The Science of Revenge: Why Getting Even Feels So Good
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You're listening to The Michael Shermer Show. Hey everybody, it's Michael Shermer and it's time for another episode of the Michael Shermer Show. I got a really special guest for you today, a really hot topic, you might say. The topic is revenge. and violence more generally.
In fact, it turns out there's a science of the study of revenge. But before I introduce my guest and his book of that title, The Science of Revenge, let me just read something I wrote. This is in the Moral Arc from 2015, in which I'm quoting, or actually citing, David Buss's 2005 book, The Murderer Next Door, Why the Mind is Designed to Kill, in which Buss reports that most people have harbored homicidal fantasies at some point in their lives. Who are these homicidal fantasists? Quote, not the gang members or troubled runaways one might expect to express violent rage, Buss explained, but intelligent, well-scrubbed, mostly middle-class kids, in other words, his students, which is how a lot of psych research is done.
But but Buss not only conducted his own studies, he gathered the results of other related studies that together comprised a database of over 5,000 people worldwide. Basically, they asked, have you ever thought about killing somebody? And Bus says he was just shocked, like, oh my God, like almost everybody. What he found was, let's see, it was um 91% of men and 84% of women reported having had at least one vivid homicidal fantasy in their life. One man who acted on these fantasies from a group of Michigan murderers, whom Bus studied, said he killed his girlfriend because I was deeply in love with her, and she knew that.
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