The Compassionate Instinct

In light of these outrageous, often tragic stories of revenge, you might be tempted to assume that people like Brandon Biggs possess some special trait that enables them to bypass the desire for vengeance. At the same time, it may seem that people who act on those urges for revenge are somehow defective, sick, or morally misshapen.

Both of those assumptions are wrong. My research on forgiveness has led me to this unsettling conclusion: The desire for revenge isn’t a disease that afflicts a few unfortunate people; rather it’s a universal trait of human nature, crafted by natural selection, that exists today because it helped our ancestors adapt to their environment.

But there’s some good news, too. Evolutionary science leads us squarely to the conclusion that the capacity for forgiveness, like the desire for revenge, is also an intrinsic feature of human nature, crafted by natural selection. Because revenge and forgiveness both solved problems for ancestral humans, these capacities are now typical of modern humans.

If the capacity to forgive and the desire for revenge really are standard-issue human social instincts, then there’s a hopeful possibility waiting in the wings: that we can make the world a less vengeful, more forgiving place, even when we’re forced to work with a fixed human nature. How do we do that? By making our social environments less abundant in the factors that elicit the desire for revenge and more abundant in the factors that elicit forgiveness. In other words, to increase forgiveness in the world, it doesn’t make sense to try to change human nature. It makes a lot more sense to try to change the world around us.

But to do that, we need to make sure that we’re seeing human nature for what it really is. Consider these three simple truths about forgiveness and revenge and their place in human nature.

TRUTH #1: THE DESIRE FOR REVENGE IS A BUILT-IN FEATURE OF HUMAN NATURE

A century of research in the social and biological sciences reveals a crucial truth: Though we might wish it were otherwise, the desire for revenge is normal—normal in the sense that every neurologically intact human being on the planet has the biological hardware for it.

When evolutionary biologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson looked at data on 60 different societies from around the world, they tried to determine how many of those societies showed evidence of blood feuds, capital punishment, or the desire for blood revenge. They found that 57 of the 60 societies they examined—95 percent—had “some reference to blood feud or capital punishment as an institutionalized practice, or specific accounts of particular cases or, at the least, some articulate expression of the desire for blood revenge.”

“What our survey suggests,” Daly and Wilson write in their book Homicide, “is that the inclination to blood revenge is experienced by people in all cultures, and that the act is therefore unlikely to be altogether ‘absent’ anywhere.”

When a behavior is this universal, that suggests it’s not just the product of particular cultures or social factors. Instead, it’s essential to what it means to be human.

There are three very good reasons why revenge might have evolved in humans. First, revenge may have deterred would-be aggressors from committing acts of aggression against our ancestors. Ancestral humans were group-living creatures who lived, worked, and ate in the presence of others. Thus, the outcomes of their aggressive encounters with other individuals quickly became public knowledge. If our ancestors saw that someone didn’t seek revenge after being harmed, they may have concluded that he was an easy mark, then tried to take advantage of him themselves.

Research suggests that these social dynamics still play out today. Social psychologists have shown in the laboratory that a victim will retaliate more strongly against his or her provoker when an audience has witnessed the provocation, especially if the audience lets the victim know that he or she looks weak because of the abuse he or she suffered. In fact, when people find out that bystanders think less of them because of the harm they’ve endured, they’ll actually go out of their way—even at substantial cost to themselves—to retaliate against their provokers. Moreover, when two men have an argument on the street, the mere presence of a third person doubles the likelihood that the encounter will escalate from an exchange of words to an exchange of blows.