انتقام آوارگان:آیا انتقام اگر به هدف اشتباهی اصابت کند می تواند طعم شیرین بدهد؟

This article investigates whether acts of displaced revenge, that is, revenge targeted at a different person than the original transgressor, can be satisfying for the avenger. We assume that displaced revenge can lead to justice-related satisfaction when the group to which the original transgressor and the displaced target belong is highly entitative. Two experimental online studies show that displaced revenge leads to less regret (Study 1; N = 169) or more satisfaction (Study 2; N = 89) when the transgressor and the displaced target belong to a group that is perceived as highly entitative. Study 3 (N = 72) shows that avengers experience more satisfaction when members of the transgressor group were manipulated to be both strongly interconnected and similar in their appearance. Results of an internal meta-analysis furthermore corroborate the notion that displaced revenge leads to more satisfaction when the transgressor group is highly entitative. Taken together, our findings suggest that even displaced revenge can achieve a sense of justice in the eyes of avengers.

On the afternoon of May 23, 2013, the 25-year old British soldier Lee Rigby was attacked and brutally killed by two Islamic extremists in Woolwich, southeast London. Soon after the killing, a video appeared on the Internet in which one of the murderers proclaimed that “The only reason we have killed this man today is because Muslims are dying daily by British soldiers […] And this British soldier is one. It is an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” (Rayner & Swinford, 2013). Lee Rigby was obviously murdered to avenge the killing of Muslims by the British military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. This brutal act exemplifies that violence can spread beyond the initial agents of a conflict and that even innocent people are suddenly deemed as appropriate targets for retaliation. This phenomenon appears in many guises—terrorism, war, or gang fights. What all of these instances have in common is that they are acts of revenge, and that these vengeful reactions are targeted against people who were entirely uninvolved in the act that sparked these vengeful desires. In that sense, the murder of Lee Rigby was displaced because he was not a perpetrator himself, but merely a member of the perpetrator group.

The brutal murder of Lee Rigby is only one case among many that exemplifies displaced revenge as a pervasive phenomenon that is not fully understood yet. The present research sheds light on the circumstances under which displaced revenge has hedonic benefits for the avenger. More precisely, we show that displaced revenge is more satisfying when the group the target and the transgressor belong to is highly entitative. In this regard, our results also underscore the important role of both similarity and interconnectedness between group members. On a conceptual level, these three studies advance our understanding of displaced revenge by showing that it can actually achieve a sense of justice. By doing this, they pave the way to directly investigate the goal underlying vengeful actions in a next step. On a broader level, this research enriches our understanding of the dynamics underlying violent and often intractable intergroup conflicts (e.g., Rubin, Pruitt, & Kim, 1994). By investigating the forces driving displaced revenge we ultimately gain a better insight into the nature of violent conflicts, ranging from small-scale conflicts between street gangs to large-scale conflicts between nations.