Our animal instincts demand Wall Street blood

It turns out revenge can be pleasurable. Ariely referred to a group of Swiss researchers who have found that when players take revenge, the same part of the brain normally triggered by reward lights up.

It's no surprise that humans love revenge. Other research has shown that people feel satisfaction when someone they dislike suffers, and interestingly, men in particular are found to enjoy physical vengeance.

Even chimps are vengeful, a study last year found. The primates become "exploding black balls of rage" when food is stolen, said a scientist involved in the study. Other primates are known to seek revenge against relatives of an attacker. Studies have shown that revenge is in fact widespread among animals, from birds of the Galapagos, called blue-footed boobies, to elephant seals.

Revenge on Wall Street
The same emotional process, Ariely said, is happening around the nation's current financial crisis.

"People feel that Wall Street has betrayed our social trust," Ariely told LiveScience. "In some sense they've walked off with our 50 dollars. Actually it's more than 50 dollars. And now the question is — how do we feel about it? And the truth is we feel really angry. Because of that, we're willing to take revenge."

He added, "It means that all of us are willing to lose money in order for those 'bastards on Wall Street' — I'm just using a general expression — to suffer even more."

And so in order for the public to support a bailout for Wall Street, and the thinking goes, for the bill to pass through Congress, revenge must be incorporated, Ariely said.

"In some sense, it's in [the public's] best interest to have the bailout, but they really want somebody to pay for it," Ariely said. "So we are all going to lose for these guys to lose more."

Two types of revenge could give the bill a swifter passage.

Obama administration faults Senate bank bill The Obama administration on Friday pushed back against a proposal in the U.S. Senate to create a single bank super-regulator and strip the Federal Reserve of its supervisory powers. Warren Buffett: Financial panic is over Pay czar concerned firms could lose talent U.S. banks to prepay $45 billion to FDIC Geithner encouraged by policies in Asia

Retroactive revenge would make the CEOs and other higher-ups at banks suffer. For instance the bill could include something like, "if we bail out the banks, we are going to take all the stock options of the people in the bank," Ariely said.

Future revenge would mean "creating more general legislation that will ensure that in the future if people misbehave we will punish them," he added.

Schroeder thinks the bailout plan just needs to be framed in a different way. That's because the public seeks a sense of fairness. Right now, he said, the everyday person views the recipients as people who are already making lots and lots of money, so it's not fair they should be "bailed out."

"I think the retribution side probably got into play because they [the government] talked about it as a bailout — 'We're going to help the people who were cheaters,'" Schroeder said. "If they had talked about this instead as sort of a loan package," the public may have reacted more positively.

In addition to the "feel good" factor, revenge can serve as a means of maintaining social order, particularly in times or under conditions when it seems like policing and government regulations are non-existent.

Ariely gives the example of someone taking your donkey, way back when. The rational solution would be to figure out how long it would take to get back the donkey and whether it's worth it. If it took a month to chase the thief down but a week to work enough to buy another donkey, the revenge would be too costly.

"What if I will chase you to the ends of the world to get my donkey back? And I not only will take my donkey, I will take your donkey and your sister's donkey and so on," Ariely said. If word gets out that you'd carry out such revenge, others would steer clear of your donkeys in the future. 

"In an odd way, revenge is very useful in getting people to behave well," Ariely said.

So perhaps it's not surprising that humans, one of the most social of animals, would show such a penchant for enacting revenge, he said.

MORE FROM SCIENCE

Science Section Front

Cosmic Log: The bird vs. the Big Bang Machine Good news! NASA says world won’t end in 2012 Top 10 doomsday predictions that failed Friday the 13th: Your luck is about to change Humans still evolving as our brains shrink India to move all zoo elephants to wildlife parks Super-sniffing bees combat colony pest Power cut during heat wave shuts Australian zoo Record high temps are double the lows Chimps don't talk: Now experts may know why Science Section Front   Add Science headlines to your news reader: