Punishment: cool, rational, and legitimate act to inflict harm as a penalty for offense
Revenge: emotional, implies spite and uncontrolled expression of emotions. However, in practice, boundaries are fuzzy.
Evolution: urge for revenge is adaptive function that deters behaviors that interfere with survival and reproductive goals.
Forgiveness: suppresses urge for revenge for the sake of greater benefit, like maintaining important relationships. maintains social harmony.
Marital happiness was linked to ease of forgiveness, but not associated with extent to which partners punished one another.
Their empirical study:
- Couples brought into lab. One group asked to recall a time of their partner’s betrayal, control group recalled mundane event. Participants were given an opportunity for punishment of their partner by allocating an amount of hot sauce.
- Participants primed to think about betrayal allocated more hot sauce. Women also punished more severely than men.
- Every participant claimed to have punished their partner at some point.
Their conclusion:
- Forgiving and forgetting is unrealistic.
- There is a conflict between cognitive decision to forgive, and emotional reality, finding it difficult to let go of the anger and hurt
- Reminds me of 밀양