WANT REVENGE? THINK AGAIN, SAY UA PSYCHOLOGISTS

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - A new study conducted by University of Arkansas psychologists suggests that the more people think about a situation in which they’ve been double-crossed, the less likely they are to exact revenge.

For the past two years Julie Steel, a graduate student in psychology, and David Schroeder, chair of the psychology department, have been examining the phenomenon of revenge. They’ve staged a series of experiments to uncover the motives and mental states behind acts of retribution.

"This year we were trying to understand what kinds of thoughts people engage in before they make the decision to seek revenge and how different types of thoughts might affect the action they take," Steel said.

The study is a continuation of experiments conducted last year, in which Steel and Schroeder assessed how likely people are to take revenge - given an opportunity to do so - and whether leadership roles deter people from seeking retribution.

Titling their new study "The Effects of Counterfactual Thinking and Outcome Closeness on Post-Decisional Reactions in Social Dilemmas," the researchers presented their latest findings on Feb. 3 at the annual Society for Personality and Social Psychology meeting in San Antonio.

To conduct the research, Steel and Schroeder recruited 140 subjects to participate in a "communication strategies" experiment. The researchers divided the subjects into groups of four and confidentially informed each person that he or she was "participant number two."

As compensation for their time, subjects each received 20 poker chips - worth 10 cents apiece - which could be exchanged for cash at the end of the experiment. While distributing the chips, Steel and Schroeder informed each group that it had an opportunity to earn more poker chips by playing an investment game.

The rules of the investment game allowed each subject to anonymously contribute a portion of their poker chips to a group fund. If the group fund reached 40 chips, each subject would be awarded 25 additional chips, worth an additional $2.50. After collecting and counting the chips, Steel and Schroeder established an atmosphere of treachery amongst the participants.

"Most groups actually did accumulate 40 chips," Steel explained. "But we told them that they hadn’t met the goal because one group member - participant number three - had given less than we anticipated."

After planting this seed of betrayal, Steel and Schroeder wanted to assess what subjects thought about the outcome of the game and whether these thoughts would later influence their decision to take revenge on the defector, participant number three. To make this assessment, the researchers called on the expertise of Denise Beike, an assistant professor of psychology who studies counterfactual thinking - a phenomenon that some people might call hindsight or "what might have been."

With Beike’s guidance, Steel and Schroeder instructed 27 of the 140 subjects to focus counterfactual thoughts on their own actions - to speculate, "What could I have done to make the outcome better?" They asked an additional 27 subjects to focus counterfactual thoughts on others - "What could others in the group have done to make the outcome better?"

Finally, the researchers asked 59 participants simply to give their thoughts about the game and its outcome. By not specifying a particular focus, Steel and Schroeder hoped these subjects would naturally generate counterfactual thoughts about themselves or their group members.

A control group of 27 subjects read a completely unrelated story and answered questions about the reading, Steel said. This exercise was intended to keep them from considering the investment game at all.

"Our hypothesis was that people who focused counterfactual thoughts on themselves would take more responsibility for the outcome of the game and be less likely to seek revenge," Steel said.

"We wanted to test whether these counterfactual thoughts acted as antecedents to revenge," Schroeder added. "The results didn’t come out as clean as our hypothesis, but they indicated something else going on, something that surprised us."

To conclude the experiment, Steel and Schroeder asked each subject to write a one-page essay on a given topic. Each participant was then instructed to review the essays their fellow group members had written and rate them for clarity, conciseness and persuasiveness. The subjects then ranked the essays according to quality.

"The trick is that we replaced the real essays with essays that had been composed by graduate students and normed to ensure they were of similar content and quality," Steel revealed.

The researchers further controlled the study by counterbalancing the counterfeit essays - switching them around so that the same essay was not always attributed to participant number three, the defector.

Despite the similar quality of the essays, Steel and Schroeder found that, in general, subjects tended to rate the defector’s essay lower for clarity, conciseness and persuasiveness. While observing how subjects evaluated the essays for overall quality, however, the researchers noticed an interesting variation.

According to Schroeder, those who participated in counterfactual thinking - regardless of whether they directed those thoughts at themselves or others - acted more charitably when evaluating the defector’s essay. However, subjects in the control group, who had read the unrelated passage, significantly and consistently devalued the quality of the defector’s work.

In other words, subjects who devoted conscious thought to the outcome of the investment game seemed less inclined to exact revenge when presented with an opportunity to do so.

"The results seem to indicate that any instructions that generate thought about an outcome stimulate people to reflect on the situation as a whole," Schroeder said. "That reflection appears to have caused subjects to take a more comprehensive view of the circumstances. Rather than jumping to a conclusion about blame, they considered more of the factors that could have contributed to the negative outcome."

But Steel suggests that even those subjects in the control group may have given thought to the investment game without the researchers’ knowledge.

"Those who sought retribution may have engaged in counterfactual thinking in a more natural, more mindless way and grabbed hold of the first explanation that occurred to them - 'That guy’s responsible, and I’m going to make him pay.’" Schroeder conceded. "Regardless, those subjects never had the opportunity to engage in a more exhaustive consideration of explanations."