The Science of Revenge by James Kimmel Understanding the World's Deadliest Addiction - and How to Overcome It
What's it about?
The Science of Revenge (2025) explores how the desire for vengeance functions like an addictive behavior, hijacking the brain’s reward system much like drugs do. It combines neuroscience, psychology, and real-life stories to explain why people become consumed by revenge – and how they can break free from its grip.
Revenge is one of the most intense emotions people experience. It can feel urgent, justified, even necessary. But what starts as a response to being hurt often leads to more damage – both for the person seeking revenge and those around them. From minor grudges to large-scale violence, the craving to get even follows a recognizable psychological pattern – one that can take over your thoughts and behavior.
In this lesson, you’ll learn how revenge functions like an addiction, how it rewires the brain through cycles of pain and craving, and how it has shaped violence throughout history – from personal conflicts to mass atrocities. You’ll also see how forgiveness and targeted mental health strategies can interrupt this cycle, and offer a path toward genuine relief and self-control.
To understand how revenge gains such a grip on us, let’s start by looking at what happens inside the brain when we’re driven to strike back.
You’re playing an online game with two other people. At first, everything seems normal – each of you tossing a virtual ball back and forth. But suddenly, they stop throwing the ball to you. They pass it only to each other, ignoring you entirely. You’ve been excluded. Now imagine being given the chance to get even.
This thought experiment is part of a real psychological study used to simulate social rejection. In follow-up tasks, participants were asked to stick pins in virtual voodoo dolls representing those who excluded them, or to deliver loud noise blasts as punishment. The result? The more rejected participants felt, the more aggressively they retaliated – and the more pleasure they reported from doing so.
Brain scans of participants during these experiments reveal what’s happening beneath the surface. When they’re excluded during these virtual ball games, their anterior insula – the region linked to social and physical pain – lights up. Rejection is neurologically painful. But when they retaliate – by stabbing a virtual doll or blasting their excluders with noise – another region lights up: the nucleus accumbens, the brain’s reward hub. This area releases dopamine, the same neurotransmitter that fuels cravings in drug and gambling addictions. In other words, getting even delivers a chemical hit that makes revenge neurologically rewarding.
The power of this craving was on display at a conference where – after reading a fictional story about a man who sacrificed someone’s pet in a dogfight – a group of trained psychiatrists voted enthusiastically to sentence the character to be torn apart by dogs. These were professionals trained to empathize and heal. Yet, momentarily immersed in grievance, even they craved harsh retaliation.
Understanding how easily the brain can be hijacked by the desire for revenge is key, because real danger lies in what happens when this craving intensifies. Petty acts of spite can escalate into something far more destructive, with consequences that reach well beyond the individual.
When people think about mass murderers, they often assume they must be suffering from serious mental illnesses like psychosis or schizophrenia. But research tells a different story. The vast majority of these attackers don’t show signs of traditional psychiatric disorders. What they do have in common is a deep and obsessive focus on grievances – real or imagined – and a powerful urge to retaliate. This need for revenge doesn’t come from nowhere. It builds over time, reinforced in the brain in the same way as an addiction.
Across hundreds of cases, revenge is the most common motive behind mass killings. These individuals tend to be isolated and angry, often collecting slights and perceived betrayals over months or years. That long-term rumination creates a cycle of craving and relief in the brain’s reward system, particularly in areas that also light up in substance abuse. Grievances trigger feelings of pain and humiliation, and planning revenge becomes a source of emotional reward. Just like an addict chasing a high, the attacker becomes consumed by the desire for emotional relief through violence.
What’s striking is that many mass killers don’t hide this process. A surprising number leave behind manifestos explaining exactly how their resentment grew and why they believed violence was the only option. Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007, described feeling violated, erased, and excluded. His language reflected extreme pain and a belief that inflicting suffering would restore his lost dignity. His writings reveal someone both aware of the consequences and tormented by a compulsion he couldn’t resist.
Another attacker, Andre Bing, shot six of his coworkers at a Walmart in 2022. He described being mocked, humiliated, and betrayed – and feeling controlled by something he didn’t understand. In both cases, the killers expressed some awareness that they were not well, but saw no way out of the craving to hurt others.
Identifying this addictive loop of grievance and revenge isn’t included in assessments aiming to prevent violent acts. Recognizing it for what it is – a serious, often fatal mental illness – could open the door to better early intervention, and possibly prevent future tragedies.
While these tragedies often unfold in isolation, history shows what happens when the same compulsive drive for revenge is magnified through political power.
Revenge has shaped some of history’s most brutal regimes. Political leaders like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong used it as both a justification for violence and as a guiding principle of governance. They built entire systems around grievance – identifying enemies, stoking resentment, and rewarding acts of retaliation. The result was suffering on an unprecedented scale.
Adolf Hitler didn’t start as a genocidal dictator. Early on, he was an aspiring artist rejected by Vienna’s elite and left struggling in poverty. Over time, he built up grievances – personal, political, and national – until he believed Germany had been humiliated by its own politicians and betrayed from within. He wasn’t satisfied with war victory; he wanted revenge for the emotional pain of perceived national betrayal. Over two decades, he transformed Germany into a revenge delivery machine, fueling national outrage, building systems to identify and destroy scapegoats, and channeling a collective sense of grievance into violent action. Nearly six million Jews were killed, along with tens of millions of others – enemy soldiers, civilians, even fellow Germans – because he convinced a nation that it had been wronged and deserved payback.
Joseph Stalin followed a similar pattern. Shaped by childhood abuse and a culture steeped in blood feuds, he found personal satisfaction in selecting targets and watching them suffer. His purges weren’t random – they were methodical campaigns designed to scratch the itch of betrayal. He turned paranoia into policy, built elaborate show trials to justify executions, and had former allies tortured and killed to satisfy his sense of being undermined. His war on perceived traitors led to mass starvation, executions, and repression that killed around 20 million people.
Mao Zedong took this further by turning everyday citizens into instruments of revenge. Rather than using secret police alone, he encouraged ordinary people to publicly humiliate, torture, and kill one another over class-based grievances. His policies killed millions and addicted a population to retaliatory violence under the guise of justice and reform.
What connects these violent leaders? It’s the same compulsive cycle seen in school shooters and domestic abusers – an endless drive to feed a craving that grows stronger the more it’s indulged. And when that drive is scaled up to fit a government, the consequences can be measured in tens of millions of lives.
Looking at these leaders individually is revealing, but the broader picture shows that this pattern has been present in human history for thousands of years.
You might think something as dangerous and widespread as revenge addiction would be more widely recognized. But like many major breakthroughs in science, some truths hide in plain sight for centuries. The bubonic plague, for example, killed millions over a thousand years before anyone discovered it was caused by bacteria. Until then, people blamed evil spirits or divine punishment. A similar misunderstanding surrounds human violence. For thousands of years, acts of mass cruelty and destruction have been attributed to evil, fate, or ideology – when many may have actually been driven by a psychological compulsion to seek revenge.
The earliest evidence of murder in fossil records – a hominin skull with trauma from a weapon – dates back over 400,000 years and likely reflects the beginnings of interpersonal revenge. And some of the world’s most enduring stories, like Cain and Abel, follow the structure of grievance, emotional pain, and retaliatory violence. These moral myths mirror the addictive cycle of revenge we now see reflected in neuroscience.
This pattern continues through recorded history. The Old Testament, for instance, documents an escalating sequence of violence where personal and collective revenge drives massive bloodshed, often justified by divine command. Religious figures like Moses, David, and Joshua act not just as leaders, but as revenge seekers. Even God is portrayed as unleashing destruction in response to betrayal and wrongdoing – only to later express remorse and vow to stop.
The compulsion to retaliate didn’t end in ancient scripture. Roman emperors staged public executions to fuel revenge cravings in the crowd, while the Christian Inquisition institutionalized torture and burning as righteous punishment. Revenge has been built into religious and political systems across cultures, despite teachings on forgiveness.
By analyzing historical data on the world’s deadliest atrocities – from the Crusades to the world wars – a clear pattern emerges. Revenge was a key driver behind most of the largest mass killings in history. Taken together, hundreds of millions of lives have been lost because of this powerful psychological force.
Understanding revenge as an addiction reframes the entire history of human violence. And recognizing the scale of this problem invites an important question – if revenge addiction is so powerful and widespread, is there any reliable way to stop it?
The idea of forgiveness often feels moral or spiritual, but your brain treats it as something far more practical: a built-in mechanism for managing pain and preventing destructive behavior. As you now know, when someone wrongs you, your brain responds with pain – specifically in areas like the anterior insula, the same network activated during physical injury. To relieve that discomfort, your brain looks for a reward. That’s where revenge comes in. Retaliating brings a temporary surge of pleasure through a dopamine hit in your reward system. But like all addictive highs, it quickly fades, leaving the pain intact and increasing the craving to strike back.
Forgiveness, on the other hand, offers a completely different neurobiological pathway. Brain imaging studies show that when people suppress the urge to retaliate and instead accept or reframe an unfair experience, different areas of the brain light up – primarily regions in the prefrontal cortex associated with emotional regulation and self-control. These are the same circuits that help suppress addictive behavior. Unlike revenge, which fuels repeated cycles of pain and aggression, forgiveness actually reduces the original hurt. It quiets the pain response and deactivates the brain’s craving for retaliation.
One experiment used the ultimatum game to explore this. Participants received unfair offers from partners, triggering emotional discomfort. They could either retaliate – by rejecting the offer and ensuring no one received money – or accept it and move on. Brain scans showed that participants who forgave activated regions involved in cognitive control, like the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, while dampening activity in the reward network. In short, they broke the loop.
More than just calming revenge urges, forgiveness has profound health effects. Studies show it reduces anxiety, depression, and even physical ailments like high blood pressure and sleep issues. It improves resilience, emotional well-being, and the ability to think clearly under stress. And it works independently of religion or philosophy – anyone can access these benefits.
What this means is that forgiveness isn’t a gift for the person who hurt you. It’s your brain’s way of healing itself. And when practiced intentionally, it’s one of the most reliable methods for escaping the addictive pull of revenge.
Understanding the brain’s capacity to forgive is a critical first step – but putting that understanding into practice requires real, structured tools for change.
If revenge behaves like an addiction, then breaking free from it requires more than willpower. You need a strategy that directly engages the craving, allowing it to be expressed safely, without causing harm to yourself or anyone else. One powerful method for this is called the Nonjustice System – a guided mental courtroom that gives you space to confront what happened, speak your truth, and release the urge to retaliate.
To try it, find a quiet, private place where you feel safe. Then, imagine yourself stepping into a courtroom in your mind. You’ll take on every role: the victim, the prosecutor, the defense attorney, the judge, even the warden. Start by testifying as yourself. Describe in detail what happened, how it affected you, and what you wish the person would be held accountable for. Be specific. Then, step into the role of the person who wronged you. Explain what happened from their point of view – even if it feels uncomfortable.
Next, as the judge, decide the verdict. If they’re guilty, choose a punishment. It can be anything, and you’re in full control. Then imagine, as the warden, what it would be like to carry it out. What does it look and feel like when justice is served? What changes, and what doesn’t?
Finally, step into a grander courtroom – a place where you can reflect on everything that’s just unfolded. Consider whether that person, and the pain they caused, exist anywhere now beyond your own thoughts. You’re not expected to forgive. But you’re invited to stop pursuing justice, just for a moment, and see what it’s like to let go. Then, from the judge’s bench, you’re asked a final question: Do you want to stay in this trial forever – or are you ready to set yourself free?
This process isn’t magic, and it’s not a replacement for professional help. If you’re dealing with real trauma, always speak with a doctor before trying it. But for many people, this mental courtroom can be a place to process pain – and finally walk away from the grip of revenge.
The main takeaway of this lesson to The Science of Revenge by James Kimmel, Jr. is that revenge functions like an addiction, driven by the brain’s reward system and sustained by unresolved emotional pain. When this cycle goes unchecked, it fuels personal harm and large-scale violence, from mass shootings to political atrocities. Recognizing revenge as a brain-based craving – not a moral failure – makes it possible to interrupt. Forgiveness and structured mental practices like the Nonjustice System can reduce those cravings and restore control. By using practical tools, you can break the habit of retaliation and choose a healthier response to being hurt.
The Science of Revenge (2025) explores how the desire for vengeance functions like an addictive behavior, hijacking the brain’s reward system much like drugs do. It combines neuroscience, psychology, and real-life stories to explain why people become consumed by revenge – and how they can break free from its grip.
Revenge is one of the most intense emotions people experience. It can feel urgent, justified, even necessary. But what starts as a response to being hurt often leads to more damage – both for the person seeking revenge and those around them. From minor grudges to large-scale violence, the craving to get even follows a recognizable psychological pattern – one that can take over your thoughts and behavior.
In this lesson, you’ll learn how revenge functions like an addiction, how it rewires the brain through cycles of pain and craving, and how it has shaped violence throughout history – from personal conflicts to mass atrocities. You’ll also see how forgiveness and targeted mental health strategies can interrupt this cycle, and offer a path toward genuine relief and self-control.
To understand how revenge gains such a grip on us, let’s start by looking at what happens inside the brain when we’re driven to strike back.
You’re playing an online game with two other people. At first, everything seems normal – each of you tossing a virtual ball back and forth. But suddenly, they stop throwing the ball to you. They pass it only to each other, ignoring you entirely. You’ve been excluded. Now imagine being given the chance to get even.
This thought experiment is part of a real psychological study used to simulate social rejection. In follow-up tasks, participants were asked to stick pins in virtual voodoo dolls representing those who excluded them, or to deliver loud noise blasts as punishment. The result? The more rejected participants felt, the more aggressively they retaliated – and the more pleasure they reported from doing so.
Brain scans of participants during these experiments reveal what’s happening beneath the surface. When they’re excluded during these virtual ball games, their anterior insula – the region linked to social and physical pain – lights up. Rejection is neurologically painful. But when they retaliate – by stabbing a virtual doll or blasting their excluders with noise – another region lights up: the nucleus accumbens, the brain’s reward hub. This area releases dopamine, the same neurotransmitter that fuels cravings in drug and gambling addictions. In other words, getting even delivers a chemical hit that makes revenge neurologically rewarding.
The power of this craving was on display at a conference where – after reading a fictional story about a man who sacrificed someone’s pet in a dogfight – a group of trained psychiatrists voted enthusiastically to sentence the character to be torn apart by dogs. These were professionals trained to empathize and heal. Yet, momentarily immersed in grievance, even they craved harsh retaliation.
Understanding how easily the brain can be hijacked by the desire for revenge is key, because real danger lies in what happens when this craving intensifies. Petty acts of spite can escalate into something far more destructive, with consequences that reach well beyond the individual.
When people think about mass murderers, they often assume they must be suffering from serious mental illnesses like psychosis or schizophrenia. But research tells a different story. The vast majority of these attackers don’t show signs of traditional psychiatric disorders. What they do have in common is a deep and obsessive focus on grievances – real or imagined – and a powerful urge to retaliate. This need for revenge doesn’t come from nowhere. It builds over time, reinforced in the brain in the same way as an addiction.
Across hundreds of cases, revenge is the most common motive behind mass killings. These individuals tend to be isolated and angry, often collecting slights and perceived betrayals over months or years. That long-term rumination creates a cycle of craving and relief in the brain’s reward system, particularly in areas that also light up in substance abuse. Grievances trigger feelings of pain and humiliation, and planning revenge becomes a source of emotional reward. Just like an addict chasing a high, the attacker becomes consumed by the desire for emotional relief through violence.
What’s striking is that many mass killers don’t hide this process. A surprising number leave behind manifestos explaining exactly how their resentment grew and why they believed violence was the only option. Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007, described feeling violated, erased, and excluded. His language reflected extreme pain and a belief that inflicting suffering would restore his lost dignity. His writings reveal someone both aware of the consequences and tormented by a compulsion he couldn’t resist.
Another attacker, Andre Bing, shot six of his coworkers at a Walmart in 2022. He described being mocked, humiliated, and betrayed – and feeling controlled by something he didn’t understand. In both cases, the killers expressed some awareness that they were not well, but saw no way out of the craving to hurt others.
Identifying this addictive loop of grievance and revenge isn’t included in assessments aiming to prevent violent acts. Recognizing it for what it is – a serious, often fatal mental illness – could open the door to better early intervention, and possibly prevent future tragedies.
While these tragedies often unfold in isolation, history shows what happens when the same compulsive drive for revenge is magnified through political power.
Revenge has shaped some of history’s most brutal regimes. Political leaders like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong used it as both a justification for violence and as a guiding principle of governance. They built entire systems around grievance – identifying enemies, stoking resentment, and rewarding acts of retaliation. The result was suffering on an unprecedented scale.
Adolf Hitler didn’t start as a genocidal dictator. Early on, he was an aspiring artist rejected by Vienna’s elite and left struggling in poverty. Over time, he built up grievances – personal, political, and national – until he believed Germany had been humiliated by its own politicians and betrayed from within. He wasn’t satisfied with war victory; he wanted revenge for the emotional pain of perceived national betrayal. Over two decades, he transformed Germany into a revenge delivery machine, fueling national outrage, building systems to identify and destroy scapegoats, and channeling a collective sense of grievance into violent action. Nearly six million Jews were killed, along with tens of millions of others – enemy soldiers, civilians, even fellow Germans – because he convinced a nation that it had been wronged and deserved payback.
Joseph Stalin followed a similar pattern. Shaped by childhood abuse and a culture steeped in blood feuds, he found personal satisfaction in selecting targets and watching them suffer. His purges weren’t random – they were methodical campaigns designed to scratch the itch of betrayal. He turned paranoia into policy, built elaborate show trials to justify executions, and had former allies tortured and killed to satisfy his sense of being undermined. His war on perceived traitors led to mass starvation, executions, and repression that killed around 20 million people.
Mao Zedong took this further by turning everyday citizens into instruments of revenge. Rather than using secret police alone, he encouraged ordinary people to publicly humiliate, torture, and kill one another over class-based grievances. His policies killed millions and addicted a population to retaliatory violence under the guise of justice and reform.
What connects these violent leaders? It’s the same compulsive cycle seen in school shooters and domestic abusers – an endless drive to feed a craving that grows stronger the more it’s indulged. And when that drive is scaled up to fit a government, the consequences can be measured in tens of millions of lives.
Looking at these leaders individually is revealing, but the broader picture shows that this pattern has been present in human history for thousands of years.
You might think something as dangerous and widespread as revenge addiction would be more widely recognized. But like many major breakthroughs in science, some truths hide in plain sight for centuries. The bubonic plague, for example, killed millions over a thousand years before anyone discovered it was caused by bacteria. Until then, people blamed evil spirits or divine punishment. A similar misunderstanding surrounds human violence. For thousands of years, acts of mass cruelty and destruction have been attributed to evil, fate, or ideology – when many may have actually been driven by a psychological compulsion to seek revenge.
The earliest evidence of murder in fossil records – a hominin skull with trauma from a weapon – dates back over 400,000 years and likely reflects the beginnings of interpersonal revenge. And some of the world’s most enduring stories, like Cain and Abel, follow the structure of grievance, emotional pain, and retaliatory violence. These moral myths mirror the addictive cycle of revenge we now see reflected in neuroscience.
This pattern continues through recorded history. The Old Testament, for instance, documents an escalating sequence of violence where personal and collective revenge drives massive bloodshed, often justified by divine command. Religious figures like Moses, David, and Joshua act not just as leaders, but as revenge seekers. Even God is portrayed as unleashing destruction in response to betrayal and wrongdoing – only to later express remorse and vow to stop.
The compulsion to retaliate didn’t end in ancient scripture. Roman emperors staged public executions to fuel revenge cravings in the crowd, while the Christian Inquisition institutionalized torture and burning as righteous punishment. Revenge has been built into religious and political systems across cultures, despite teachings on forgiveness.
By analyzing historical data on the world’s deadliest atrocities – from the Crusades to the world wars – a clear pattern emerges. Revenge was a key driver behind most of the largest mass killings in history. Taken together, hundreds of millions of lives have been lost because of this powerful psychological force.
Understanding revenge as an addiction reframes the entire history of human violence. And recognizing the scale of this problem invites an important question – if revenge addiction is so powerful and widespread, is there any reliable way to stop it?
The idea of forgiveness often feels moral or spiritual, but your brain treats it as something far more practical: a built-in mechanism for managing pain and preventing destructive behavior. As you now know, when someone wrongs you, your brain responds with pain – specifically in areas like the anterior insula, the same network activated during physical injury. To relieve that discomfort, your brain looks for a reward. That’s where revenge comes in. Retaliating brings a temporary surge of pleasure through a dopamine hit in your reward system. But like all addictive highs, it quickly fades, leaving the pain intact and increasing the craving to strike back.
Forgiveness, on the other hand, offers a completely different neurobiological pathway. Brain imaging studies show that when people suppress the urge to retaliate and instead accept or reframe an unfair experience, different areas of the brain light up – primarily regions in the prefrontal cortex associated with emotional regulation and self-control. These are the same circuits that help suppress addictive behavior. Unlike revenge, which fuels repeated cycles of pain and aggression, forgiveness actually reduces the original hurt. It quiets the pain response and deactivates the brain’s craving for retaliation.
One experiment used the ultimatum game to explore this. Participants received unfair offers from partners, triggering emotional discomfort. They could either retaliate – by rejecting the offer and ensuring no one received money – or accept it and move on. Brain scans showed that participants who forgave activated regions involved in cognitive control, like the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, while dampening activity in the reward network. In short, they broke the loop.
More than just calming revenge urges, forgiveness has profound health effects. Studies show it reduces anxiety, depression, and even physical ailments like high blood pressure and sleep issues. It improves resilience, emotional well-being, and the ability to think clearly under stress. And it works independently of religion or philosophy – anyone can access these benefits.
What this means is that forgiveness isn’t a gift for the person who hurt you. It’s your brain’s way of healing itself. And when practiced intentionally, it’s one of the most reliable methods for escaping the addictive pull of revenge.
Understanding the brain’s capacity to forgive is a critical first step – but putting that understanding into practice requires real, structured tools for change.
If revenge behaves like an addiction, then breaking free from it requires more than willpower. You need a strategy that directly engages the craving, allowing it to be expressed safely, without causing harm to yourself or anyone else. One powerful method for this is called the Nonjustice System – a guided mental courtroom that gives you space to confront what happened, speak your truth, and release the urge to retaliate.
To try it, find a quiet, private place where you feel safe. Then, imagine yourself stepping into a courtroom in your mind. You’ll take on every role: the victim, the prosecutor, the defense attorney, the judge, even the warden. Start by testifying as yourself. Describe in detail what happened, how it affected you, and what you wish the person would be held accountable for. Be specific. Then, step into the role of the person who wronged you. Explain what happened from their point of view – even if it feels uncomfortable.
Next, as the judge, decide the verdict. If they’re guilty, choose a punishment. It can be anything, and you’re in full control. Then imagine, as the warden, what it would be like to carry it out. What does it look and feel like when justice is served? What changes, and what doesn’t?
Finally, step into a grander courtroom – a place where you can reflect on everything that’s just unfolded. Consider whether that person, and the pain they caused, exist anywhere now beyond your own thoughts. You’re not expected to forgive. But you’re invited to stop pursuing justice, just for a moment, and see what it’s like to let go. Then, from the judge’s bench, you’re asked a final question: Do you want to stay in this trial forever – or are you ready to set yourself free?
This process isn’t magic, and it’s not a replacement for professional help. If you’re dealing with real trauma, always speak with a doctor before trying it. But for many people, this mental courtroom can be a place to process pain – and finally walk away from the grip of revenge.
The main takeaway of this lesson to The Science of Revenge by James Kimmel, Jr. is that revenge functions like an addiction, driven by the brain’s reward system and sustained by unresolved emotional pain. When this cycle goes unchecked, it fuels personal harm and large-scale violence, from mass shootings to political atrocities. Recognizing revenge as a brain-based craving – not a moral failure – makes it possible to interrupt. Forgiveness and structured mental practices like the Nonjustice System can reduce those cravings and restore control. By using practical tools, you can break the habit of retaliation and choose a healthier response to being hurt.
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