How To Fight The Brain’s Desire For Revenge

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I’m Ira Flatow.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And I’m Flora Lichtman. For the rest of this hour, sweet, sweet revenge– when someone wrongs us in a big or even a tiny way, why do our brains turn to getting even? I know you know this feeling. Say your neighbor’s dog keeps pooping on your lawn. And so you fantasize about leaving flaming bags of dog doo on their front step, or maybe you get cut off in traffic. You could let it go. But wouldn’t it feel so good to get in front of that car and just slow down to a crawl?

IRA FLATOW: Yeah.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Ira, do you have a recurring revenge fantasy?

IRA FLATOW: I was thinking about that car. But being a baseball nerd, my revenge fantasies have to do with grand slams in the bottom of the ninth. But I can relate to being cut off in traffic and wanting to get even. Isn’t road rage really revenge rage?

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yes. And even beyond actually taking revenge, why does even just fantasizing about it feel so good? Our next guest says revenge can be addictive and that we should study it in the same way that we study drug addiction. And so the cure for– and the cure for revenge addiction? Forgiveness.

James Kimmel, Jr., is a lawyer, a professor in psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, and author of the new book The Science of Revenge– Understanding the World’s Deadliest Addiction and How to Overcome It. James, welcome to Science Friday.

JAMES KIMMEL, JR.: Thanks so much for having me.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And if you want to ask James a question, call us. Maybe you can get that revenge fantasy off your chest or tell us how you deal with wanting revenge. Maybe you got revenge and it didn’t feel great. We want to hear from you. Our number is 877-4SCIFRI, 877-4SCIFRI. James, tell us about your relationship with revenge, your personal relationship with it.

JAMES KIMMEL, JR.: I have a long personal relationship with revenge. I was bullied as a kid. I was raised on a farm in Central Pennsylvania. And I really wanted to be friends with the surrounding farm kids.

My family had moved to this farm when I was about 12 years old. So I hadn’t grown up there. It wasn’t a real working farm. The farms around us were real working farms. So there was a bit of a time and a cultural disparity there. And the more I reached out to befriend these guys, the more they started shunning me and didn’t really want me to come in to their community. And my dad was an insurance agent. And their dads were out in the milking parlors.

And eventually, as we got older– so mid-teens and up to driving age– they moved from shunning to bullying and bullying from words to small acts of violence to more significant until one night, we’re all at home, sleeping at night, very late at night. And we were awakened to the sound of a gunshot.

And we rushed to the windows, looked outside, and I saw a pickup truck that was owned by one of the guys who had been tormenting me for all those years. And it was taking off down the road. And we checked around the house. And there was no evidence of any harm. And so we went back to bed.

But one of my jobs the next morning before going to school was to take care of our animals. We had a small herd of Black Angus cattle and some pigs and things. And when I went up to feed and water our dog, a hunting dog, a sweet Beagle named Paula, I found her dead with a bullet hole in her head in her pen, which was a pretty big deal, obviously.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Terrible. What happened next?

JAMES KIMMEL, JR.: So– called the police. And they didn’t offer a lot of support. They felt bad about it. But it was a dog. And this was the early ’80s. And they took the report and said, if it gets worse, let us know. And it did get worse.

A couple of weeks later, I was home alone. And my parents were out. It was, again, late in the evening. And a vehicle came to a stop in front of our house. And when I was looking outside to see what this was about– it was a one-lane country road– there was a flash and an explosion. And they had just blown up our mailbox. And that same pickup truck took off down the road.

And when that pickup truck left, it also took with me– it took away from me what little self-control I had left. And I had had it. And I wanted payback at this point. I had put up with years of abuse. So I raced through the house, grabbed a loaded handgun that my dad kept in a nightstand, and I jumped in my mother’s car. And I went off after them at top speed and cornered them by a barn, dark night.

So my car is behind their pickup truck. I have my high beams on, three or four heads in the window. They slowly get out of the truck. I’m in my car. And I grab the gun. And I open the door. And I start to get out.

And at the last second, I had this flash of insight that if I go through with this, I’ll be– never be the same guy again, if I survive it at all. Even if I “got off” scot-free, I would have to know myself as a killer. And that wasn’t who I was. And I knew I– that I couldn’t be.

And so that was just enough to stop me and pull me back inside the car. And I drove home. But my relationship with revenge only deepened at that point. What I learned was I want it. I just didn’t want to pay top dollar for it, which is what that would have amounted to. And eventually, I came upon the idea of going into the professional revenge business by becoming a lawyer and–

FLORA LICHTMAN: Which some people call justice, right?

JAMES KIMMEL, JR.: Well, we sell the drug revenge under the brand name justice– is the way it came to me over 20 years of being a litigator. We call it justice. But it looks very addictive. And people are willing to pay enormous sums to get us to do that for them. So you hire a lawyer, you’re hiring somebody to get legalized revenge. And that was the career that I took until I found myself being completely consumed by it.

And you get these– through every legal case, there are multitudes of little wins that give you these little highs. And you feel great from them. But then you want– and then it goes away really quickly. And then you want another one, and another one.

IRA FLATOW: What is going on in– what’s going on in our brain that makes us– is there really something changing in our brain?

JAMES KIMMEL, JR.: Oh, yeah.

IRA FLATOW: What is going on there?

JAMES KIMMEL, JR.: So after being a lawyer for 20 years, for the next 20, I’ve been– and for the last 14, I’ve been a researcher at Yale. And here is– I’m glad you asked the most important question. So how does this work?

So when get a– when we have experience, when we perceive a real or imagined grievance in our minds, which is a sense of injustice or humiliation, shame, betrayal, victimization of any kind, this is activating the pain network inside your brain, the anterior insula. And when that occurs, the brain wants to restore homeostasis. To do that, it needs to add pleasure back into the circuitry. And the way that the brain, it turns out, does that in response to a grievance is to seek pleasure by inflicting pain upon other people.

We’ve evolved, is the leading theory by evolutionary psychologists, to derive enormous pleasure from retaliating against, which is to say, punishing or inflicting pain upon, the people who wrong us. And it is– we’ve all experienced this. It is enormously pleasurable to think about, fantasize about, and particularly to do it.

IRA FLATOW: And you say it’s addictive?

JAMES KIMMEL, JR.: Yeah. And that’s an important statement. It’s a big statement. But the evidence is now very solid that that is what’s happening. And the reason is because– well, we need to define what is addiction. Addiction, for these purposes and, I think, for most purposes, is the inability to resist a desire despite the negative consequences, despite knowing the negative consequences.

That’s what all addictions are about– gambling, drug addiction. You have a desire. And you can’t resist it, even though you know it is ruining your life. And revenge fits that to a T. Revenge only has negative consequences. By definition, you can only get revenge by inflicting pain upon someone else. So you’re always having a negative consequence for another person.

But on top of it, studies show that when we seek revenge, it’s like this. A hammer striking a nail can’t avoid the impact of that blow. And human beings are unable to become the instrument of another person’s pain without experiencing that pain themselves. And so we get angrier. It doesn’t release our anger. It makes us more angry. We get anxious.

We’re filled with anxiety, and sometimes fear, because we know that our act of revenge becomes a– or act of justice in the form of revenge becomes another person’s victimization. And their desire for revenge has now been stimulated. And we have these revenge cravings in homes, schools, workplaces, and then society itself.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Does it mirror drug addiction cravings?

JAMES KIMMEL, JR.: Yeah. Yeah, it does. In the neurological circuitry, it looks the same. So your brain on revenge looks like your brain on drugs. And when researchers– and this has been reproduced by neuroscientists at universities around the world. And when your brain– when it gets this dopamine hit, then the question becomes– is for addiction– is always, what’s happening to the prefrontal cortex? That’s your self-control circuitry.

And they are seeing in the same studies that for a group of people– because we know only about 20% of people who try drugs or alcohol become addicted to them. And it may be– we don’t know yet for sure. But roughly the same proportion, 20%, can become addicted to these revenge pleasures and revenge gratification such that their prefrontal cortex is shut down and they’re no longer able to control their impulse to harm others.

IRA FLATOW: Is it contagious, revenge?

JAMES KIMMEL, JR.: Grievances are contagious. You need to have a grievance to activate the desire for revenge. And so there’s a part of my book where I talk about social networking platforms, for instance. They’re extremely effective at allowing contagions of grievance to be spread at light speed.

My grievance I can broadcast instantly and get other people to share the same grievance at the same time and create, therefore, in all of their minds, the same desire for revenge over the same grievance at the same time. That is enormously dangerous for humanity. And it just happened in the last, what, 20 years?

We were not prepared for this at all. But the platforms are using it because it brings on and creates user engagement. And that’s been found in the Wall Street Journal’s Facebook files, paper reporting. And Frances Haugen, who had become the whistleblower– and shown that the algorithms are feeding people grievance.

And then, and this is the other half of it, the same platform enables you to gratify your desire for revenge by typing back the mean tweet or– and so that’s in the ether world. But it also enables people to plan real-world attacks.

IRA FLATOW: And how about the antidote? Is there one for this?

JAMES KIMMEL, JR.: Yes. So two– so one is by seeing the grievance revenge cycle as an addictive process, we’re able now– because we have a big toolkit for addictions. We have addiction professionals. We have psychiatrists. We have psychologists. And they do things like cognitive behavioral therapy. And they do motivational interviewing.

We even have new pharmaceuticals that exist now, like naltrexone. And we have new ones, like GLP-1 drugs, that seem to work on food cravings and are being studied for other cravings, and might one day be shown to have an impact on revenge desires. So we can use the entire addiction toolkit, including AA, NA– or I would call RA, Revenge Anonymous.

IRA FLATOW: But you say in your book forgiveness is the number– how do we use that as a tool?

JAMES KIMMEL, JR.: Thanks for asking that. And that’s the most, to me, exciting part of the entire book. The neuroscience of forgiveness shows that it does the exact opposite of what a grievance and revenge cycle does to you.

So when you simply imagine forgiving someone for a grievance or imagine just forgiving the grievance without even speaking to them and without even making a decision to forgive, but to just imagine forgiving, it does three things. It shuts down that pain network, the anterior insula. So instead of just covering up the pain of your grievance for a few minutes with a dopamine high, it stops the pain. That’s wonder drug quality stuff.

The second thing that it does, and we’ve– just now learning this. The second thing that it does is it also shuts down the pleasure and reward circuitry of addiction. So you’re no longer craving revenge, either.

And then the third thing it does is it reactivates the prefrontal cortex so that you now have self-control again. So forgiveness is this amazing, I think, long-neglected part of humanity that has been relegated only to spirituality when, in fact, it has enormous brain biological benefits as well. So Jesus’s teachings have been neurologically proven, I think, now.

FLORA LICHTMAN: It’s interesting, though, because people rarely have forgiveness fantasies.

IRA FLATOW: Do you really have to practice forgiveness or allow yourself moments, like we do in yoga, to sit quietly and meditate? Do we need to do that kind of forgiveness training?

JAMES KIMMEL, JR.: That would be a great place to start. So I’m going to go back to the biblical teaching from Jesus for a second and when he was asked, how many times am I supposed to forgive this person– once, twice, seven times? And he says, no, 70 times 7.

And it’s an interesting– that quote is always fascinating to me. Does that mean I should just become a victim 70 times, because I don’t like that idea? None of us want to become a victim. And I think that from the brain biological perspective, what it’s showing is that you forgive as many times as it takes until you no longer feel the pain of that grievance.

So you can take this drug, the drug of forgiveness, as many times as you want. It has no side effects. You don’t need a doctor. It’s available for free.

IRA FLATOW: And you can see it acting in the brain?

JAMES KIMMEL, JR.: And you can see that happen.

IRA FLATOW: How does it act in the brain?

JAMES KIMMEL, JR.: The way it acts in the brain is it shuts down the pain network, that anterior insula. So that was activated from the grievance. When you imagine forgiveness, the pain network is shut down. It also shuts down the craving circuitry. So you’re no longer craving the desire for revenge. That is observable through brain scan studies, and has been observed.

IRA FLATOW: So you’re hopeful?

JAMES KIMMEL, JR.: I’m really hopeful. But I would say this for America. If you want to Make America Great Again, MAGA, then you– you need to start by making America forgiving again, MAFA. That is really what we need. America needs to become a little bit more forgiving on both sides. And forgiveness is out of the public discourse right now. We don’t see it.

IRA FLATOW: And you’re saying it should be in?

JAMES KIMMEL, JR.: And it needs to be in, yes.

IRA FLATOW: All right. Thank you for those words of encouragement.

JAMES KIMMEL, JR.: Sure.

IRA FLATOW: And we’ve run out of time. James Kimmel, Jr., is a lawyer, clinical professor in psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine, author of the new book The Science of Revenge– Understanding the World’s Deadliest Addiction and How to Overcome It.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And I think we should end with just a moment of forgiveness. If you have a grievance and you want to think of a person that you’ve wanted to get even with, just– let’s take a moment to forgive.

JAMES KIMMEL, JR.: Just imagine forgiving them. You don’t even have to forgive them at first. You’ll feel it.

IRA FLATOW: All right. I think that’s something good we could all do today for the weekend.

Copyright © 2025 Science Friday Initiative. All rights reserved. Science Friday transcripts are produced on a tight deadline by 3Play Media. Fidelity to the original aired/published audio or video file might vary, and text might be updated or amended in the future. For the authoritative record of Science Friday’s programming, please visit the original aired/published recording. For terms of use and more information, visit our policies pages at http://www.sciencefriday.com/about/policies/