Retribution Is Not Helpful for Individual Well-Being

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There's this idea that revenge is sweet and it's satisfying, but actually there's data showing that if you hold on to grudges and revenge, like that's harmful to your well-being as well. We did these experiments where basically we gave people the opportunity to punish someone and they would never know that they had been punished. It was sort of like the economic game equivalent of waiters spitting in a root customer's food in the kitchen before they bring it out. They will pay money to reduce the payoff of somebody who's behaved unfairly towards them, even if they never find out. But then when you ask them to report afterwards, like, oh, why did you punish?

Most of us strive to be good, moral people. When we are doing that striving, what is happening in our brains? Some of our moral inclinations seem pretty automatic and subconscious. Other times we have to sit down and deploy our full cognitive faculties to reason through a tricky moral dilemma. I talk with psychologist Molly Crockett about where our moral intuitions come from, how they can sometimes serve as cover for bad behaviors, and how morality shapes our self-image.

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Molly J. Crockett received her Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Cambridge. She is currently Associate Professor of Psychology and University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. She is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the Society for Experimental Social Psychology.

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