Go on, make my day if you dare play dirty
Dirty Harry was right. Revenge really is so satisfying it can make your day, a new brain scanning study has revealed.
To unravel the complex emotion of schadenfreude, Swiss researchers monitored men dishing out punishment to strangers who had betrayed their trust in a game involving real money. They found that getting revenge activated a brain region related to enjoyment.
In the test, one man would give a stranger a sum of money which was then quadrupled. The recipient could reciprocate and hand half of it back to the first man. If he was untrustworthy and kept it all, the first man could punish him by reducing his payout. Most of the players chose to penalise the selfish men even if it meant they had to give up some of their own money.
Dominique de Quervain, of the University of Zurich, said his team's research helped explain why humans had evolved a level of co-operation unmatched in the animal world.
"Our findings support the hypothesis that people derive satisfaction from punishing norm violations," he wrote in the journal Science.
The study is part of a new brain imaging technique aimed at understanding social behaviour and moral emotions