The Price of Revenge

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. 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. 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 rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. 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. 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? 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. No one can see or hear your personal messages. So the calls with your mom, chats about the latest work drama, late night voice messages, and all those photos and videos of your dog, every personal message stays private. Because no one...

not even WhatsApp, can see or hear your personal messages. WhatsApp, message privately with everyone. 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.

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

No, zero. He was actually quite a peaceful young man in school and as a young adult. Tell me about his background. How did he come to be in the restaurant that day? What was the story, James? 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. And at this restaurant, he meets this woman named Wanda. Tell me about her. Who was she and what was the connection between them?

Yeah, Wanda was a co-worker 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 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. So after some time, Wanda took a job as a manager at a different restaurant. Tell me what happened next. Well, Michael continued pursuing her at the new restaurant, but Wanda... refused to reply. She essentially dropped all communications with Michael.

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. 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?

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. 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.

And did it? 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 spiraling moment because he had kind of bet everything on a relationship with her. 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 eventually he becomes suicidal. He begins to think of thoughts of killing himself. 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. Yeah, I think that at first his thoughts were rage and anger towards himself for not being able to find success in any part of his life. 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, uh he had a different thought and when he began to imagine what it would be like to to kill himself he imagined how wanda and the man that michael believed he was having and 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. completely made up but they 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 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. goes back into the back of the restaurant with his gun to carry out his plan. Wanda is standing... with a with a male co-worker 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. That was enough for him to unleash his rage entirely. He fired first at the man and then he fired at Wanda. 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 co-worker in the restaurant at the time.

When the police came to arrest Michael in the restaurant, he gave a statement to them. What did he tell them, James? He tells them that at the moment that he shot and killed them, he felt... relief, anger, and disbelief.

So, James, you met Michael Stokes in 2019. What were the circumstances that got you in contact with him? 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 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. 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? Yeah, I was, you know, as you might be, a little...

a little concerned and trepidatious going into the prison to meet him. But Michael turned out to be an incredibly nice, soft-spoken man. 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 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. And as a matter of fact, in 2024, You know, he received he and one other inmate are 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.

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 Vedanta.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. 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. 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. 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.

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 homes. But I began to meet them in school.

I really tried to befriend them. I began to dress like them, wearing farmer's kinds of boots and jeans and flannel shirts and tractor hats and all that kind of stuff and listening to country music. Unfortunately, they... 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.

are living from the farm. My dad was actually an insurance agent. So, you know, he was going into the local town, uh, maybe 10 AM dressed in a suit and, uh, there. Their dads were up at 4 a.m. and out in the milking parlor, knee-deep in manure, milking the cows. So they kept me out of their community. That was painful enough, but eventually they took to bullying me as I got older in high school.

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? Yeah, that noise was a gunshot. 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. What happened the next morning? 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 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 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. How did you feel in that moment, James? Yeah, it was terrible. Seeing your dog killed is a terrible thing to witness. Knowing who killed her and

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

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 go to a much more extreme measure. I'd been on that farm since I was a young kid. 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. What were you trying to do? What was the plan? 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.

cornered them against a barn on one of their farms. There were three or four of them in the pickup truck. Their truck was facing away from me, so I saw, you know, 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.

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. You know, 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.

I would no longer be that guy ever again. I'd always have to know myself as a murderer. 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.

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.

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.

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 I wasn't willing to pay the high price that I'd have to pay to get revenge with a gun illegally. You know, I still wanted revenge and I wanted it badly against them and kind of against the world at this point as a young man. You know, it's kind of 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. 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 the...

cycles of retaliation. 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.

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?

Very badly, unfortunately. 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' teachings of forgiveness must have meant something important or we wouldn't be considering them all these many years later.

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? 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, but for no benefit to the punisher, no discernible benefit. Those researchers theorize, they hypothesize that there must be some form of benefit 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 hypothesize that that if that's true that would manifest in the neural circuitry of pleasure and reward. 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?

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 Some form of a grievance, a reason to be angry and to feel wronged. 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.

A good number of study participants went through with the punishment, even though they understood it would result in them instantly losing the game. In other words, I'm willing to bring the roof down over your head, even if it means bringing the roof down over mine.

That's correct. 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. 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. 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? 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 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 Eislinger at Penn State. And I proposed this idea to them. Anna Rose is a... you know, a world-leading addiction researcher. And to my surprise, she not only listened, but she was very encouraged by the idea and captivated by it. 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.

You eventually 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? 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 gambling 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 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. 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?

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 these noise blasters, 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. 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 that's supposed to be stopping you from doing terrible things against your own interest, like seeking revenge.

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

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. 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.

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. 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 dog fighting 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? 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.

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? So in the non-justice system, if you're the victim, you get to play the victim and prosecutor.

then 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. In step two, as the defendant, we've seen study participants deeply spending a deep amount of time thinking about what the person who wronged them uh 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. Billy was probably caught up in that and was just doing what he had been taught. 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. Then the study participant moves out of the role as defendant, and now I get to look at 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.

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

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? 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. The intervention is...

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, and particularly that last step that we were talking about, to help calm that down, reduce the pain, and reduce that desire for revenge.

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 level the scales of justice and basically 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 the sense of grievance is that at some level it is giving us pleasure to carry around this revenge fantasy. So if you think 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 trying to satiate this drive for pleasure. 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... people with a gambling use disorder or substance use disorder are experiencing, which is this nagging craving that I can satisfy in moments at a time followed by feeling worse.

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 uh you know and and never allowing it to go i mean blood feuds throughout history are based on that idea of 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 and balanced 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. When we come back, what happens when revenge addiction goes global? You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. 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. 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? 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 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 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 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. 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.

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? 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. 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. That's correct. It's an 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 to retaliate for some vengeance that he believed had been perpetrated and balancing the scales. 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? 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. 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.

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.

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? Oh, we certainly do, unfortunately.

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 uh 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 all really uh objects of abuse if you think about it uh you know we abuse narcotics in the way that we abuse those uh 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.

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. So Matthew White has written this enormous book in which... He analyzes all of the atrocities in human history, all of the greatest multicides, as he calls them, and ranks the top 100, leading to a death toll of a...

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 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 multicides. 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, 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.

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? Sure. In the United States, 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 revenge and retaliation.

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 before in human history. You say that there's a connection between revenge addiction and the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. How so?

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.

that is to say retaliate in any way possible and so a group of them eventually came together as we know on january 6th and stormed the capital to retaliate for this grievance that had been nurtured for the prior four months.

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? I do. You know, it was, he was able to be captured at the time, but instead 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 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.

We featured the researcher Fred Luskin on Hidden Brain 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.

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. 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.

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. 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 unto thee until seven times.

but until 70 times 7. 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 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.

James Kimmel Jr. is a lecturer at Yale University. He is 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. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer.

I'm Hidden Brains Executive Editor. 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 ideas at hiddenbrain.org. That email address again. is ideas at hiddenbrain.org. Use the subject line, Revenge. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.