O what a brilliant day it is for vengeance!
—AESCHYLUS1
When I heard on the news they finally got him, I was filled with joy.
—SAUNDRA WOOLEN, MOTHER OF AN ARMY SERGEANT KILLED IN THE PENTAGON ON 9/11, ON HEARING THE NEWS OF OSAMA bIN LADEN’S DEATH2
I am not a vengeful man, but I do enjoy a touch of retribution now and then.
— NEW YORKER CARTOON CAPTION BY ED KOREN3
One appeal of witnessing deserved misfortunes is that any joy we feel can seem free of malice. As I highlighted in the previous chapter, this is especially true when our judgments of deservingness follow from clear, culturally shared standards. Our thinking then has the stamp of impartiality, and we gain the license to feel righteous pleasure.4 But it is important to recognize that there is a strong motivational component to judgments of deservingness that can heighten this pleasure, sometimes in a subjective, biased way. This is a process well worth exploring.
One way that this subjectivity happens is because we are often motivated to construe the world as a just place. We need to believe in a “just world” in which people generally get what they deserve and deserve what they get.5 Believing in a just world allows us to go about our lives as if events are guided by predictable, orderly forces. The alternative belief, that the world operates in a random fashion in which deservingness is absent, undermines the value of planful actions. The chaos it implies causes anxiety. These are existential conclusions that most of us resist.
This motive to believe in a just world, originally proposed by psychologist Melvin Lerner, seems innocent enough, but research by Lerner and others shows that it can lead to the ironic effect of blaming innocent people when they suffer. Lerner and his colleague Carolyn Simmons did a series of now-classic studies in the late 1960s and early 1970s that supports this idea. In their first study,6 observers witnessed another person who appeared to be receiving electric shocks. The reason for these shocks was designed to seem unfair, and, indeed, knowledge that this innocent person was receiving these shocks produced compassion in the observers. When given the opportunity in one condition, they chose to rescue and compensate the person. But an additional condition gave observers the expectation that this person would continue to receive the shocks. Surprisingly, observers tended to derogate the character of the victim. Lerner and Simmons suggested that reactions in both conditions could be explained by concerns over justice. If people need to believe that the world is a just place in which people get what they deserve, then they will construe all events as confirming this belief. In the first condition, the easy recognition that the victim was undeserving of the shock led to compassion. In the second condition, the disturbing sense that an innocent victim would continue to receive undeserved shock led to a more rationalized view that she must deserve it. Lerner and Simmons argued that the just world motive provides a substantial filter through which we interpret and react to both good and bad things happening to others.
The idea that people need to believe in a just world might explain reactions to events that are otherwise perplexing. Consider the memorable case in the late 1980s of a young woman who was raped at knife-point after she had been kidnapped from a Fort Lauderdale restaurant parking lot. The perpetrator was captured and put on trial, but the jurors acquitted him. The jury foreman commented, “We all feel she asked for it [by] the way she was dressed.”7 The victim had been wearing a white lace miniskirt, a tank top, and no underwear. This may have been a provocative, attention-getting ensemble, but did she deserve her assault? It seems the jurors thought as much. Otherwise, how could they have found the perpetrator innocent? A need to believe in a just world may offer one clue.
In his 1980 book, The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion, Lerner explained how he came up with this idea. His first thoughts about the just world motive were prompted by noticing schadenfreude in others. Early in his career, when he worked among doctors and nurses who cared for psychiatric patients, he saw many instances of these professionals joking about their patients behind their backs, sometimes to their faces. These reactions jarred him because, generally, these patients were unlucky souls and had little control over their psychological problems. But he did not view his colleagues as callous. Rather, he concluded that their reactions were coping responses to the unpleasant reality they confronted in these patients. Eventually, he developed the notion of a need to believe in a just world as a prime motive for such reactions. If these patients largely seemed to “deserve” their troubles, one could feel comfortable joking about them.8
Lerner’s core idea is far-reaching in its implications. Believing in a world with no semblance of justice may indeed lead to an unsettling existential uncertainty. Perhaps even the most world-weary and cynical individual may believe, superstitiously, in a kind of karma. On the outside chance that there is some cosmic principle that will even the balance and correct injustice, they avoid dismissing the fates entirely. A bad deed will be punished—somehow, in some way, at some time.
The possibility that people have a need to believe in a just world connects concerns over justice more strongly with schadenfreude for at least two reasons. For one, when there are good, “objective” reasons to blame people for their misfortunes, we will be all the more eager to do so. After all, these valid reasons will go along with the motivational grain. And so, when people appear responsible for their misfortunes (e.g., the driver has an accident while texting or the investment banker goes broke because of risky loan practices), we will zero in on their role in the outcome all the more. We will seize on this information, even embellish it. The objective details of deservingness nicely satisfy the just world motive. The second reason is that the range of unfortunate events that can be construed as “just” increases. This is because our perceptions of causality are likely to be distorted by a need to perceive a just basis for the misfortune when none exists in the first place—which may be why victims are at risk for receiving blame.
That just world motivations might bias our judgments of deservingness raises the general problem of human biases and how they might distort judgments in ways that create schadenfreude. Research by social psychologist Mark Alicke demonstrates that we tend to see others as having more control over bad outcomes than they actually have. As a consequence, this perception of “culpable control” means that others will be seen as more blameworthy—which should enhance pleased reactions to their suffering. Generally, we show what Alicke labels an outcome bias. Especially when we want to evaluate someone negatively, we work backward from negative events and perceive more intentionality and foresight than is warranted by the facts.9 Schadenfreude itself may encourage this process: if we find people’s suffering amusing, we may conclude that they must be blameworthy.
I noted in Chapter 5 that many were pleased when Bernie Madoff was punished for his Ponzi scheme—but his victims were the ones who cheered the loudest. Likewise, of the many happy at news of Osama Bin Laden’s death, relatives of those who died from the terrorist attack master-minded by Bin Laden were most gratified. Saundra Woolen, whose son died in the attack on the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, said, “I wish they could have gotten him alive and given him a slow death. … Either way, he’s gone and I’m glad.”10 People responsible for treating us poorly will seem to deserve their suffering more surely than those who have offended others. And their suffering will create especially satisfying schadenfreude. We will delight in it.
In the Aesop fable, the ant felt good to see the grasshopper suffer from hunger. After all, the grasshopper had danced, sung, and taunted the ant during the summer while the ant had worked and stored food for the winter.
We easily develop grievances against people and come to dislike them, sometimes hate them, because they have mistreated us. These can seem petty sentiments, and so they often remain private. But they nonetheless set us up for feeling schadenfreude if these people suffer. And we probably feel that even their severe suffering is deserved. I am persuaded on this point by the example of Sir Kenneth Dover, the late distinguished scholar of Greek life, literature, and language.11 Dover was a prolific scholar who wrote pioneering books on the Greek Classical Age. His writings overturned many assumptions about this period in history. Remarkably, despite his impressive scholarly record earned at Oxford and St. Andrews universities, he may be best known for a few admissions made in a memoir that he wrote at the end of his career.12 The book includes frank observations about many aspects of his life.13 The admissions attracting the most attention concerned his intense dislike of another colleague at Oxford, Trevor Aston. This man’s exasperatingly manipulative personality, drunken behavior, and chronic threats of suicide caused Dover, who was then the administrator charged with dealing with Aston’s behavior, to contemplate ways of furthering these suicidal intentions. Dover wrote: “My problem was one which I feel compelled to define with brutal candour: How to kill him without getting into trouble.”14 Dover had found Aston such a maddening burden that he considered that through an “act of omission” on his own part Aston might act on his suicide threats.15 Only the legal implications seemed to cause Dover to balk at following through on such plans. When Aston did take his own life, Dover described his own reaction the following morning: “I can’t say for sure that the sun was shining, but I certainly felt it was. I said to myself, slowly, ‘Day One of the Year One of the Post-Astonian Era.’”16
Was Dover lacking in normal human compassion, or was he simply being refreshingly candid in confessing to emotions that others were privately feeling as well?17 Some, such as James Howard-Johnston, a lecturer in Byzantine studies at Oxford, thought the former, arguing that Dover was “cold, clinical and ahuman.”18 Others, such as Brian Harrison, a history fellow and tutor, disagreed: “I’m 100 percent behind Kenneth. It’s astonishing he bore it all those years.”19 Dover was sensitive to this question, and, in his memoir, he related that on hearing the news of Aston’s death, two of his colleagues confessed to nothing but relief.20 He noted that all the proper things were said at Aston’s funeral and at his memorial service, but he also believed the general sentiment was probably not far different from his own.
Should readers have been shocked by what Dover wrote about himself? I am inclined to agree with Stephen Halliwell, a professor of Greek at St. Andrews University, who wrote the Guardian obituary on Dover. He suggested that Dover was unfairly criticized for honestly exploring his life. Dover embraced the task of giving a frank and full accounting of his emotions and desires; that some parts of life seemed unbecoming obscured the broader story of a remarkably accomplished and admirable person.21 Putting aside Dover’s lethal thoughts, it seems natural to find pleasure when misfortunes happened to people we despise,22 especially if the reason why we despise them is because they have badly treated us. These misfortunes are likely to “feel” just—and pleasing.
A few years ago, a friend of mine told me about the firing of a manager at a big company. For a time, they had worked at the same company. My friend, as well as many of his co-workers, felt that this man treated them poorly. He had been unkind to many of them, often humiliating and bullying them. But finally, he went too far, and the company president decided to fire him. My friend was decidedly excited about the news—as were many others. My friend said to me, “I finally get it. You know that emotion you study, what is it ‘farfegnugen’?23 Well, guess what, I’m feeling it.” He went on to describe the details with unashamed excitement and delight. He had a smile on his face as wide as the Cheshire Cat in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It took really disliking (if not hating) someone for him to recognize his own capacity for schadenfreude.
In Chapter 4, I noted the memoir written by Albert Haas, the French physician who had survived the German extermination camps.24 One of the last camps suffered a typhus epidemic. Haas found consolation in the “apolitical nature of the lice that spread the disease.”25 Although many of the SS guards who caught it were healthy enough to recover, some did not. Haas and his friends were “especially pleased when one of the sharpshooters stationed in the watchtower died of the disease.”26
The life of Malcolm X also provides examples in which the experience of mistreatment from others can cause pleasure if they suffer. As a Muslim minister in the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X used his remarkable rhetorical skills and unique charisma to unsettle the status quo of the 1950s and early 1960s. Perhaps more than anything, he held whites accountable for their abominable treatment of African Americans. One way he achieved this was by suggesting that most slaves would have been happy if their masters suffered. In a speech at Michigan State University in 1962, he contrasted the “house Negro” with the “field Negro.” The house Negro, because he lived comparatively better than the field Negro (although he wore the master’s secondhand clothes and ate leftovers), identified with the master. The identification was so strong that when the master got sick, he would say, “What’s the matter boss, we sick?” But the “house Negro” was the minority. The “field Negroes” made up far greater numbers. How did they feel when the master got sick? Well, as Malcolm X put it: “[T]hey prayed that he’d die. If the house caught on fire, they’d pray for the wind to come along and fan the breeze.”27 The implied schadenfreude hit its mark and may have unsettled many listeners. Is there much doubt that misfortunes happening to these slave masters would have seemed well deserved to those suffering slavery in the fields? The resulting schadenfreude must have been keen.
When justice is personal, the righting of the wrong can merge most clearly with the powerful motive of revenge and its resulting gratifications. The pleasure derived from revenge is complicated, however, by factors creating ambivalence over this pleasure, at least in the context of present-day Western culture. An example is the experience of Simon Wiesenthal, survivor of multiple Nazi concentration camps, who made it his life’s work after World War II to track down and capture Nazis war criminals.28 His most celebrated case was the capture of Adolf Eichmann, now infamously remembered as one of the main planners of the Holocaust. Eichmann had been hiding in Argentina until a group of Israeli agents snared him as he was coming home from work in a Buenos Aires suburb, thanks in part to Wiesenthal’s information gathering. Wiesenthal was associated with other triumphs as well, including exposing the man who had been responsible for arresting Anne Frank and her family. Even though he had exceptional just cause for hunting these men down, he was careful to avoid characterizing his motive as vengeful. Wiesenthal’s motto, often repeated, was “Justice, not vengeance.”29
Wiesenthal denied being motivated by revenge. Rather, he wanted to ensure that people didn’t forget the horrors of the Holocaust.30 He had good reason for this concern. Not long after the war, much of the world largely lost interest in pursuing Nazis. As the Cold War struggle took center stage and became the priority for powerful governments, it became better to use ex-Nazis for various purposes, such as scientific and espionage work, than to investigate whether they had committed war crimes.31 There was also the problem of some people refusing to believe what had happened. Wiesenthal faced a postwar generation that could conclude that The Diary of Anne Frank was a fabrication and the death camps were propaganda. Hunting down Nazis, then, was a way for Wiesenthal to restore and permanently settle the record by bringing those responsible to justice. He may have prudently avoided letting it seem as if his motives were personal, to stay clear of seeming biased, even though he once conceded that he had wanted revenge, “perhaps … for a short time in the very beginning.”32
Psychologically, however, it is strange to separate justice from revenge. We feel the urge to take revenge when someone has wronged us.33 We want the person who has wronged us to suffer “just” as we were made to suffer. This is the main point of revenge. We feel that the harm was unfair and unjust. Although though the grievance may sometimes be subjectively derived through self-serving thinking, the experience of it is saturated with a sense of injustice even so. Also, regardless of this potential for self-serving construals, the urge to take revenge, because of its close link with justice, is made up of a mix of related emotions, including anger, hate, indignation, and outrage, all focused on the wrongdoer.
Of course, some instances of personal revenge are uncluttered by ambivalence. Once again, I am reminded of the memoir by French physician Albert Haas, who managed to survive the circles of hell that was the system of German death camps. His last camp was Gusen I (the name itself gives one chills). When word came that the Americans would soon arrive to liberate the camp, the order was given to destroy the whole camp with explosives. This was to hide evidence and prevent testimonies. But a resistance group in the camp had been planning an uprising using stolen weapons and was ready when the SS officers made their move. Despite their weakened state, the prisoners had strength in numbers. Haas was barely lucid from a worsening fever, but with a “gun in his hands” he “found the strength.”34 He joined the fight. Near the camp gates, he confronted a frightened SS man who raised his arms, begged not to be shot, and said, “I didn’t do anything!”35 This was too much for Haas, for, as he candidly described his own reaction, the SS man’s “blanket denial of any guilt violently liberated all of the anger I had been storing for so long. I emptied my gun into him.”36
Evolutionary psychologists conclude that vengeful urges are instinctual. Acting vengefully in response to harm would have served as a powerful, adaptive deterrence against future harm.37 Legal scholars like Jeffrie Murphy agree. Murphy suggests in his book, Getting Even: Forgiveness and its Limits, that vengeful feelings and the actions that they inspire should have helped our ancestors defend both themselves and the moral order.38 He argues that a moral person must have both an intellectual and emotional reaction to a wrong. It is probably the emotional commitment to insisting on one’s rights that leads to corrective action. If we feel no outrage over injustice, we will fail to redress a wrong.39
Murphy also reflects on why revenge has such a bad reputation—and so can seem decoupled from justice. He notes that in both literature and films, revenge is so often portrayed in extreme and pathological ways. He gives the example of the early 19th-century novella Michael Kohlhaas.40 In it, a man, angered by mistreatment from an official and by the death of his wife from a beating, goes wild. Before he is through, he sets fire to part of two towns in efforts to find out where the official is hiding, thereby harming many innocent people. Murphy points out that this man’s response is “insanely over the top, and if all revenge was like that then nothing could be said for it.”41
Examples of excessive vengeance in films come easily to mind, such as the ending of The Fury, mentioned in Chapter 5. How about Commando, one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s early films with a revenge theme? Schwarzenegger’s daughter in the film is kidnapped by a group of lowlife criminals, and, in the process of rescuing her, he leaves a path of surplus mayhem and death. In a hyperbolic moment, he skewers a man with an exhaust pipe and says, “let off some steam.”42 The inflated features of these stories are probably part of their appeal. Would they be remembered if the avenging heroes had been less over the top and more proportional in their reactions? Revenge need not be out of proportion. But the trouble is that personal revenge is more likely to be disproportionate to the initial harm. The poet W. H. Auden summed it up in a definition he gave for justice:
Justice: permission to peck
a wee bit harder
than we have been pecked.43
And so, as the reaction to being wronged loses a sense of proportionality and seems more rationalized than rational, it is difficult to conclude that “justice” is being served.
Nonetheless, that the nature of the vengeful motivations can have a rationalized component does not alter the subjective feel of the related emotions. Misfortunes suffered by others, when perceived to be deserved, are pleasing to behold—especially from the vantage point of the person who feels wronged.
When we look behind extreme acts of violence, vengeful motives are a frequent cause.44 A desire for revenge can be so powerful that it supplants any other concerns, even self-preservation. There is unlikely to be a more powerful human passion than vengeance. The satisfaction of taking revenge is often correspondingly sweet. In a well-known passage, Geronimo describes the moment when he and his fellow Apache warriors exulted over their defeat of the Mexican soldiers who had killed many beloved relatives.
Still covered with the blood of my enemies, still holding my conquering weapon, still hot with the joy of battle, victory, and vengeance, I was surrounded by the Apache braves and made war chief of all the Apaches. Then I gave orders for scalping the slain. I could not call back my loved ones, I could not bring back the dead Apaches, but I could rejoice in this revenge.45
Geronimo and his people had suffered greatly, and so we interpret his actions as revenge, not sadism. But it is likely that in cultures in which revenge is frowned on, enacting it may bring a mixture of both joy and regret. For example, in Western culture today, as much as we enjoy themes of revenge in movies and novels, we are admonished against actually taking revenge ourselves. Legal systems assert their dominion over punishment, making it illegal to take the law into one’s own hands. In Judeo-Christian traditions, God reserves the right to take revenge.46 Phrases from the Bible, such as “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says the Lord,” are lodged in our thinking.47
An experiment by Kevin Carlsmith, Tim Wilson, and Dan Gilbert supports this view about our attitudes toward revenge.48 Undergraduate participants, in groups of four, thought that they were playing a multiround computer game with each other. Players were given some initial money that they could decide to invest in the group or keep for themselves. The instructions made it clear that investing in the group (cooperating) would ultimately lead to the greatest overall amount of money, which would be distributed equally at the end of the game. To stimulate investing, a 40 percent dividend was promised to the group total, to be distributed at the end of the game. But there was also a temptation to “free ride.” If a single player decided not to invest in the group, he or she would earn the most money, and the other players earn less. What was best for the group was for all participants to invest their money—but there was also a temptation to act selfishly by keeping one’s money and also receiving a quarter of the final distribution (which was also made larger by investments from others). The experimenters programmed the apparent behavior of the others so that it appeared that one participant ended the game with a series of selfish choices, even though this participant had urged the other players to cooperate at first. There was a “punisher” condition in which participants were allowed to financially penalize any or all of the other players (literally, “payback”) and then report how they felt. There was also a “forecaster” condition in which participants completed the game and were asked how they would feel if they punished this free-rider.
The researchers found that forecasters predicted that retaliation would be more satisfying than what was actually reported by punishers. This effect seemed to be explained in part by a measure of how much participants ruminated over their actions. The measure came 10 minutes after the end of the game, suggesting that punishers continued to brood over the experience more than did others. Thus, it appears that people often overestimate how satisfying revenge will be because they are unaware that their vengeful actions can cause them “to continue to think about (rather than forget) those whom they have punished.”49 And so, does revenge work? Because of rumination, there may be at least one downside. If we go by these researchers’ results, after people have taken revenge, rumination may cause increased regret over their vengeful behavior.50
Social psychologist Sung Hee Kim argues that one function of revenge is to restore self-esteem, diminished by the fact that another person has so little respect for us that they are willing to harm us. Revenge restores the balance.51 But by stooping to the wrongdoer’s level, one’s moral superiority can seem diminished, at least in most modern cultures. And so, unless the initial harm is extreme or the harmdoer is especially despicable, internalized norms against taking revenge, guided by culture, may sap the pleasure out of the vengeful act. No wonder countless Hollywood films show heroes who hold back from vengeful behavior until so goaded that few viewers will think less of them. We want our heroes to take revenge, but we want them to do so from an unimpeachable moral high ground.
The research by Carlsmith and his colleagues nicely highlights our complex attitudes toward revenge. It also helps us appreciate another important point about how schadenfreude arises. The strong impress of cultural norms against revenge means that indirect revenge, the act of bearing witness, might in fact bring greater pleasure to an individual than direct revenge. There is a lot to be said, in terms of psychological gain, for this indirect, “passive” form of outcome. Although one might temper the outward expression of joy, there is no danger of being browbeaten over having acted in an uncivilized way. At the same time, the misfortune should go a long way toward appeasing vengeful feelings. The experiment by Carlsmith and his colleagues partially supports this idea as well. In an additional condition, participants witnessed the punishment rather than enacting it. This produced significantly greater positive feelings than the “punisher” condition, comparable to another “forecaster” condition in which participants predicted reactions to witnessing the punishment. Participants in the “witness” condition also ruminated less. Yes, witnessing the suffering of someone who has wronged us has a lot going for it over inflicting the suffering ourselves. It is schadenfreude, guilt-free (and avoids counter revenge too!).
As I have already noted, some scholars claim that we feel schadenfreude only when we witness another person’s suffering, not when we bring it about ourselves.52 Schadenfreude is passive, not active. I think this demarcation is too neat. A friend of mine grew up in Eastern Kentucky near the area famous for the feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys. His grandfather was a Golden Gloves winner as a teen and, even in his late eighties, is still ornery and ready for a fight. He was just 16 when Pearl Harbor was attacked, but he lied about his age and enlisted on the spot. Unluckily, he was one of the many American soldiers captured by the Japanese in the Philippines when U.S. forces were overrun and defeated there at the start of the war. He suffered through the Bataan Death March, so rivetingly chronicled in the book Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides.53 During the march, a buddy was decapitated by a Japanese soldier simply because he was too big and tall, so it seemed. My friend’s grandfather also endured years of appalling hardship in a POW camp until he and the other surviving soldiers were rescued toward the war’s end. My friend told me that his grandfather avoided talking about this experience, but there was one incident that he didn’t seem to mind telling. He and the other men suffered backbreaking labor in rock quarries. They were overseen by guards who treated them cruelly and who were indifferent when a man died from the labor. The soldiers hated these guards and would find ways to have them suffer “accidental” deaths themselves. Once, his grandfather was carrying a large rock and found himself looking over a ledge where a guard was standing below. He took aim and let the rock fall. It found its target and crushed the guard’s head, killing him instantly. He would tell the story with the glee and satisfaction of justice served. It was an invigorating memory of an event now over 60 years past. I confess that when my friend told it to me, I smiled a little as I imagined the incident too.
Were my friend and I the only ones feeling schadenfreude, not his grandfather, because he dropped the rock, and we did not? The distinction is far from hard and fast. In any event, I found it difficult to fault my friend’s grandfather for taking pleasure in the guard’s death. It was not sadistic—he was not someone who ordinarily found joy in hurting others, nor did he seek such pleasures.54 The conditions were extraordinary. Going by the calculus of fairness created by the war, “justice” was served. In my mind’s eye, as my friend recreated the event for me, and as I saw the big grin on his face, I seemed to live vicariously his grandfather’s happy satisfaction. I also felt a whiff of something similar when Albert Haas described how he dealt with the SS man, noted earlier in this chapter. There seems no question that misfortunes happening to others who have severely wronged us appeal to our deep-rooted sense of justice.
In Hamlet, Shakespeare’s timeless revenge drama, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are to be the instruments of Hamlet’s death because they carry sealed instructions for the King of England to have him killed. But Hamlet intercepts the document, changes the instructions, and directs that the English King have them killed instead. He feels little compunction because these two school friends are toadies to his treacherous uncle and are to be trusted like “adders fang’d.” He anticipates being pleased over the outcome, “For ’tis the sport to have the engineer hoist with his own petard.”55 Certainly, we expect the playgoer to sense the sport in it too.