State Psychology, Tribal Psychology, and Revenge
The Willingness to Turn Our Grievances Over to the Government is Fragile Indeed
Wednesday 07 May 2008 at 1:18 pm. Used tags: antisocial, diamond, jared, psychology, punishment, revenge, state, tribal
A few people have asked me what I thought about Jared Diamond’s piece in the April 21 New Yorker, “Vengeance is Ours: What Can Tribal Societies Tell Us About Our Need to Get Even?” It’s a very interesting article.
Diamond writes of his friendship with a man from the New Guinea Highlands named Daniel whom Diamond met in the 1990s when Daniel was driving a car for an oil company, and Diamond was in New Guinea doing field work. A few years before, Daniel had been called back to his ancestral village to avenge the death of an uncle who had been killed by a man from another clan. Ultimately, Daniel would spend three years, and a huge amount of money, to pay, house, and feed the allies and soldiers of fortune from other clans who helped him, before he got succeeded in avenging his uncle’s death. In the process, 29 other men would be killed as well. In the end, though, Daniel and his allies felt that their revenge had been well worth all of the time, money, and additional heartache.
In re-counting Daniel’s plan for vengeance, which Daniel shared with Diamond during a series of back-country drives, Diamond echoes several of the insights that I also discovered while doing my research for Beyond Revenge. He describes the compelling motivational power of the desire for revenge, the joy that people feel when they finally obtain revenge, and the negative emotions they often feel when their plans for revenge are thwarted. Diamond also asserts my own strong belief that the desire for revenge is as natural to human psychology as are joy, fear, and sorrow.
But what interested me most were Diamond’s thoughts on the role of what I call “state psychology” in controlling the desire for revenge, and the role of (again, what I call) “tribal psychology” in fueling it. New Guineans have only been part of a “state” for the past half-century. For the 40,000 years of human habitation on the island prior to that, the societal form that New Guinea’s highlanders knew best was the tribe. And despite the last few decades of experience with living in a state, the tribal psychology still comes to the fore when New Guinea highlanders have grievances that turn violent.
Daniel was not at all unusual in seeking personal revenge rather than appealing to the state for redress after his uncle was killed. Old tribal habits die hard. And for Daniel, this was true even though he knew full well that state control over revenge was, in theory, a vastly superior approach to handling grievances. But it can take a long time to re-wire people’s thinking so that they trust the state to seek redress on their behalf.
Research by Benedikt Herrmann, Christian Thöni, and Simon Gächter in the 7 March 2008 issue of Science helps to make this point. As people who have been following the study of revenge and punishment in experimental economics know, it is now widely believed that the prospect of receiving punishment from the group is often sufficient to get us to cooperate with non-kin. The standard story for interpreting this finding is that if the members of a group have the ability to punish group members who don’t cooperate toward the common good, then almost everyone will eventually pitch in and act in the group’s best interests.
But it turns out that not everyone follows the standard script of (a) resigning themselves to a rap on the knuckles when they behave selfishly, (b) reforming their ways, and then (c) returning to cooperation. Some people respond to being punished for their selfishness by retaliating against the do-gooders who punished them. Herrmann and colleagues called it “antisocial punishment.”
Herrmann and his associates were interested in the possibility that anti-social punishment is more prevalent in some societies than in others, so they had 1120 middle-to-upper-class university undergraduate students from many different cities around the world—Boston, Melbourne, Zurich, Minsk, Riyadh, Athens, Muscat (Oman), and Athens, to name a few—play repeated rounds of a four-member public goods game. In this game, each of the four players could make investments out of their personal funds into a common pool. After everyone in the group made their choices about how much to contribute, the total amount of funds in the public pool was then multiplied by 1.4, and the total of the pool was then divided evenly among the four players. If everyone contributes, everyone makes a little money. If you don’t contribute, though, you still make money, but at the other group members’ expense (I describe this game in Chapter 3 of Beyond Revenge).
In these games, it was also possible to punish players whose behavior you disliked by unilaterally causing money from their personal accounts to disappear at the end of the round. In this way, if you didn’t like how much any individual player contributed to the common good, you could fine them. Of course, you could also fine group members for any other reason that pleased you, too—for instance, if you were just angry that they had previously punished you.
The researchers found that the punishment of free-riders was quite prevalent in most of the groups, which supports the idea that people do possess an instinct to punish non-cooperators. But the researchers also found that in many of the four-person games, people were also quite willing to punish other group members who had punished them in previous rounds. This is revenge at its finest: Someone just punished you for your failure to cooperate with the group, so when you get the chance, you harm them back. Thus, the “anti-social” in “anti-social punishment.”
The frequency with which people use anti-social punishment varies in lawful ways across societies. Herrmann and his colleagues used previously published data to develop two measures of the characteristics of the societies from which their players were drawn. The first measure was a “rule of law” measure that indexed the extent to which people within those societies have confidence in the rules of the society and the extent to which crimes and contract violations are published by governmental authorities. The second measure was a measure of civic cooperation, which includes information regarding tolerance for tax evasion, fraud, and, literally—“free riding,” for example, evading the fares required to use public transport.
The amount of antisocial punishment that the four-person groups manifested was directly related to the norms of civic cooperation and confidence in the rule of law within their societies. In societies in which people did not endorse very high norms for civic cooperation (Minsk and Athens, for example), and in which people’s confidence in the rule of law was low (Athens, Istanbul, and Riyadh, for example), the university students used more antisocial punishment. So even when people live in modern states—and remember, we’re talking about middle- and upper-class university students here--they nevertheless continue use revenge to deal with their resentments, especially when their faith in state institutions such as the rule of law and norms of civic cooperation is low.
In light of the Herrmann et al. paper on antisocial punishment, it really comes as no surprise to me that Diamond’s friend Daniel found personal revenge so enticing as a way of dealing with his uncle’s murder. Sure, Daniel lived in a “state,” but it was a young state, and tribal ways of thinking die hard. Most people around the world live in states today. But even for those who do, it can be very difficult to completely exorcise the old tribal psychology—especially for those who don’t feel very bonded to their state institutions or who don’t feel like the state is working very well. When state psychology is weak, tribal psychology becomes strong again. And when that happens, people become less willing to submit to the common good, and therefore, they take matters into their own hands when they feel angry.
Most of us wouldn’t actually follow through with avenging the murder of an uncle as Diamond’s friend Daniel did, even if we were tempted to. Instead, most of us would turn the matter over to the police and the courts, and hope that justice would be served. But our attachments to this way of handling our grievances may only be as strong as (a) our confidence that the state has the ability to redress our grievances for us, and (b) our willingness to be part of a society that handles its grievances in this way. Taking matters into our own hands is the old and time-tested way of doing things. It is state psychology that allows us to behave differently, and state psychology can be easily disrupted when people stop trusting in the state’s effectiveness. It’s really a bit scary to think about just how much is riding on “state psychology,” and just how fragile that way of thinking might be.
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