Its certainly a fascinating article. There is, however a degree of interpretation in the conclusions presented and I think that might evolve over time.
Someone told me recently that obscene language is heard significantly less from Japanese Tourette's Syndrome sufferers than European or American sufferers of the same disorder. If Tourette's maps to neurological differences in specific parts of the brain (which, IIRC, it does) then the cultural influence (kinds of words, at least in the emotive sense, automatically chosen) might be wrongly ascribed to brain function in too broad an interpretation.
Similarly there's a possibility that schadenfreude similarly triggers certain responses, but is not the response itself. IOW, the delicious anticipation of revenge might be a process where the kind of delight is inherent to the brain but the route to that pleasure (anticipation of revenge) is culturally specific.
That said, it looks like the experiment described is the most recent in a series of experiments conducted by the same people and the interpretation offered takes cognisence of a lot of past work, so I doubt the interpretation is too broad.
This article I found provides more details about the experiment and links to related work and information about the experimenters:
http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/002324.html
Its fascinating because it's evident that a large number of the responses that make us social creatures and dictate the kind of societies we form are "hard-wired".
In a recent thread on IIDB about empathy towards animals one of the central pillars of the argument that love for animals is some kind of intellectual perversion of our feelings, that we cannot truly empathise with them, was the idea that human emotional behaviour is a very simple ingredient and conscious intellect plays a massive role in exercising it.
But experiments like these hint, I think, that our in-built emotional reasoning is as complex as the intellect that sits astride it. Its a concern though, how people use this kind of information, especially in the consideration of moral behaviour.
The most obvious concern is that its too easy to simply say "we're built to do that, so it must be right". Such arguments would justify entirely crimes of passion which are guided by our complex in-built sexual behaviour, yet the majority of heartbroken people the world over manage to control the urge to commit such crimes because of cultural learning, with positive results.
From the evidence of anthropology contemporary humans in a primitive state are essentially pack animals, yet in modern society the majority of us live in herds. Our territories have shrunk massively, our behaviour, of necessity, has become more constrained and we have become tremendously more aware of the signals we're giving off and able to mask or alter them for diplomacy and deceit. This last assumption I've made is, I think a matter of degree only because there are many examples of self-conscious and deceitful behaviour in other social animals.
So there's always a tension between the very complex instincts that allowed us to form primitive societies in the first place and act in useful concert and the even more complex behaviour required to maintain and evolve our current society. Contemporary human culture has evolved much too fast for simple forces of genetic natural selection to keep pace. IIRC Richard Dawkins acknowledged this when he started talking about culture genes or memes as a compliment to his ideas about genetic selection (I may be wrong but I think he was the source of the currently accepted meaning of the term).
Many of our inherent, hard-wired responses still serve us well and others are totally inappropriate in modern urban life. Some are only useful in specific situations. So I think good part of the memetic evolution is a process of selecting which ones to temper and which to give free reign, as well as when and where.
I was chatting to my uncle the other day who is a sport fanatic who regularly runs marathons and does other gruelling endurance sports like long-distance canoeing. He was extolling the virtues of adrenaline in sports and it made me think of a book on brain health my brother sent me. Apparently every time you manufacture adrenaline you also manufacture cortisol as a by product. Your body flushes adrenaline in hours, cortisol in days. Cortisol is poison to brain cells, so every time you get really stressed you're making yourself a little stupider.
The author's point is that adrenaline is a wonderful substance that is useful for a lot of things, but our primitive ancestors got seriously adrenalised about three times a week, whereas many workers in modern society get seriously adrenalised several times a day and the cortisol just builds and builds with very negative consequences for your brain.
God I'm rambling again.
Anyway, back to how this all relates to the OP, I think my point is that the instinct to revenge probably evolved as an inbuilt response because carrots and sticks create a nice model for social cohesion by an obvious ratchet mechanism, but...
As I indicated on the thread this sprang from, the instinct required to punish deliberate antisocial behaviour (in the article above they actually stipulate that punishment was usually applied for deliberately screwing others in the game) would naturally blur over to the instinct to punish unintended or thoughtless social behaviour, usually with the same amount of venom.
Its certainly evident that this is the case when people scream at other people for, say locking the house and going out when another cohabitant has forgotten their keys at home. You see a lot of that, the desire to punish for even unintended harm or percieved harm. So obviously the desire for punishment/revenge should be curbed their because it
doesn't advance social cohesion.
Thoughtless behaviour is more of a grey zone because its often possible to assume someone had adequate facts at their disposal to be considerate but was simply too selfish to exercise that consideration, a condition that can be cured by retribution - but on the other hand, the inconsiderate behaviour could be the result of ignorance. Also, there is a values debate around whether selfish negligence carries the same moral weight as deliberate malignance based on singular instances.
In terms of social cohesion, we'd need to have information about whether consistently malignant behaviour does more, less or the same amount of damage to society as consistently negligent behaviour. Given that the former seeks harm but the latter accidentally causes it, my instincts tell me malignant intentions are far worse, and the natural instinct for revenge should be curbed appropriately for negligent behaviour.
The last thing that occurs to me about the experiment is that a game with an abstract rule set was used and that has significant implications. A set of values were created and "harm" was defined in terms of those values. People weren't beating each other with sticks, they were point scoring according to abstract values, yet it triggered inherent hard wired responses.
So it can be assumed that the rule set could be turned on it's head - "good" made "bad" - and people would be enacting revenge for what were previously positive actions and letting previously negative actions pass without a response.
In real life, however, we can't make completely arbitrary value choices if we are to enjoy a cohesive society. So a lot of value choices stem from obvious usefulness. Some, as the prohibition experiment demonstrated (although some will contend this) and I think GW Bush's insane sex education policies will demonstrate, loop right back to a hard-wired response being too strong to select anything but the value choice that indulges them*.
That obviously highlights the role that learned values play in the triggering of such inherent responses and why we cannot entirely subordinate moral thought to inherent moral response
or entirely subordinate inherent moral response to moral thought.
I think our instinct for revenge is a lot like our jealousy reaction. We indulge it far too much in contemporary society and that overindulgence means that it is often as harmful as it is useful.
*As a side note, its foolish to assume that only one working value set choice exists for cohesive society. The most rational model is one employed by contemporary evolutionary theorists who speak of a morphological phase space where there are a vast number of viable configurations of the entire value system in which the same values succeed in certain combinations and fail in others.
Viability is more or less an on-off switch, but within the viable range there's also a gradient of desirability. By making certain value choices we might be forcing the requirement of others. There may, in fact be more desirable overall sets of values but often to arrive at them we much change a whole bunch of values so that they will work well in concert.
Such changes cannot occur by increments, a fact which sometimes retards our cultural growth. Its a situation where any kind of incrementalism would require value choices that are bad in context to arrive at a new context (a different
set of values) that work together well.
The phenomenon has been well described by the likes of Goodwin, Gould and Dawkins in genetic evolution, but I see it is far less discussed in the consideration of moral values.
Sweet Revenge and Social Cohesion
Re: Sweet Revenge and Social Cohesion
Linear Mode
