drug addiction. The desire for revenge is very similar to the compulsion that substance users have to continue to engage in the use of addictive substances or other behavioral addictions, such as gambling.

• 31:15Shankar Vedantam?

  I understand that you reached out to some neuroscientists who studied addiction to ask if they would be interested in working with you to develop this hypothesis?

• 31:24Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah. The first place I went, you know, so I'm still a lawyer at this point, although a lawyer without much of a home. But it was clear to me in my My personal experience as a lawyer and by watching other lawyers and other litigants and then looking at the wider world around, and I'm talking about acts of violence that are reported in the news and all sorts of forms of revenge-seeking, that it's often compulsive. It seems as though people are unable to control their desire to do this, to act in this way, to engage in this behavior. It seems as though we're doing it even though

• 32:09Speaker 01

  we know there will be negative consequences that follow, and the more we get, the more we need, even though it's wrecking our lives and that it's filled with negative consequences. And so those things started to tick all of the boxes of addiction for me. And I began to consult with addiction scientists, and then one was Anna Rose Childress at the University of Pennsylvania and Paul Isler at Penn State. And I proposed this idea to them, and Anna Rose is a world-leading addiction researcher. And to my surprise, she not only listened,

• 32:47Speaker 01

  but she was very encouraged by the idea and captivated by it and thought that we ought to begin to apply for some grants and begin to research it and see whether we can prove that it's true.

• 33:02Shankar Vedantam?

  You have actually joined the psychiatry department at Yale, and you and others have explored the parallels between the desire for revenge and drug addiction. What happens in the brains of people seeking revenge, James?

• 33:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, so neuroscientists began to see what I was seeing, which is when you have a grievance, this triggers the reward and pleasure circuitry inside your brain, just in the same way that seeing a place where You've taken drugs in the past if you're a drug user, or seeing a casino if you're a gambling addict. Seeing those things will cue in the brain cravings for, in our case, revenge, right? So the grievance triggers this craving for revenge. And if the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which is there to stop you from making bad decisions

• 34:00Speaker 01

  and give you strength in weighing costs and benefits, if that's inhibited, you might go through with a revenge-seeking act compulsively, which is to say beyond your control or inability to resist it.

• 34:20Shankar Vedantam?

  Can you tell me about the research of David Chester, who looked at the relationship between the pain of rejection and the pleasure of revenge?

• 34:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, what he has found in his studies is he's gone beyond just economic games and set up some studies in which study participants, typically undergraduates at his university, are put in brain scanners and are given the opportunity to play some games in which they are subjected to noise blasts, for instance, if they lose the game. And this, of course, these noise blasts are somewhat painful, mildly painful, but incredibly unfair because they've done nothing other than lose a game. So the design here is to create an instantly powerful grievance.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  Having stimulated them in this way, he then scanned their brains while giving them the opportunity to retaliate. And what he has found, Dr. Chester, is that in those instances, the nucleus accumbens area of the brain, which is the most widely associated area of the brain with craving and compulsion, that area of the brain is becoming extremely active while study participants are considering retaliation. And at the same time, there's a loss of connectivity or silence with the prefrontal cortex, which is the executive function, control area of the brain

• 35:57Speaker 01

  that's supposed to be stopping you from doing... Terrible things against your own interest like seeking revenge.

• 36:05Shankar Vedantam?

  Hmm. I understand that some of this work has also found that as people experience this spike in feelings of aggression or revenge, in some ways, it ameliorates the negative mood that they're experiencing. It helps to repair the sense of grievance that they're experiencing.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I'm glad you brought that up. So, right, what is the end game here? It activates the pleasure and reward circuitry to what extent? We now know revenge-seeking is incredibly pleasurable. I mean, revenge acts like a drug inside our brains. But like a drug, the pleasure is short-lived. And this appears to be the same experience for revenge seekers. Fantasizing about revenge is incredibly pleasurable. Engaging in it is incredibly pleasurable. But these pleasures are short-lived and leave us with both feeling worse, but also in harm's way, because our act of pleasurable revenge-seeking becomes the other person's

• 37:03Speaker 01

  act of grievance and provocation, or experience, I should say, of grievance and provocation, igniting their revenge-seeking desire. And so, we, throughout, you know, human history, have experienced these revenge cycles over and over again.

• 37:22Shankar Vedantam?

  Most of us cloak revenge in the language of morality. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. But what if revenge has little to do with justice? What if it's driven by ancient algorithms in the brain? When we come back, can we treat revenge addiction the way we treat other addictions? Should we? You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 38:01Speaker 02

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• 38:29Speaker 03

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• 38:59Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Revenge feels instinctive. When we seek vengeance, it feels like we are balancing the scales, restoring order, making things right. The urge to strike back doesn't just seem justified, it feels necessary. James Kimmel Jr. says that vengeance promises us satisfaction and relief from pain. But like other kinds of addiction, we can pay a huge price for brief moments of satisfaction.

• 39:34Shankar Vedantam?

  James, you came up with a study to test an anti-revenge intervention that you call the Non-Justice System, where a victim enacts all the different roles of a courtroom trial. You gave volunteers a scenario. They go on vacation and they leave their dog with a neighbor, Billy. When they return from their trip, they find their dog is missing. Billy says he ran away. But the volunteers in the study soon discover this isn't true. They find out that Billy is part of a dogfighting ring and that he used their pet as a bait dog to train another animal to kill. How do people respond to this scenario, James?

• 40:11Speaker 01

  They're just absolutely furious and wanting revenge at a very high level. And so we were able to measure that during the study. And revenge desires before reading this dog killing scenario and after show that revenge desires just skyrocket and go right through the roof, which is where we need them to be in order to try the intervention against those revenge desires and see whether it is effective at reducing them.

• 40:44Shankar Vedantam?

  So when you have people now undertake this non-justice system, where they're essentially playing all the roles in the courtroom, I'm wondering even what this sounds like, just in this scenario. I mean, what would it sound like to play all the different roles of the people engaged in this particular scenario?

• 41:01Speaker 01

  So in the non-justice system, if you're the victim, you get to play the victim and prosecutor. And you get to play the defendant. You play the judge and jury. You play the warden and you play ultimately the judge of your own life in the final step. So you're playing all of those roles. In playing the victim and prosecutor role, it gives the victim an opportunity at that point to be heard. And that's what courtrooms around the world serve. One of their purposes is to be heard, to let other people know that you've been harmed and hopefully to elicit some form of sympathy or understanding that, yes, this in fact happened and we all feel maybe bad about it. So that's step one.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  In step two, as the defendant, we've seen study participants spending a deep amount of time thinking about what the person who wronged them would say, what excuses they would bring, whether they would admit or deny it, whether they would concoct a story, whether they would be callous and hateful and happy that they've done what they've done. So testifying as Billy, some study participants, not necessarily having sympathy for Billy, but empathy with the idea that in some cultures and communities, dogfighting is part of that culture. It's not considered to be a horrific event

• 42:29Speaker 01

  and that Billy was probably caught up in that and was just doing what he had been taught.

• 42:37Shankar Vedantam?

  Most participants found it difficult to hold this viewpoint. They saw Billy instead as a perpetrator, someone willing to lie and make excuses for his violent actions. After the volunteers played the role of defendant and the role of the prosecutor, they were also asked to play the roles of judge and jury in the case.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  Then, you know, the study participant moves out of the role as defendant. And now I get to look at the, all of the facts and circumstances and come up with the best arguments for and against guilt or innocence, and then to hand down a verdict. In most instances, in the Billy scenario, the verdict is guilt, that Billy is guilty for what he's done. And then the participant's given an opportunity to hand down a sentence. That sentence in the non-justice system can be anything you want, right? So it's not just what would be allowed in a court of laws, for instance, a term of incarceration, or a fine, or probation, or parole.

• 43:41Shankar Vedantam?

  Hmm.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  When we give victims the opportunity to pick any punishment they want, they will come up with some pretty hard and sadistic things. They will want Billy put in a cage with a pack of dogs and literally torn to shreds.

• 43:54Shankar Vedantam?

  Wow. So I'm trying to figure out here how this is a substitute for revenge here, James. It feels it can be pretty bloodthirsty.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  That's correct, until the last step, right? So the goal here, if you think of this as methadone for a revenge addict, this is giving the victim an opportunity to be heard, to experience revenge in a safe way inside their brain, not out in the real world, and to release that desire and that craving. But also, as the warden, you have to experience being the person who's inflicting the punishment. And so if you wanted Billy to be put in a cage and torn to shreds, you can't just say, that's the sentence, and walk away and hope it happens. You have to be the one who creates that circumstance and is there, watching it from beginning

• 44:46Speaker 01

  until end, and considering whether this, whether you really feel better watching Billy being torn to shreds, or whether a part of you is starting to emerge that's in even deeper pain than you imagined, because now you've been the instrument of this other person's torture and death. At the last step, though, everything has changed. It's an all-new courtroom. It's a courtroom that's a higher place where the judge in this courtroom is high above you and begins asking you a few questions. Namely, first, is the grievance that you've experienced, is that happening here today? And can it be experienced with your senses? Or is it only in the past?

• 45:28Speaker 01

  And we begin at that point to start to realize, oh, the grievance that I'm carrying, maybe years after the fact, is deep in the past. It only exists as a thought formation inside my brain. And then you're asked at that point, well, if that's so, what might it be like to forgive the person who wronged you?

• 45:52Speaker 01

  Now, almost no one wants to forgive. But if you just imagine it, so you don't have to forgive, you imagine it. What we find is that most people who imagine forgiving something after going through this huge burden of prosecuting and punishing another person realizes that they feel this immediate sense of relief from forgiving. And what the neuroscience shows, actually, is that that's what happens. Forgiveness shuts down the pain center in your brain. It shuts down the revenge craving center in your brain, and it activates the executive function center in your brain. It does all of these things. It's possibly the most important self-healing mechanism we all have inside our heads, and

• 46:37Speaker 01

  yet we kind of don't know it's there much of the time.

• 46:47Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm wondering how effective this has been in the real world. Besides in laboratory settings, is there any evidence that this actually works in helping people deal with real-world grievances, James?

• 46:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it does. Soon after I created this in 2005, I think around 2009, 10, we began to use it in some Pennsylvania prisons as part of a pilot project to help inmates there who were preparing to come back into society, but obviously had powerful revenge desires unresolved and usually exacerbated while being in prison. We weren't able to study the effectiveness of the intervention there, but the results of their staying out of prison for at least a year afterward were extremely promising. So that was good news.

• 47:40Speaker 01

  The intervention is used by a group of violence interrupters in the New Haven area to prevent the next round level of retaliatory street violence. So when they go to, for instance, a hospital where the family and friends of a victim of a gun shooting are located and everybody is just absolutely thirsting for revenge, they use the intervention, in particular that last step that we were talking about, to help calm that down, reduce the pain and reduce that desire for revenge.

• 48:17Shankar Vedantam?

  I mean, one thing that I'm taking away from what you're saying, James, is that when we think about grievances, especially grievances that we have carried around for many years or many decades sometimes, we often tell ourselves, the reason I'm holding on to this grievance is because I have this very sharp sense of fairness and justice. And I'm carrying around this grievance because at some point in the future, I hope to, you know, level the scales of justice and basically, you know, make sure that the good guys win and the bad guys lose. But as you're talking here, what I'm really hearing is that Part of the reason we're carrying around this sense of grievance is that at some level, it is giving us pleasure to carry around this revenge fantasy. So if you think

• 49:00Shankar Vedantam?

  about this from an addiction model, you know, I'm carrying around the grievance very much like the way I'm carrying around the picture of the bar or the casino in my head. It's not really about justice. It's about, you know, trying to satiate this drive for pleasure.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  That's correct. The trouble with it, though, is that that pleasure is this cruel form of pleasure. It's this always taunting, always nagging experience that, you know, people with a gambling use disorder or substance use disorder are experiencing, which is this nagging craving that I can satisfy, you know, in moments at a time, followed by feeling worse and then the craving returning. And this is happening for us over and over again, revenge rumination, where we could ruminate on the same grievance for decades even, you know, and never allowing it to go. I mean, blood feuds throughout history are based

• 49:58Speaker 01

  on that idea of the scale is never balanced. Even when you get to the point of getting your revenge, there is no balance because you've just now created an all-new grievance and an all-new imbalanced scale. So it's this cruel, torturous experience that humanity continues to put itself through, that we really don't have to if we understand what's going on and that the way to feel better lasting, as opposed to just for a temporary high, you know, is to let go of that grievance.

• 50:35Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, what happens when revenge addiction goes global?

• 50:41Shankar Vedantam?

  You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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• 52:27Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 52:31Shankar Vedantam?

  James Kimmel Jr. is the author of The Science of Revenge: Understanding the World's Deadliest Addiction and How to Overcome It. He says revenge isn't just something that affects us as individuals. It affects groups, even countries.

• 52:49Shankar Vedantam?

  So James, you say that three of the most dangerous people in human history, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Chairman Mao, were revenge addicts. Let's look at each of them in turn. How was Hitler motivated by revenge?

• 53:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Hitler's motivation for revenge is found in speeches that he gave when he was just ascending in Germany. He focused all of his energy not on, you know, a productive campaign that he wanted to lead for Germany and how he wanted to improve conditions. All of his discussion throughout, essentially, all of his speeches in his leadership of the country was based on his grievances and the grievances of the German people, primarily against the Jews and other politicians for, first of all, and most importantly, the stab

• 53:44Speaker 01

  in the back myth, in which the accusation was laid that German politicians and Jews had caused Germany to accept the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, ending World War I. And so historians are now, have now really identified World War I and the way it was resolved as the source cause of World War II. And that's because at the resolution of World War I, the Treaty of Versailles, the German nation was put under extreme reparations and punishment for having begun World War I.

• 54:23Speaker 01

  And the politicians who signed the armistice leading to the Treaty of Versailles were considered by some Germans and Hitler to have betrayed Germany. Hitler wanted revenge for that and quickly, over the course of 20 years, built up an amazing system for seeking nationwide revenge through the infliction of grievances upon the people, the repetition of these grievances, and the guarantees and promises that if he was put in power, he would retaliate against all of Germany's internal enemies first and then their external enemies. And he delivered on that promise.

• 55:06Shankar Vedantam?

  So a few years before Hitler was rising to power in 1915, this was in fact, two years before the Russian Revolution and long before he was the ruler of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin was serving an exile in Siberia. And while he was there, he was asked by one of his comrades, what was his greatest pleasure? How did he respond to that, James?

• 55:30Speaker 01

  So in response to this question, Stalin says, "My greatest pleasure is to choose one's victim, prepare one's plans minutely, slake an implacable vengeance, and then go to bed. There's nothing sweeter in the world."

• 55:46Shankar Vedantam?

  I mean, in some ways, this is a textbook example of what you've been talking about here, about the pleasures of vengeance and revenge.

• 55:56Speaker 01

  That's correct. It's incredible quote. He is not even the leader of the Soviet Union at that point, but he's explaining, even in his early years as a 36-year-old, that vengeance is his greatest pleasure in life. And I recount in the book, going back to his youth and his teen and young adult years, that he was a revenge seeker extraordinaire in all sorts of ways, including committing a huge bank robbery that left many people dead. And in all instances, he was always not robbing the bank for the money, he was robbing it

• 56:39Speaker 01

  to retaliate for some vengeance that he believed had been perpetrated and balancing the scales.

• 56:46Shankar Vedantam?

  In the 1920s, Chairman Mao in China writes to his party bosses about the violence that he has managed to unleash. What does he say, James?

• 57:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, so as Mao was experimenting with communism and rising through the Communist Party, he was put in charge of an entire region of China. But he had the idea, when he was doing that, of encouraging peasants to begin to rise up against the landowners and landlords that had been oppressing them.

• 57:28Speaker 01

  And his idea was to encourage them to retaliate against this oppression. Rather than having the Communist Party do the dirty work, they could encourage the peasants and encouraging villagers to engage in struggle sessions in which they effectively put the landlords and people that they thought were abusing them on trial, and then marching them through the streets wearing pointy dunce caps while beating them, torturing them, and in some cases, actually killing them. After having done all of this, he reports back to the leaders in the Communist Party that he really had created terror in the countryside, and that for him, it felt like a kind of ecstasy never experienced before.

• 58:13Shankar Vedantam?

  Hmm. I'm wondering if you see the same patterns of revenge intoxication in modern conflicts, James. Think about what's happening in the Middle East now for many, many years. Do you see the same kinds of patterns?

• 58:26Speaker 01

  Oh, we certainly do, unfortunately. If we consider Israel and Gaza, for instance, or Russia and Ukraine, all of the language is about revenge-seeking, all of the language is about grievance. So one side harms the other. These harms are registered in the brain as incredibly painful, and the desire to retaliate and harm back the other side is ever-present and constant. All the weapons of war that we've created are designed just for revenge gratification. All of the billions of dollars and the enormous technology that's going into them, they're

• 59:09Speaker 01

  all really objects of abuse, if you think about it. You know, we abuse narcotics in the way that we abuse those. But we, for revenge, we abuse guns, weapons, bombs, tanks, all of it, in order to simply gratify this unending desire to get pleasure by harming the people who harmed us.

• 59:38Shankar Vedantam?

  The researcher Matthew White has examined mass atrocities down history. You've looked at some of this work and you've interpreted it through the lens of revenge. Tell me what you found, James.

• 59:50Speaker 01

  So Matthew White has written this enormous book in which he analyzes all of the atrocities in human history, all of the greatest multi-cides, as he calls them, and ranks the top 100, leading to a death toll of about 450 million people in those top 100 atrocities. I went through that list and just for the top 20, where most of those deaths occurred, which is about 355 million people killed. And in that group of top 20, all but one of them, in other words, 19, I was able to

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  learn were the result of compulsive revenge-seeking in the form of addiction. And this begins with the greatest one, which is World War II with more than 60 million dead, and continues on unrelentingly. But we were able to see that these conflicts, these atrocities, these multi-cides, all began with some form of perceived grievance or wrongdoing, and then a desire to retaliate and gratification of that urge to retaliate over and over again, and then the original perpetrator retaliating back.

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  And this going on and on in a conflagration that can last for years and, as I say, leading to millions of deaths in each one of them.

• 1:01:22Shankar Vedantam?

  When I think of the current politics of the United States, I hear a significant amount of grievance articulated by various political leaders, people who basically say, "We need to take action because these other people have done these terrible things to us." Can you talk a moment about the role of grievance and revenge addiction in modern-day countries, including the United States?

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  Sure, in the United States, you know, we're really caught up in this right now. And I think it's because humans are living through a vulnerable period where technology is completely outracing the ability of our brains to keep up with and manage what's happening. So, social media networks are playing an enormous role in the grievance-revenge cycle that we're experiencing today. These platforms have algorithms that are designed to engage users. But the way that the algorithms do this is by preying upon our desire for

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  revenge and retaliation. So, the social media networks enable us to identify and spread grievances at light speed to millions of people. So, we can now have millions of people holding the exact same grievance at the same time, multiple times during the day. Politicians have now gotten the idea that they can increase engagement by using these social networks and inflaming these grievances and these desires for revenge. I've sometimes described it as like the COVID epidemic. The disease, the virus, is blowing at us into our faces from our cell phones and our computer screens. And we're completely vulnerable to it and have no defense mechanism for it because we've never experienced that

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  before in human history.

• 1:03:18Shankar Vedantam?

  You say that there's a connection between revenge addiction and the January 6th attack on the US Capitol. How so?

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's exactly what I was describing here, right? A group of people led by President Trump who made the allegation, false allegation, that the election had been stolen by President Biden and Democrats. And they were able very successfully to propagate through this viral experience in social media, to propagate this "stop the steal" lie. And by doing that, people came to believe that something terrible had gone wrong, and they needed to do something about it, and that is to, say, retaliate in any way possible. And so, a group of them eventually...

• 1:04:09Speaker 01

  Came together, as we know, on January 6th and stormed the Capitol to retaliate for this grievance that had been nurtured for the prior four months.

• 1:04:20Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm wondering, are all forms of retribution problematic, James? Take the killing of Osama bin Laden, for example, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Would you call that revenge addiction too?

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  I do. You know, it was, he was able to be captured at the time, but instead he was, he was shot and killed. However, the question that you're asking is an important one. Is it in any way, at all, wrong to kill somebody who is sworn to kill you if you allow them? That's called self-defense, and that is not what grievance and revenge-seeking is about. We're talking about grievances of the past that are no longer present, that no longer contain an imminent threat of serious bodily harm or death. To harm or kill someone for that prior grievance when they no longer represent a threat, that

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  is what leads to the violence that we've been describing, and that is the addictive concern that we all need to face. And if public health authorities begin to treat revenge-seeking for past wrongs as an addiction, we can begin to help people heal from those wrongs and prevent violence. So this is really giving us an opportunity, an unexpected and very important, in the course of human history, opportunity to prevent violence using public health prevention and treatment strategies that have been used for addiction.

• 1:05:54Shankar Vedantam?

  We featured the researcher Fred Luskin on Hidden Brains some time ago, and he studies the role of grudges and how we carry around grudges and grievances. And one of the really interesting points that he made that I think echoes and mirrors what you're saying, James, is that the reason to give up a grudge has actually very little to do with the person who has done us harm, that the rationale for doing so is almost entirely self-centered. It actually is good for us to give up grudges rather than being good for the other person.

• 1:06:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I'm familiar with Dr. Luskin's work, but the neuroscience now that's more recent is bolstering what he's saying. And that neuroscience, as I said, is showing that these key areas of the brain can be quieted and that this intense desire for revenge, along with the intense pain that you're experiencing, all of those things can be turned off by simply imagining forgiveness. And if you imagine it multiple times, you'll eventually come to the conclusion that you'd rather feel better than continue to carry this burden of punishing the person who wronged you. You choose to set yourself free from the pain of the past.

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  And that's available to you through forgiveness. It's not available for revenge, which just lashes you even more tightly to the pain of the past.

• 1:07:23Shankar Vedantam?

  James, you've looked not just at research studies and brain imaging work, but also the teachings of spiritual and religious leaders. You told me that you were raised in a spiritual household. And in the book, you cite the instruction of Jesus, who talked about how much we should be willing to forgive.

• 1:07:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. When Jesus of Nazareth was asked, "How oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Till seven times?" He responded, "I say not until seven times, but until seventy times seven." So, you know, these weren't words, I believe at least, of Jesus telling us how to get ourselves into heaven, or how to be a good person,

• 1:08:14Speaker 01

  or how to obtain the approval of church elders or other people in society. The neuroscience really shows us now that this was extremely practical and scientifically sound advice for preventing violence and restoring peace in your own life, in your family, in your community, your society, your nation, and in the world. We just have to follow it.

• 1:08:56Shankar Vedantam?

  James Kimmel Jr. is a lecturer at Yale University. He's the author of The Science of Revenge: Understanding the World's Deadliest Addiction and How to Overcome It. James, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Thank you, Shankar.

• 1:09:36Shankar Vedantam?

  Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Powell, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.

• 1:09:56Shankar Vedantam?

  Do you have a story about a time you took revenge on someone or wanted to but didn't? If you'd be willing to share your stories and follow-up questions with James Kimmel Jr. with the Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at [email protected]. That email address again is [email protected]. Use the subject line revenge.

• 1:10:25Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

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