Chapter 5
The Case for Revenge

What Makes Us Seek Justice?

In Alexandre Dumas’ novel The Count of Monte Cristo, the protagonist, Edmond Dantès, spends many years suffering in prison under false charges. He eventually escapes and finds a treasure left to him by a fellow prisoner that transforms his life. Under an assumed identity as the Count of Monte Cristo, he uses every ounce of his wealth and wit to entrap and manipulate his betrayers, exacting terrible revenge on them and their families. After surveying the human wreckage in his wake, the count finally realizes that he has taken his desire for revenge too far.

Given the opportunity, most of us are generally more than happy to seek revenge, though few of us take it to the extremes that Dantès did. Revenge is one of the deepest-seated instincts we have. Throughout history, oceans of blood have been spilled and an endless number of lives ruined in an effort to settle scores—even when nothing good could possibly come of it.

BUT IMAGINE THIS scenario: You and I live two thousand years ago in an ancient desert land, and I have a handsome young donkey that you want to steal. If you thought I was a rational decision maker, you might say to yourself, “It took Dan Ariely ten full days of digging wells to earn enough money to buy that gorgeous beast. If I steal it one night and escape to a faraway place, Dan will probably decide that it’s not worth his time to chase me. Instead, he’ll just take it as a business loss and go dig more wells in order to make enough money to buy a new donkey.” But if you know that I’m not always rational and that in fact I’m the dark-souled, vengeful type who would chase you to the ends of the earth, take back not only my donkey but all of your goats, and leave you a bloody mess to boot—would you go ahead and steal my donkey? My guess is that you would not.

From this perspective, despite all the harm caused by revenge (and anyone who has ever gone through a bad breakup or divorce knows what I am talking about), it seems that the threat of revenge—even at great personal expense—can serve as an effective enforcement mechanism that supports social cooperation and order. Though I’m hardly recommending taking “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” I do suspect that, overall, the threat of vengeance can have a certain efficacy.*

What, exactly, are the mechanics and motivations underlying this primal urge? Under what circumstances do people want to take revenge? What drives us to spend our own time, money, and energy and even take risks just to make another party suffer?

The Pleasure of Punishment

To begin to understand how deeply the human desire for vengeance runs, I invite you to consider a study conducted by a group of Swiss researchers led by Ernst Fehr, who examined revenge using a version of an experimental game we call the Trust Game. Here are the rules, which are explained in detail to all participants.

You are paired with another participant. You are kept in separate rooms, and you will never know each other’s identity. The experimenter gives each of you $10. You get to make the first move. You must decide whether to send your money over to the other participant or keep it for yourself. If you keep it, both of you get to keep your $10 and the game is over. However, if you send the other player your money, the experimenter quadruples the amount—so that the other player has their original $10 plus $40 (the $10 multiplied by four). The other player now has a choice: (a) to keep all the money, which means that they would get $50 and you would get nothing; or (b) to send half the money back to you, which means that each of you would end up with $25.*

The question, of course, is whether you will trust the other person. Do you send them the money—potentially sacrificing your financial gain? And will the other person justify your trust and share the earnings with you? The prediction of rational economics is very simple: no one would ever give back half of their $50, and, since this behavior is so glaringly predictable from a rational economic perspective, no one would ever send over their $10 in the first place. In this case, the simple economic theory is inaccurate: the good news is that people are more trusting and more reciprocating than rational economics would have us believe. Many people end up passing along their $10, and their partners often reciprocate by sending $25 back.

This is the basic trust game, but the Swiss version included another interesting step: if your partner chooses to keep all $50 for himself, you can use your own money to punish the bastard. For each dollar of your own hard-earned money that you give the experimenter, $2 will be extracted from your greedy partner. This means that if you decide to spend, say, $2 of your own money, your partner will lose $4, and if you decide to spend $25, your partner will lose all his winnings. If you were playing the game and the other person betrayed your trust, would you choose this costly revenge? Would you sacrifice your own money to make the other player suffer? How much would you spend?

The experiment showed that many of the people who had the opportunity to exact revenge on their partners did so, and they punished severely. Yet this finding was not the most interesting part of the study. While making their decisions, the participants’ brains were being scanned by positron emission tomography (PET). This way, the experimenters could observe participants’ brain activity while they were making their decisions. The results showed increased activity in the striatum, which is a part of the brain associated with the way we experience reward. In other words, according to the PET scan, it looked as though the decision to punish others was related to a feeling of pleasure. What’s more, those who had a high level of striatum activation punished others to a greater degree.

All of this suggests that punishing betrayal, even when it costs us something, has biological underpinnings. And this behavior is, in fact, pleasurable (or at least elicits a reaction similar to pleasure).

THE URGE TO punish exists in animals, too. In an experiment carried out at the Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, Keith Jensen, Josep Call, and Michael Tomasello wanted to find out whether chimpanzees had a sense of fairness. Their experimental setup called for putting two chimps in two neighboring cages and placing a table piled high with food within both their reach, just outside the cages. The table was equipped with roller wheels and a rope on each end. The chimps could grab the table and move it closer to or farther from their cage. The rope was connected to the bottom of the table. If a chimp pulled the rope, the table would collapse and all the food would spill onto the floor and out of reach.

When the researchers placed one chimp in one of the cages and left the other cage empty, the chimp pulled the table over, ate contentedly, and didn’t pull the rope. However, things changed when a second chimp was put in a neighboring cage. As long as both chimps shared the food, all was well; but if one happened to roll the table very close to its own cage and out of the reach of the other chimp, the annoyed animal would often pull on the “revenge rope” and collapse the table. Not only that, but the researchers reported that when the table rolled away from them, the annoyed chimps exploded in rage, turning into screeching black furballs. The similarity between humans and chimps suggests that both have an inherent sense of justice and that revenge, even at personal expense, plays a deep role in the social order of both primates and people.

BUT THERE IS more to revenge than merely satisfying a personal desire to get back at the other guy. Revenge and trust are, in fact, opposite sides of the same coin. As we saw in the trust game, people are generally willing to put their faith in others, even in people they don’t know and will never meet (this means that, from a rational economics point of view, people are too trusting). This basic element of trust is also why we get so upset when the social contract, founded on trust, is violated—and why under these circumstances we are willing to spend our own time and money, and sometimes take physical risks, to punish the offenders. Trusting societies have tremendous benefits over nontrusting societies, and we are designed to instinctively try to maintain a high level of trust in our society.


A LAWMAKER’S ANGER

The following excerpt of a letter from an anonymous lawmaker posted on the politically progressive Web site Open Left does a good job of describing the rage many people felt in response to the 2008 banking bailout:9

Paulsen and congressional Republicans, or the few that will actually vote for this (most will be unwilling to take responsibility for the consequences of their policies), have said that there can’t be any “add ons,” or addition provisions. Fuck that. I don’t really want to trigger a worldwide depression (that’s not hyperbole, that’s a distinct possibility), but I’m not voting for a blank check for $700 billion for those mother fuckers.

Nancy [Pelosi] said she wanted to include the second “stimulus” package that the Bush Administration and congressional Republicans have blocked. I don’t want to trade a $700 billion dollar giveaway to the most unsympathetic human beings on the planet for a few fucking bridges. I want reforms of the industry, and I want it to be as punitive as possible.

Henry Waxman has suggested corporate government reforms, including CEO compensation, as the price for this. Some members have publicly suggested allowing modification of mortgages in bankruptcy, and the House Judiciary Committee staff is also very interested in that. That’s a real possibility.

We may strip out all the gives to industry in the predatory mortgage lending bill that the House passed last November, which hasn’t budged in the Senate, and include that in the bill. There are other ideas on the table but they are going to be tough to work out before next week. I also find myself drawn to provisions that would serve no useful purpose except to insult the industry, like requiring the CEOs, CFOs and the chair of the board of any entity that sells mortgage related securities to the Treasury Department to certify that they have completed an approved course in credit counseling. That is now required of consumers filing bankruptcy to make sure they feel properly humiliated for being head over heels in debt, although most lost control of their finances because of a serious illness in the family. That would just be petty and childish, and completely in character for me. I’m open to other ideas, and I am looking for volunteers who want to hold the sons of bitches so I can beat the crap out of them.


Rotten Tomatoes for Bankers

Not surprisingly, the desire for revenge struck many a citizen in the wake of the financial meltdown of 2008. As a result of the collapse of the mortgage-backed securities market, institutional banks fell like dominoes. In May 2008, JPMorgan Chase acquired Bear Stearns. On September 7, the government stepped in to rescue Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. A week later, on September 14, Merrill Lynch was sold to Bank of America. The following day, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. The day after that (September 16), the U.S. Federal Reserve loaned money to AIG to prevent the company’s collapse. On September 25, Washington Mutual’s banking subsidiaries were partially sold to JPMorgan Chase, and the following day, Washington Mutual’s holding company and remaining subsidiary filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

On Monday, September 29, Congress voted against the bailout package proposed by President George W. Bush, resulting in a 778-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. And while the government worked to build a package that would pass, Wachovia became another casualty as it entered talks with Citigroup and Wells Fargo (the latter bought the bank on October 3).

When I looked around at the outraged public reaction to the $700 billion–plus bank bailout plan, it seemed as if people really wanted to bust the chops of the bankers who had flushed their portfolios down the toilet. One nearly apoplectic friend of mine promoted the idea of an old-fashioned solution: “Instead of taxing us to bail out those crooks,” he ranted, “Congress should put them in wooden stocks, with their feet and hands and heads sticking out. I bet everyone in America would give big bucks for the joy of throwing rotten tomatoes at them!”

Now consider what transpired from the perspective of the trust game. We entrusted those bankers with our retirement funds, our savings, and our mortgages. Essentially, they walked away with the $50 (you may want to put a few zeroes behind that). As a consequence, we felt betrayed and angry, and we wanted the bankers to pay dearly.

To set the economy right, the world’s central banks tried to infuse money into the system, give short-term loans to banks, increase liquidity, buy back mortgage-backed securities, and every other trick in the book. But these extreme measures did not achieve the desired effect in terms of economic recovery, especially if you consider the relatively pitiful impact that the massive injection of money actually had on restoring the economy.* The public remained livid, because the central issue of rebuilding trust was neglected. In fact, I suspect that the public trust was further eroded by three things: the version of the bailout legislation that eventually passed (which involved multiple unrelated tax cuts); the outrageous bonuses paid to people in the financial industry; and the back-to-business-as-usual attitude on Wall Street.

Customer Revenge: My Story, Part I

When our son, Amit, was three years old and Sumi and I were expecting our second child, Neta, we decided to buy a new family car and ended up with a small Audi. It was not a minivan, but it was red (the safest color!) and a hatchback (versatile!). Moreover, the company had a reputation for great customer service, and the car came with four years of free oil changes. This little Audi felt great—it was peppy and stylish, it handled well, and we loved it.

We were living in Princeton, New Jersey, at the time, and the distance from our apartment at the Institute for Advanced Study to Amit’s day care was two hundred yards. The distance to my office was about four hundred yards, so driving opportunities were limited to occasional grocery-shopping trips and my bimonthly visits to MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. On the nights before I was due at MIT, I would usually leave Princeton at about 8:00 P.M. in order to avoid the traffic, and I would arrive in Cambridge sometime after midnight; on the way back to Princeton, I followed the same procedure.

On one such occasion, I left MIT at about 8:00 P.M. with Leonard Lee, a colleague from Columbia University whose visit to Boston coincided with mine. Leonard and I hadn’t had a lot of time to talk over the previous few months, so we were both looking forward to the ride. About an hour into our journey, I was driving about seventy miles per hour in the left-hand lane on the busy Massachusetts Turnpike when, all of a sudden, the engine stopped responding to the gas pedal. I let my foot off the pedal and pressed it again. The car revved in response, but there was no change in speed. It was as if we were coasting in neutral.

The car was losing speed fast. I switched on the right-turn signal and looked over my right shoulder. Two eighteen-wheeler trucks, one after the other, were bearing down on me and seemed unimpressed with my signaling. There was no way to get over. After the trucks passed, I tried to push my way into the right lane, but the distance Boston drivers generally maintain from the car in front of them is visible only with a good microscope.

Meanwhile, my typically chatty, smiling colleague was noticeably unchatty and unsmiling. When the speed of the car dropped to 30 mph, I finally managed to push my way into the right lane and from there onto the shoulder, my heart in my throat. I didn’t make it all the way to the extreme right because the car had lost all of its speed, but at least we were out of the driving lanes.

I turned the car off, waited a few minutes, and then tried to restart it to see whether the transmission would engage. It would not. I opened the hood and gazed at the engine. When I was younger, I could make sense of a car engine. In the old days, you could see the carburetor, the pistons, the spark plugs, and some of the hoses and belts; but this new Audi had a big block of metal with no visible parts. So I gave up and called roadside assistance. An hour later, we were towed back to Boston.

In the morning, I called Audi customer service and described the experience, as vividly and graphically as I could, to the customer service representative. I went into fine detail about the trucks, the fear of not being able to make it off the highway, the fact that I had a passenger whose life was in my hands, and the difficulty of navigating a car without a functioning engine. The woman on the other end of the line sounded as if she were reading from a script. “I am sorry about your inconvenience,” she sniffed.

Her tone made me want to grab her throat through the phone line. Here I was, having had what felt like a near-death experience—not to mention having had a five-month-old car break down on me—and the best description she could come up with for the ordeal was “inconvenience.” I could just see her sitting there, filing her fingernails.

The subsequent dialogue went something like this:

SHE: Are you currently in your hometown?

ME: No. I currently live in New Jersey, and I am stuck in Massachusetts.

SHE: Strange. Our records indicate that you live in Massachusetts.

ME: I usually live in Massachusetts, but I am spending two years in New Jersey. Also, I purchased the car in New Jersey.

SHE: We have a reimbursement policy for people who get stuck out of town. We can pay their flight or train ticket to help them get back home. But since our records show that you live in Massachusetts, you are not eligible for any of these.

ME (voice rising): You mean to tell me that it is my fault that your record-keeping is faulty? I can provide all the proof you want that I’m now living in New Jersey.

SHE: Sorry. We go by our records.

ME (deciding not to push the point for the sake of getting my car fixed quickly): What about my car?

SHE: I will call the dealership and keep you posted.

Later that day, I learned that it would take the dealership at least four days to even look at my car. I rented a car, and Leonard and I struck out again—this time with more success.

I called Audi customer service two or three times each week over the next month, talking with customer service representatives and supervisors of all levels, asking each time for more information about the state of my car, to no good effect. After each call, my mood took a turn for the worse. I realized three things: that something very bad had happened to my car; that Audi customer service was going to take as little responsibility as possible; and that from then on, I would not be able to enjoy driving my car in the same way because my experience was now tainted by a lot of negative feelings.

I have a friend in the district attorney’s office in Massachusetts who gave me the regulations for the “lemon law.”* So I called Audi’s customer service in order to talk to the people there about it. The person on the other end of the phone was surprised to learn that there was something called a lemon law. She invited me to pursue a legal recourse (I could imagine her smiling and thinking “And our lawyers will be very pleased to engage your lawyer in a long and costly process”).

After that conversation, it was clear that I didn’t stand a chance. Hiring a lawyer to resolve the dispute would cost me much more than simply selling the car and accepting the loss. About a month after the car originally broke, it was finally fixed. I drove the rental car back to Boston, got into my Audi, and returned to Princeton with much less joy than usual. I felt helpless and frustrated by the whole experience. Of course I was disappointed that the car had broken down in the first place, but I also understood that cars are mechanical things that break from time to time—there’s nothing much to be done about it. It just happened that I’d had the bad luck to buy a defective car. What really annoyed me was the way I was treated by the people in customer service. Their clear lack of concern and their strategy of playing a game of attrition with me angered me. I wanted the people at Audi to feel some pain as well.

Don’t Touch That Phone

Later on, I had a wonderful venting session with one of my good friends, Ayelet Gneezy (a professor at the University of California at San Diego). She understood my desire to get back at Audi and suggested that we look into the phenomenon together. We decided to carry out some experiments on consumer revenge, hoping that in the process we would be able to better understand our own vengeful feelings and behavior.

Our first task was to create experimental conditions that would make our participants want to take revenge against us. That doesn’t sound like a good thing, but we needed to do it to measure the extent of vengeful behavior. The ideal setup for such an experiment would be to re-create a high level of customer annoyance—something like my Audi customer service story. Though Audi seemed very happy to annoy me, we suspected that it would not be willing to annoy half the people who called its customer support line and not annoy the other half—just to help with our research project. So we had to try to set up something analogous.

Though in some ways it would have been nice—for experimental reasons—to create a dramatic irritation for our participants, we didn’t want people to go to jail or blood to be spilled—especially ours. Not to mention that it would be at least slightly unethical to subject participants to substantial emotional duress for the purpose of studying revenge. For research reasons, we also preferred an experiment that would involve only a low level of consumer annoyance. Why? Because if we could establish that even a low level of irritation is sufficient to make people feel and act vengeful, we could extrapolate that in the real world, where annoying actions can be much more potent, the probability of vengeance would be much higher.

We had lots of fun coming up with ways to annoy people. We contemplated having the experimenter eat garlic and breathe on the participants while explaining a task, spill something on them, or step on their toes. Eventually, though, we decided to have the experimenter pick up his cell phone in the middle of explaining a task, talk to someone else for a few seconds, hang up, and, without acknowledging the interruption, continue explaining the task to them from the place where he had left off. We figured that this was less invasive and unsanitary than our other ideas.

So we had our annoyance of choice, but what opportunity for revenge would we give participants, and how would we measure it? We can divide the types of vengeful acts into two classes that we call “weak” and “strong.” Weak revenge is the type that falls within acceptable moral and legal behavioral norms, as when I complain loudly to neighbors and friends (and you, dear reader) about Audi’s abysmal customer service. It is perfectly okay to behave this way, and no one will say that I have sidestepped any norms when expressing myself. Revenge becomes strong when one strays beyond the acceptable norms to inflict revenge upon the offending party, in the form of, say, breaking a window, creating some physical damage, or stealing from the offending party. We decided to go for the strong revenge type, and here is what we came up with.

Daniel Berger-Jones, age twenty, talented, bright, and good-looking (tall, dark-haired, broad-shouldered, and blessed with a swashbuckling scar on his left cheek). An unemployed acting student at Boston University, he was exactly what we were looking for. Ayelet and I hired Daniel for the summer to annoy people in the ubiquitous Boston coffee shops. Being a good actor, Daniel could easily irritate people while maintaining a charmingly straight face; he could also repeat his performances consistently, time after time.

Having established himself in a coffee shop, Daniel watched for people entering alone. After they’d settled into a chair with their drink, he approached them and said, “Excuse me, would you be willing to participate in a five-minute task in return for five dollars?” Most people were delighted to do so, since the $5 would more than cover the cost of their coffee. When they agreed, Daniel handed them ten sheets of paper covered with random letters (much like the ones we used in the letters experiment described in chapter 2, “The Meaning of Labor”).

“Here’s what I’d like you to do,” he would instruct each person. “Find as many adjacent Ss as possible and circle them. If you finish all the letter pairs in one sheet, move on to the next one. Once the five minutes are up, I will come back, collect the sheets, and pay you the five dollars. Do you have any questions?”

Five minutes later, Daniel would return to the table, collect the sheets, and hand the participants a small stack of $1 bills, along with a prewritten receipt that read:

I, _______________________, received $5 for participating in an experiment.

             (name here)

Signature: _____________________ Date: _____________________

“Please count the money, sign the receipt, and leave it on the table. I’ll be back to collect it later,” Daniel said. Then he left to look for another eager participant. This was the control, the no-annoyance condition.

Another set of customers—those in the annoyance condition—experienced a slightly different Daniel. In the midst of explaining the task, he pretended that his cell phone was vibrating. He reached into his pocket, took out the phone, and said, “Hi, Mike. What’s up?” After a short pause, he would enthusiastically say, “Pizza tonight at eight thirty. My place or yours?” Then he would end his call with “Later.” The whole fake conversation took about twelve seconds.

After Daniel slipped the cell phone back into his pocket, he made no reference to the disruption and simply continued describing the task. From that point on, everything was the same as in the control condition.

We expected the people who experienced the phone call interruption to be more annoyed and more willing to seek revenge, but how did we measure the extent to which they sought it? When Daniel handed all the participants the stack of bills, he told them, “Here is your five dollars. Please count it and sign the receipt.” But in fact, he always gave them too much money, as if by mistake. Sometimes he gave them $6, sometimes $7, and sometimes $9. We were interested in finding out whether the participants, thinking that they were overpaid by mistake, would exhibit strong revenge by violating a social norm (in this case, keeping the extra change) or give it back. We particularly wanted to measure the extent to which people would keep the extra cash would increase following the twelve-second phone interruption—which would give us our measure of revenge. We also chose this approach because it was similar to the revenge opportunities people have every day. Imagine you go to a restaurant and discover that the server made some mistake with the bill—do you let him know or keep the loot? And what if the server has annoyed you? Would you be even more likely to turn a blind eye to the mistake?

Faced with this basic dilemma, what did our participants do? The amount of extra money participants received ($1, $2, or $4) had no impact on their tendency to turn a blind eye to the extra cash. Daniel’s taking the phone call in the midst of instructing them, however, made a big difference. A mere 14 percent of the participants who experienced Daniel’s rude side returned the additional money, compared to 45 percent of those in the no-annoyance condition. The fact that only 45 percent of people returned the extra cash even when they were not annoyed is a sad state of affairs, to be sure. But it was truly disturbing that a twelve-second phone call vastly decreased the likelihood that the participants would return the cash to the point where just a small minority of people made the honest choice.

The Very Bad Hotel and Other Stories

Amazingly, I discovered I am not the only human who has taken offense after being mistreated by customer representatives. Take the businessmen Tom Farmer and Shane Atchison, for example. If you search for them on the Internet, you will find an amusing presentation called “Yours Is a Very Bad Hotel,”10 an interesting PowerPoint act of comeuppance against the management of the Doubletree Club hotel in Houston.

One cold night in 2001, the two businessmen showed up at the hotel, where they had guaranteed and confirmed reservations. Sadly, upon arrival, they were told that the hotel was overbooked and that there was only one room available, but it was off limits due to air-conditioning and plumbing problems. Though the news was obviously annoying, what really irritated Farmer and Atchison was the nonchalant attitude of Mike, the night clerk.

Mike failed to make any effort to find them alternate accommodations or help them in any way. In fact, his rude, unapologetic, and dismissive behavior infuriated Farmer and Atchison far more than the problem with the room itself. Since Mike was the service representative, they felt it was his job to demonstrate some compassion, and when he didn’t, they got mad and got even. Like all good consultants, they prepared a PowerPoint presentation. Theirs described the sequence of events—complete with humorous quotes from “Night Clerk Mike.” They included the calculated potential income that his incompetence would cost the hotel chain, along with the likelihood that they would ever return to the Doubletree Club hotel.

For example, in slide 15 of their presentation, entitled “We Are Very Unlikely to Return to the Doubletree Club Houston,” Tom and Shane describe their probability of ever going back:


WE ARE VERY UNLIKELY TO RETURN TO THE DOUBLETREE CLUB HOUSTON

• Lifetime chances of dying in a bathtub: 1 in 10,455

(National Safety Council)

• Chance of Earth being ejected from the solar system by the gravitational pull of a passing star: 1 in 2,200,000

(University of Michigan)

• Chance of winning the UK Lottery: 1 in 13,983,816

(UK Lottery)

• Chance of us returning to the Doubletree Club Houston: worse than any of those

(And what are the chances you’d save rooms for us anyway?)


The businessmen e-mailed the file to the general manager of the Doubletree Club hotel and their clients in Houston. After that, the presentation enjoyed viral fame on the Internet. In the end, Doubletree offered to make amends with Farmer and Atchison. The two asked only that Doubletree fix the customer service problem, which it reportedly did.

ANOTHER REVENGE STORY with a relatively good ending is that of the Neistat brothers, who created a video detailing their experience with Apple’s customer service. When one of the brothers’ iPod batteries died and they called to ask about a replacement, the customer service representative told them that since he’d had the iPod for more than the year of warranty, there would be a charge of $255, plus a mailing fee, to fix it. And then he added, “But at that price, you know, you might as well go get a new one.”

In response, the brothers spray-painted the words “IPOD’S UNREPLACEABLE BATTERY LASTS ONLY 18 MONTHS” onto all the multicolored iPod posters they could find on the streets of New York City. They also filmed their experience and posted it as “iPod’s Dirty Secret” on YouTube and other Web sites. Their actions forced Apple to change its policy about battery replacement. (Unfortunately, Apple continues to make iPods and iPhones with batteries that are difficult to replace.)*

Of course, the sine qua non of terrible customer service in the public consciousness is the airline business. Flying can often be a hostility-building exercise. On the security side, there are those invasive scans, including pat-downs of old ladies with hip replacements. We must take off our shoes and make sure our toothpaste, moisturizer, and other liquid items are limited to three ounces each and fit into a quart-sized, clear Ziploc bag. And, of course, there are countless other annoyances and frustrations including long lines, uncomfortable seats, and flight delays.

Over the years, airlines have started charging for just about everything, packing flights with as many seats and people as possible, leaving space between seats that are comfortable only for a small child. They charge for checked bags, water, and in-flight snacks. They’ve even optimized airtime by getting planes to spend more time in the air and less time on the ground, and, as a consequence, guess what happens when there is one delay? You got it—a long sequence of delays across numerous airports that are all attributed to bad weather somewhere (“Not our fault,” says the airline). As a result of all of these injuries and insults, passengers often feel angry and hostile, and express their frustration in all kinds of ways.

One such flying revenge seeker made me suffer on a flight from Chicago to Boston. On boarding the flight, I had the pleasure of being seated in a middle seat, 17B, stuffed between two hefty individuals who were spilling into my seat. Soon after takeoff, I reached for the airline magazine in the seat pocket. Instead of feeling the firm touch of paper, I felt a cold glob of what might politely be called leftovers. I took my hand out and squeezed my way out of the seat to the toilet in order to wash my hands. There I found the surfaces covered with toilet paper, the floor wet with urine, and the soap dispenser empty. The passengers on the previous flight, as well as the one whose seat I was now occupying, must have been angry indeed (this feeling might have also infected the cleaning and maintenance crew). I suspect that the person who left me the wet gift in the seat pocket, as well as the passengers who messed up the toilet, did not hate me personally. However, in their attempt to express their anger at the airline, they took out their feelings on other passengers, who were now more likely to take further revenge.

Look around. Do you notice a general revenge reaction on the part of the public in response to the increase of bad treatment on the part of companies and institutions? Do you encounter more rudeness, ignorance, nonchalance, and sometimes hostility in stores, on flights, at car rental counters, and so on than ever before? I am not sure who started this chicken-and-egg problem, but as we consumers encounter offensive service, we become angrier and tend to take it out on the next service provider—whether or not he or she is responsible for our bad experience. The people receiving our emotional outbursts then go on to serve other customers, but because they are in a worse mood themselves, they aren’t in a position to be courteous and polite. And so goes the carousel of annoyance, frustration, and revenge in an ever-escalating cycle.

Agents and Principals

One day, Ayelet and I went to lunch to talk about the experiments involving Daniel and his cell phone. A young waitress, barely out of her teens and seeming particularly distracted, took our order. Ayelet ordered a tuna sandwich and I asked for a Greek salad.

Several minutes later the waitress reappeared, bearing a Caesar salad and a turkey sandwich. Ayelet and I looked at each other and then at her.

“We didn’t order these,” I said.

“Oh, sorry. I’ll just take them back.”

Ayelet was hungry. She looked at me, and I shrugged. “It’s okay,” she said. “We’ll just eat these.”

The waitress gave us a despairing look. “I’m sorry,” she said and then disappeared.

“What if she makes a mistake on our bill and undercharges us?” Ayelet asked me. “Would we tell her about this mistake, or would we take revenge and not say anything?” This question was related to our first experiment, but it was also different in one important way. If the question was about the size of the tip we would leave the waitress, then the issue would be simple: she was the person offending us a bit (the principal in economics-speak), and as a punishment we would tip her a bit less. But a mistake on the bill would cost the restaurant, and not the waitress, in reduced revenues; in terms of the bill, the waitress was the agent, while the restaurant was the principal. If we detected a mistake in our bill but didn’t call attention to it because we were annoyed with her performance, the principal would pay for the mistake of the agent. Would we take revenge against the principal even if the mistake was the agent’s fault? And “what if,” we asked ourselves, “the waitress owned the restaurant?” In that case she would be both the principal and the agent. Would that situation make us more likely to take revenge against her?

Our speculation was that we would be much less likely to take revenge against the restaurant/principal if the waitress were just an agent and much more likely not to report the billing mistake if she were the principal. (In the end, there was no mistake on the bill, and though we were unhappy with the waitress’s service, we tipped her 15 percent anyway.) The idea that the distinction between agents and principals would make a difference in our tendency to take revenge looked reasonable to us. We decided to put our intuition to the test and study this problem in more detail.

Before I tell you what we did and what we found, imagine going into a corporate-owned clothing store one day and encountering a very annoying salesperson. She stands behind the counter, yakking with a colleague about the latest episode of American Idol, while you try to get her attention. You’re more than miffed by the fact that she’s ignoring you. You think about leaving, but you really like the shirts and sweater you’ve picked out, so in the end you toss down your plastic. Then you notice that the salesperson mistakenly forgets to scan the price of the sweater. You realize that underpaying will penalize the owner of the store (principal) and not the salesperson (agent). Do you keep quiet, or do you point out her mistake?

Now consider a slightly different case: You go to a privately owned clothing store, and here, too, you meet an annoying salesperson, who also happens to be the owner. Again, you have a chance to get a “free” sweater. In this case, the principal and the agent are the same person, and so not mentioning the omission would punish both. What would you do now? Would it make a difference if the person suffering from your revenge was also the one responsible for your anger?

THE SETUP FOR our next experiment was similar to the previous one in the coffee shop. But this time around, Daniel introduced himself to some of the coffee drinkers by saying “Hello, I’ve been hired by an MIT professor to work on a project.” In this condition, he was the agent, equivalent to the waitress or salesperson, and if an annoyed person decided to keep the extra cash, he would be hurting the principal (me). To other participants, Daniel said, “Hello, I’m working on my undergraduate thesis project. I’m paying for this project with my own funds.” Now he was the principal, like the owner of the restaurant or the store. Would the coffee-drinking Beantownies be more likely to seek revenge when their action would punish Daniel himself? Would they react in a similar way regardless of who got hurt?

The results were depressing. As we had discovered in our first experiment, people who were annoyed by the phone call were much less likely to return the extra cash than those whose conversations were uninterrupted. More surprisingly, we found that the tendency to seek revenge did not depend on whether Daniel (the agent) or I (the principal) suffered. This reminded us of Tom Farmer and Shane Atchison. In their case too they were annoyed mostly with Mike, the night clerk (an agent), but their PowerPoint presentation was aimed mostly at the Doubletree Club hotel (the principal). It seems that at the moment we feel the desire for revenge, we don’t care whom we punish—we only want to see someone pay, regardless of whether they are the agent or the principal. Given the number of agent-principal dualities in the marketplace and the popularity of outsourcing (which further increases these dualities), we thought this was indeed a worrisome result.

Customer Revenge: My Story, Part II

We have learned that even relatively simple transgressions can ignite the instinct for revenge. Once we feel the need to react, we often don’t distinguish between the person who actually made us angry and whoever suffers the consequences of our retaliation. This is very bad news for companies that pay lip service (if that) to customer support and service. Acts of revenge are not easy to observe from the CEO’s office. (And when engaging in acts of strong revenge, consumers try very hard to keep their actions under cover.) I suspect that companies like Audi, Doubletree, Apple, and many airlines don’t have a clue about the cause-and-effect relationship between their offending behavior and the retaliatory urges of their annoyed customers.

So how did I express my revenge to Audi? I have seen many amusing YouTube videos in which people vent about their problems, but that approach did not suit me. Instead, I decided to write a fictional case study for the well-known business magazine Harvard Business Review (HBR). The story was about a negative experience that Tom Zacharelli had with his brand-new Atida car (I made up “Atida” and used Tom Farmer’s first name; notice, too, the similarity between “Ariely” and “Zacharelli”). Here is the letter Tom Zacharelli wrote to the CEO of Atida:

Dear Mr. Turm,

I am writing to you as a longtime customer and former Atida fan who is now close to desperation. Several months ago, I purchased the new Andromeda XL. It was peppy, it was stylish, it handled well. I loved it.

On September 20, while I was driving back to Los Angeles, the car stopped responding to the gas. It was as if we were driving in neutral. I tried to make my way to the right. Looking over my right shoulder, I saw two big trucks bearing down on me as I tried to move over. The drivers barely missed me, and somehow I managed to make it onto the shoulder alive. It was one of the most frightening experiences of my life.

From there the experience only got worse thanks to your customer service. They were rude, unhelpful and they refused to reimburse me for my expenses. A month later I got my car back, but now I’m angry, spiteful, and I want you to share in my misery. I feel the need for revenge.

I’m now seriously thinking of making a very slick and nasty little film about your company and posting it on YouTube. I guarantee you won’t be happy with it.

Sincerely,

Tom Zacharelli

The main question posed by my HBR case was this: how should Atida Motors have reacted to Tom’s anger? It was not clear that the manufacturer had any legal obligation to Tom, and the company’s managers wondered whether they should ignore or appease him. After all, they asked, why would he be willing to spend additional time and effort on making a video that would reflect poorly on Atida Motors? Hadn’t he spent enough time dealing with his car issues already? Didn’t he have anything better to do? As long as Atida made it clear that it was not going to take one little step toward appeasing him, why would he want to waste his time taking revenge?

My HBR editor, Bronwyn Fryer, asked four experts to reflect on the case. One was none other than Tom Farmer of “Yours Is a Very Bad Hotel” fame, who, not surprisingly, censured Atida and took Tom Zacharelli’s side. He opened his comment with the statement that “whether the company knows it or not, Atida is a service organization that happens to sell cars, not a car-making organization that happens to provide service.”

In the end, all four reviewers thought that Atida had treated Tom poorly and that he had the potential to do a lot of damage with his threatened video. They also suggested that the potential benefits of making amends with one understandably upset customer outweighed the cost.

When the case study appeared in December 2007, I mailed a copy to the head of customer service at Audi with a note saying that this article was based on my experience with Audi. I never heard back from him, but I now feel better about the whole thing—though I am not sure whether that’s because I took revenge or because enough time has passed since the incident.

The Power of Apologies

When I finally got my car, the head mechanic gave me the keys. As we parted, he said, “Sorry, but sometimes cars break.” The simple truth of his statement had a surprisingly calming effect on me. “Yes,” I said to myself, “cars do break. This is not a surprise, and there is no reason to get so upset about it, just as there is no reason to get upset when my printer jams.”

So why did I get so angry? I suspect that if the customer service representative had said, “Sorry, but sometimes cars break,” and had showed me some sympathy, the whole sequence would have played out very differently. Could it be that apologies can improve interactions and soothe the instinct for revenge in business and in personal exchanges?

Given my frequent personal experience apologizing to my lovely wife, Sumi, and given that it often works well for me (Ayelet is basically a saint, so she never needs to apologize for anything), we decided in the next iteration to examine the power of the word “sorry.”

Our experimental setup was very similar to that of the original experiment. Again, we sent Daniel to ask coffee shop customers if they would complete our letter-pairing task in exchange for $5. This time, however, we had three conditions. In the control (no-annoyance) condition, Daniel first asked the coffee shop patrons if they would be willing to participate in a five-minute task in return for $5. When they agreed (and almost all agreed), he gave them the same letter sheets and explained the instructions. Five minutes later, he returned to the table, collected the sheets, handed the participants four extra dollars (four $1 bills and one $5 bill), and asked them to fill out a receipt for $5. For those in the annoyance condition, the procedure was basically the same, except that while going over the instructions, Daniel again pretended to take a call.

The third group was basically in the same condition as those in the annoyance group, but we threw in a little twist. This time, as Daniel was handing the participants their payment and asking them to sign the receipt, he added an apology. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I shouldn’t have answered that call.”

Based on the original experiment, we expected the annoyed people to be much less likely to return the extra cash, and indeed that is what the results showed. But what about the third group? Surprise!—the apology was a perfect remedy. The amount of extra cash returned in the apology condition was the same as it was when people were not annoyed at all. Indeed, we found that the word “sorry” completely counteracted the effect of annoyance. (For handy future reference, here’s the magic formula: 1 annoyance + 1 apology = 0 annoyance.) This showed us that apologies do work, at least temporarily.

Before you decide it’s okay to start acting like a jerk and saying “sorry” immediately after you annoy someone, a word of caution is in order. Our experiment was a onetime interaction between Daniel and the coffee shop customers. It is unclear what would have happened if Daniel and the customers had gone through the experiment and apology for many days in a row. As we know from the story of “The Boy Who Cried ‘Wolf,’ ” it’s possible to overuse a word, and an overworn “sorry” may well lose its power.

We also discovered one other remedy for the revenge that the coffee drinkers in Boston took against us. As it turned out, increasing the time between Daniel’s disrespectful phone call and the participants’ opportunity for revenge (when he gave them the payment and asked them to sign a receipt), even by fifteen minutes, muted some of the vengeful feelings and got us more of our money back. (Here, too, a word of caution is important: when annoyance is very high, I am not sure that simply letting some time pass is sufficient to eliminate the urge for revenge.)

If You’re Tempted

A number of wise men have warned us against the would-be benefits of vengeance. Mark Twain said, “Therein lies the defect of revenge: it’s all in the anticipation; the thing itself is a pain, not a pleasure; at least the pain is the biggest end of it.” Walter Weckler further observed that “revenge has no more quenching effect on emotions than salt water has on thirst.” And Albert Schweitzer noted that “Revenge . . . is like a rolling stone, which, when a man hath forced up a hill, will return upon him with a greater violence, and break those bones whose sinews gave it motion.”


WHEN DOCTORS APOLOGIZE

As much as some people seem to think otherwise, physicians are in fact human and do make mistakes from time to time. When this happens, what should they do? Is it better for them to admit medical errors and apologize? Or should they deny their mistakes? The reasoning behind the latter is clear: in a litigious society, a doctor who comes clean is much more likely to lose a lawsuit if one is filed. But on the other hand, you could argue that a doctor’s apology can placate the patient and thereby lower the likelihood that he might be sued in the first place.

It turns out that in the battle between humility and bedside manners on one side and a calculating, legalistic approach on the other, saying “sorry” often wins the day. For example, when researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore11 showed participants videos of doctors responding to medical errors, participants rated the doctors who expressed an apology and who took personal responsibility far more favorably. What’s more, another research team from the University of Massachusetts Medical School found that people expressed less interest in suing doctors who had assumed responsibility, apologized, and planned a means of avoiding the error in the future.12

Now, if you are a surgeon who operates on the wrong knee or leaves a tool inside a patient’s body, an apology makes a lot of sense. Your patient might not feel so outraged and won’t have a desire to stomp into your office, kick you with his good leg, and throw your favorite paperweight through the window. It may also make you appear much more human and keep you from getting sued. In line with these findings, many medical voices are now suggesting that physicians should be encouraged to apologize and admit when they are wrong. But of course denying our mistakes and blaming others is a part of being human—even when doing so can escalate the anger and revenge cycle.


With all this good advice about not engaging in revenge, is it really something we can avoid? For my part, I think that the desire for revenge is one of the most basic of human responses; it’s linked to our incredible ability to trust others, and since it’s a part of our nature, it’s a difficult instinct to overcome. Maybe we can adopt a more Zen-like approach to life. Maybe we can take the long-term view. Maybe we can count to ten—or ten million—and let the passage of time help us. Most likely, such steps offer only slight mitigation of what is sadly an all-too-common feeling. (For another tour of the dark side of our emotions, see chapter 10, “The Long-Term Effects of Short-Term Emotions.”)

When we can’t fully suppress our vengeful feelings, perhaps we can figure out how to blow off steam without incurring negative consequences. Maybe we can prepare a laminated sign that reads “HAVE A NICE DAY” in large letters on one side and “f**k you” in much smaller letters on the other side. We can keep this sign in the glove compartment of our car, and when someone drives too fast, cuts into our lane, or generally endangers us with their driving, we can show the driver the sign through our window, with the “HAVE A NICE DAY” side facing them. Maybe we can write down vengeful jokes about an offending party and post them anonymously on the Web. Maybe we can vent with some of our friends. Maybe we can make a PowerPoint presentation about the event or write a case study for the Harvard Business Review.

Useful Revenge

Other than my near brush with death on the highway, I’d say that my experience with Audi was overall beneficial. I got to reflect on the phenomenon of revenge, do a few experiments, share my perspective in print, and write this chapter. Indeed, there are many success stories built on the motivation for revenge. These stories often involve entrepreneurs and businessmen, whose self-worth is tightly bound to their work. When they are ousted from their positions as CEOs or presidents, they make revenge their life’s mission. Sometimes they succeed in either regaining their former position or creating a new and successful competitor to their former company.

Near the end of the nineteenth century, for example, Cornelius Vanderbilt owned a steamship company called Accessory Transit Company. Everything was going well for him until he decided to vacation in Europe on his yacht. When he returned from his trip, he found that the two associates he had left in charge had sold his interest in the company to themselves. “Gentlemen, you have undertaken to cheat me. I won’t sue you, for the law is too slow. I’ll ruin you,” he said. Then he converted his yacht into a passenger ship and started a rival company, aptly named “Opposition.” Sure enough, his new company quickly succeeded and Vanderbilt eventually regained control of his first company. Though Vanderbilt’s company was larger, it contained at least two fewer questionable employees.13

Here’s another revenge success story:14 after being fired from the Walt Disney Company, Jeffrey Katzenberg not only won $280 million in compensation; he cofounded DreamWorks SKG, a Disney competitor that went on to release the highly successful movie Shrek. Not only did the movie make fun of Disney’s fairy tales, but its villain is also apparently a parody of the head of Disney at the time (and Katzenberg’s former boss), Michael Eisner. Now that you know Shrek’s background, I recommend you revisit the movie to see just how constructive (and entertaining) revenge can be.