CARLSMITH, WILSON, & GILBERT (2008) The Paradoxical Consequences of Revenge.pdf

INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS AND GROUP PROCESSES

The Paradoxical Consequences of Revenge

Kevin M. Carlsmith

Colgate University

Timothy D. Wilson

University of Virginia

Daniel T. Gilbert

Harvard University

People expect to reap hedonic rewards when they punish an offender, but in at least some instances,

revenge has hedonic consequences that are precisely the opposite of what people expect. Three studies

showed that (a) one reason for this is that people who punish continue to ruminate about the offender,

whereas those who do not punish “move on” and think less about the offender, and (b) people fail to

appreciate the different affective consequences of witnessing and instigating punishment.

Keywords: affective forecasting, punishment, revenge, rumination

On April 16, 2007, Seung Hui Cho massacred 32 people at

Virginia Tech University before turning the gun on himself. In the

aftermath, some lamented that his death had robbed the survivors

of the emotional satisfaction of exacting their own revenge. As one

woman from the Midwest wrote on an Internet blog, “I don’t think

there would be anything temporary about the satisfaction I would

feel in being permitted to execute the person who killed my child”

(Barnstead-Klos, 2007).

“Sweet is revenge,” wrote Lord Byron ( Don Juan , Canto I,

Stanza 124). Indeed, this belief may be both venerable and wide-

spread, but is it right? Research in psychology and behavioral

economics has shown that people often mispredict their hedonic

reactions to future events because they mispredict how often they

will think about those events once the events have ended (Schkade

& Kahneman, 1998; Wilson & Gilbert, 2003; Wilson, Wheatley,

Meyers, Gilbert, & Axsom, 2000). We hypothesized that acts of

revenge would cause people to continue thinking about the trans-

gressor whom they have punished, which would prolong their

hedonic reactions to the transgression rather than shorten them.

Thus we predict that people punish others, in part, to repair their

negative mood and to provide psychological closure to the precip-

itating event, but that the act of punishment yields precisely the

opposite outcome. As the poet John Milton wrote, “Revenge, at

first though sweet, Bitter ere long back on itself recoils” ( Paradise

Lost , Book IX, Line 171).

Our research, then, focuses on three questions: (a) What is the

affective consequence of exacting revenge? (b) Do people accu-

rately predict this consequence, and, if not, (c) Why do people

make this error of prediction?

Although there is an enormous amount of literature on punish-

ment, it has generally focused on the justification for imposing

punishment (Bentham, 1843/1962; Ezorsky, 1972; Kant, 1790/

1952) or on the consequences of receiving punishment (Skinner,

1938, 1974; Watson, 1924). More recently, psychologists have

begun to explore the motives behind the desire to punish (see

Carlsmith & Darley, 2008, for a review), but there has been little

empirical research performed on the question of whether instigat-

ing punishment against another person has affective consequences

for the one who punishes. This absence is both surprising and

unfortunate given the ubiquity of punishment across societies

(Gintis, 2008) and the self-evident importance of this punishment

to both instigator and target. Although this discussion is potentially

relevant to the myriad forms of punishment (e.g., societal, legal,

organizational, etc.), we focus specifically on interpersonal aggres-

sion in response to individual norm-violating behaviors. This sort

of aggression is typically referred to as revenge or retaliation by

laypeople (McKean, 2005), psychologists (Frijda, 1994), and phi-

losophers (Baier, 1955; Hobbes, 1950; Quinton, 1954).

Kevin M. Carlsmith, Department of Psychology, Colgate University;

Timothy D. Wilson, Department of Psychology, University of Virginia;

Daniel T. Gilbert, Department of Psychology, Harvard University.

We acknowledge the assistance provided by James Elmers, Alison

Potocki, Emily Drummond, Sue LeBarron, and Rachel Smith in conducting

the experiments.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Kevin M.

Carlsmith, Department of Psychology, Colgate University, 13 Oak Drive,

Hamilton, NY 13346. E-mail: kcarlsmith@colgate.edu

Catharsis

People believe in the utility of aggression. There is widespread

acceptance of the notion that aggression, either directed against the

target of one’s ire or displaced to some other object, relieves the

tension, and thus the anger, that had been pent up inside. Evidence

for this belief abounds in our language (“get it out of your sys-

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2008, Vol. 95, No. 6, 1316–1324

DOI: 10.1037/a0012165

1316

CONSEQUENCES OF REVENGE

1317

tem”), in our public service advertisements (“punch a wall, not

your child”), in plays ( The Spanish Tragedy , Hamlet ), novels ( The

Count of Monte Cristo, Moby Dick, The Cask of Amontillado ), and

films ( Death Wish I – V, Revenge, Kill Bill ). Bushman (2002) cited

numerous self-help books (e.g., Lee, 1993) that extol the virtues of

the cathartic release that comes from punching pillows or other

objects that stand in for the true target.

This belief in catharsis is not surprising, perhaps, given psy-

chology’s own deep roots in the theory. Early psychological re-

search on aggression adopted the hydraulic model, in which ag-

gression was perceived to be a cathartic release to the pressure

brought about by frustration or another stimulus (Berkowitz, 1989;

Dollard, Doob, Miller, Mowrer, & Sears, 1939; Freud, 1922/1961).

In this model, the eliciting stimulus creates an internal pressure

that must be released, and the most likely form of release is

aggression. Once cathartic aggression takes place, subsequent ag-

gression is less likely. Thus, venting one’s aggression on an

appropriate object (e.g., a pillow) was seen as an effective way to

reduce interpersonal aggression and spirals of conflict.

Although the early research on catharsis was mixed, more recent

investigations have come to a clear consensus against the theory.

Bushman (2002) demonstrated that cathartic aggression not only

failed to reduce subsequent aggression, but in fact increased it.

Participants in his experiment were initially angered by a fellow

student who provided insulting feedback on an essay and were

then given an opportunity to vent their anger on a punching bag.

Shortly thereafter, participants played a competitive game with the

object of their anger and were given the opportunity to deliver

aversive noise blasts. Bushman found that use of the punching bag

actually increased subsequent aggression rather than reducing it.

Moreover, he found that participants who imagined that the punch-

ing bag was the other student (a rumination manipulation) ag-

gressed even more than did those participants in the control con-

dition and those focused on the health benefits of the punching bag

(a distraction manipulation). Critical for our purposes, participants

who vented their anger and subsequently aggressed against the

other student also experienced more anger at

ingested a “mood-freezing” pill. Thus, participants were strategi-

cally using aggression to repair their own mood.

Bushman et al. (2001) primarily examined people’s beliefs

about the hedonic utility of aggression. In one study, however, they

examined the actual impact of aggression on subsequent mood.

Those who punished most severely (because they believed in the

utility of punishment) in fact experienced increased negative af-

fect. Once again, however, the aggression variable was measured

rather than manipulated. The authors concluded that these results

“may be relevant to the question of whether aggression actually

does accomplish mood repair, although our study was not designed

to provide definitive evidence on that question” (Bushman et al.,

2001, p. 26).

In sum, research shows that cathartic venting does not reduce

subsequent aggression against the offending object. However, peo-

ple have a clear belief in the value of catharsis and regulate

aggression in service to mood. But it is unclear whether aggression

improves mood or if, indeed, it actually makes the aggressor feel

worse. In order to examine this question, we used punishment as

an independent variable (people did or did not have the opportu-

nity to punish an offender), with the hypothesis that people would

take advantage of the opportunity to punish but that doing so

would prolong rumination and negative affect.

The Accuracy of Affective Forecasting

There is ample evidence that people often make mistakes when

forecasting their future affective reactions (Loewenstein,

O’Donoghue, & Rabin, 2003; Mellers & McGraw, 2001; Wilson

& Gilbert, 2003), and the mistaken beliefs about the utility of

aggression described above may well be a case in point.

The most commonly observed error in affective forecasting is

the impact bias , whereby people overestimate the intensity and

duration of their future affective reactions. People have been found

to overestimate the hedonic impact of a wide range of events, from

romantic breakups and political elections to the loss of a job or

receipt of unwanted results of a pregnancy test (for a review, see

Wilson & Gilbert, 2003). One cause of the impact bias is focalism ,

the tendency to overestimate how much an event that one is

thinking about will occupy one’s thoughts as time goes by. Wilson

et al. (2000), for example, found that fans overestimated how

happy or sad they would be after their favorite team won or lost a

football game, in part because they overestimated how much they

would think about the game after it occurred (see also Schkade &

Kahneman, 1998). Put differently, people underestimated the ex-

tent to which the everyday routine of their lives would occupy their

thoughts, crowding out thoughts about the game.

Thoughts about some events, however, get crowded out more

easily than others. There is evidence that anger, in particular, is an

attention-focusing emotion, making it difficult to think about other

things (Fredrickson & Branigan, 2005). Anger thoughts can thus

be a vicious cycle; the more people think about them the angrier

they get, and the angrier they get, the harder it is to think about

anything else (Bushman, 2002; Konecni, 1974; Rusting & Nolen-

Hoeksema, 1998). Anger may thus be an exception to previous

research on affective forecasting and focalism. Instead of overes-

timating the intensity and duration of their anger following pun-

ishment, people may actually underestimate it. People’s lay theory

seems to be that revenge is a cathartic act that will bring them

the end of the

experiment.

Thus, Bushman (2002) found that physical venting did not

reduce the desire to aggress and that the combination of venting

and aggressing led to increased anger. The focus of Bushman’s

experiment, though, was on the effects of cathartic aggression, and

thus the aggression against the offending student (e.g., the noise

blasts) served as a dependent measure rather than as an indepen-

dent variable. It is thus unclear whether it was the venting or the

aggression that increased the anger and whether the aggression

caused the anger or whether the anger caused the aggression.

Cathartic Aggression as Mood Repair

Other research has shown that participants aggress against of-

fending others in the belief that it will improve their mood (Bush-

man, Baumeister, & Phillips, 2001). Participants were angered and

then given an opportunity to aggress against the offender, and

those who believed in the cathartic value of aggression—either

through preexisting attitudes or through manipulation—aggressed

more severely than did those who did not believe in catharsis. This

effect disappeared, however, when students believed they had

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CARLSMITH, WILSON, AND GILBERT

closure, allowing them to stop thinking about the precipitating

event, when in fact that course of action might keep their attention

on the event and prevent them from coping in other ways.

Suppose, for example, that people did not have the opportunity

to punish the object of their ire. They would be forced to deal with

their negative feelings in other ways, perhaps by deciding that in

the grand scheme of things, the person’s actions were not very

important and not worth worrying about. By trivializing the be-

havior, people could move on and not think about it further

(Simon, Greenberg, & Brehm, 1995). Ironically, the act of pun-

ishing might increase ruminations about the incident and prevent

people from dealing with their negative emotions in other ways,

such as thinking about unrelated issues, which has been shown to

reduce anger (e.g., Bushman, 2002).

Computer software simulated the play of the other participants.

Two were programmed to cooperate initially and to use a tit-for-tat

strategy on subsequent rounds. The 3rd player, always a female,

initially bid $0.50 and sent everyone an instant message urging

them to cooperate. She then defected on all subsequent rounds.

After each of eight investment decisions, participants received

feedback about each group member’s investment, a record of each

person’s total earnings, and a prompt to invest for the following

round. The program was convincing; few participants doubted that

the other players were fellow students.

Participants were randomly assigned to a punishment, no-

punishment, or forecaster condition. At the end of the game, partici-

pants in the punishment condition were told that, if they wanted, they

could anonymously penalize the other players by subtracting points

from these players’ total earnings. Each point cost the punisher $.05

but reduced the punished member’s profit by three times that amount.

After indicating whether they wanted to punish any of the other

players and by how much, participants in the punishment condition

completed the dependent measures. Participants in the no-punishment

condition completed the dependent measures right after the conclu-

sion of the game with no mention of the opportunity to penalize other

players. Participants in the forecaster condition received the same

instructions participants in the punishment condition received about

penalizing the other players, except that instead of actually being

given the opportunity to punish, they were asked to imagine that they

could do so. They then completed the dependent measures according

to how they thought they would feel if they had had the opportunity

to punish.

Dependent measures. Participants in the punishment and no-

punishment conditions rated their hedonic reactions at the conclu-

sion of the game and 10 min later after completing a filler task

(writing a detailed description of their typical day). At each time

point they rated the extent to which they were experiencing pos-

itive affect (pleased, positive, satisfied) and negative affect (neg-

ative, vengeful, irritated) on 7-point scales anchored by not at all

and extremely . Participants also reported the extent to which they

were thinking about each of the other players, again on 7-point

scales (1 not at all ,7 very much ). Participants in the

punishment condition were also asked immediately postpunish-

ment to estimate what they thought their hedonic reactions would

be (on the same scales) if they had not had the opportunity to

penalize the free rider. After the game all participants were probed

for suspicion, debriefed, and paid slightly more than they expected

to earn in the game.

Study 1

We hypothesized that people believe that punishing an offender

will improve their mood and bring about psychological closure,

but in fact punishment will increase rumination about the offender

and lead to a continuation of negative affect. Indeed, there might

be a recursive relationship between affect and rumination such that

increased negative affect also leads to increased rumination. To

test these hypotheses, we used the “free rider paradigm” in which

participants played multiple trials of an interactive game with three

other people. Players could earn money if they cooperated, but a

player who did not cooperate (a “free rider”) could earn more and

cause others to earn less. Unbeknownst to the participants, the

game was staged so that on several trials one of the players

encouraged others to cooperate and then did not cooperate himself

or herself. Punishers were given the opportunity to financially

penalize this free rider at a small cost, whereas nonpunishers

played the same game but were given no opportunity to penalize

the free rider. Both groups reported their hedonic reactions, and

punishers also estimated their hedonic reactions had they had no

opportunity to penalize the free rider. An additional group of

forecasters played the game and predicted what their hedonic

reactions would be if they penalized the free rider. There were thus

three conditions: punishers, nonpunishers, and forecasters. The

latter group made prospective predictions of affect, but we also

asked the punishers to make retrospective predictions of affect had

they been in a different condition.

Method

Participants and procedure. Forty-eight university students

were allotted a stake of $1.00 and told that they could invest in the

group or save it. After each round of play the total invested amount

from all 4 players—plus a 40% dividend—was distributed to all

players equally regardless of individual contribution. This arrange-

ment created a classic prisoner’s dilemma: The optimal group

outcome was achieved when each individual cooperated, but each

individual maximized his or her personal outcome by defecting.

Participants generally convened in groups of 4. When fewer

than 4 participants were available, participants were led to believe

that a 4th individual showed up after the original members entered

their cubicles. Participants played a few verbal practice rounds

with the experimenters to ensure they understood the instructions.

Once the game began, all of the interactions occurred in private

rooms via individual computer terminals.

Results

Preliminary analyses. Three participants failed to play coop-

eratively and therefore earned more money than each of the other

players. Thus, each of these participants was the free rider in the

group and had an entirely different psychological experience than

did the other participants. We excluded these participants (2 in the

punishment condition, 1 in the no-punishment condition) from all

analyses reported below, leaving a total of 15 participants in each

condition. Participants earned an average of $2.51 (excluding the

cost of punishing), whereas the free rider earned $5.59, t (44)

10.41, p .01. Fourteen of 15 people in the punishment condition

chose to spend their money to punish the free rider, with an

average outlay of $0.51. This resulted in an average punishment of

CONSEQUENCES OF REVENGE

1319

$1.53. No participant penalized either of the other (cooperative)

players in the game.

Data reduction. Initial analyses revealed that the positive and

negative affect items were highly correlated and that the manipula-

tions had similar effects on each type of item. We thus reverse scored

the negative items and averaged them with the positive items. Initial

analyses also revealed that although there was a main effect of time on

this index, F (1, 41) 28.79, p .001, reflecting the fact that

participants’ mood improved during the 10-min distraction test, time

did not interact with the experimental manipulations, F (2, 42) 0.12,

p .89. In order to simplify the analyses, we thus averaged the affect

ratings over time, resulting in a highly reliable index ( .93). We

also report the results of individual affect items.

Hedonic reactions. Did punishing the free rider change peo-

ple’s affect? The answer is yes: People in the punishment condi-

tion actually felt worse than people in the no-punishment condi-

tion. Did people anticipate this effect? The answer is no; those in

the forecaster condition, who rated how they would feel if they

could punish, predicted that they would feel better than people who

actually were allowed to punish. The main effect of condition on

affect was significant, F (2, 42) 6.83, p .01, and planned

contrasts revealed that people in the punishment condition ( M

3.52, SD .95) reported a significantly worse mood than did

people in both the no-punishment ( M 4.79, SD 1.22) and

forecaster ( M 4.53, SD .77) conditions, p s .01. The

no-punishment and forecaster conditions were not significantly

different from each other ( p .47).

A detailed analysis of each affect item confirms the findings

described above. Each negatively valenced item was higher for the

punishers and lower for the nonpunishers. Similarly, each posi-

tively valenced item was lower for the punishers and higher for the

nonpunishers. Each of these differences was significant by

Tukey’s least significant difference (LSD) at p .05. The largest

mean differences between punishers and nonpunishers were for the

items vengeful (2.07), irritated (1.67), negative (1.27), and positive

( 1.20). Thus it is primarily (but not exclusively) an increase in

negative affect that results from administering punishment.

Mean differences in rumination. There were no differences

between the punishment and no-punishment conditions at Time 1

in how much people reported thinking about the free rider ( M

6.07 vs. 5.73, F 1.0). However, people in the punishment

condition reported thinking about the free rider significantly more

at Time 2 than did people in the no-punishment condition ( M

4.33 vs. 2.67), F (1, 28) 4.46, p .04. The Time Condition

(punishers vs. nonpunishers) interaction was significant, F (1,

28) 4.25, p .05, indicating that although all participants

initially focused attention on the free rider, the act of punishment

kept the free rider at the forefront of the participants’ thoughts.

Nonpunishers, by contrast, were able to focus attention elsewhere.

Rumination as mediator between punishment and affect. Fig-

ure 1 reveals that rumination about the free rider at Time 2 was

related to both punishment ( b .43) and affect ( b .42) as

required for a mediated effect, and that the direct effect of pun-

ishment on affect was reduced when rumination was included in

the equation. The beta coefficient dropped from b .49 to .31,

which was marginally significant by the Sobel test( z 1.77, p

.08). The same analysis does not hold for rumination at Time 1,

suggesting that it is the continued rumination that leads to negative

affect rather than initial rumination.

Rumination

-.42*

.43*

-.49* -.31 # )

Punishment

Affect

* p < .05

# p < .10

Figure 1. Study 1: The negative relationship between punishment of the

perpetrator and personal affect is mediated by rumination about the per-

petrator.

Affect as mediator between punishment and rumination. We

anticipated, and found, a recursive relationship between affect and

rumination such that each variable served as a partial mediator for

the effect of punishment on the other. Thus, affect at Time 2 was

related to both punishment ( b .49) and rumination ( b .40),

and the direct effect of punishment on rumination was reduced

when affect was included in the equation. The beta coefficient

dropped from b .43 to .22, which was also marginally significant

by the Sobel test ( z 1.77, p .08).

Affective forecasts. As noted above, forecasters predicted

that if they could punish the free rider they would feel signif-

icantly better than punishers reported feeling. That is, they

failed to anticipate the negative hedonic effects of punishment.

This was also true at the individual level: The correlation

between forecasters’ predicted affect and predicted level of

punishment was r (15) .48, p .07. This is in stark contrast

to the negative correlation in the actual punishment condition,

r (15) .50, p .06. The difference between these correla-

tions is significant ( z 2.63, p .01), showing that actual and

predicted experience ran in opposite directions. People ex-

pected that higher punishment would lead to a better mood, but

in fact higher punishment was associated with a worse mood.

However, forecasters did not predict that they would feel better

than people in the no-punishment condition reported feeling,

which on the face of it is inconsistent with our hypothesis that

people believe punishment improves their affective states. In the

absence of a no-punishment–forecaster condition, however, in

which people predicted how they would feel without the opportu-

nity to punish, this finding is difficult to interpret. That is, our

forecasters were predicting how they would feel in a situation that

the nonpunishers did not experience, making the comparison prob-

lematic (we return to this issue in Study 2). More informative are

punishers’ beliefs about how they would feel if they had not been

given the opportunity to punish. When asked, all participants in the

punishment condition indicated that they would have been less

happy than they actually were had they not been allowed to punish,

M actual 4.00 vs. M counterfactual 5.02, t (14) 5.35, p .001.

Rumination forecasts. Finally, forecasters also failed to per-

ceive the relationship between punishment and rumination. Al-

though the actual punishers revealed a strong positive correlation,

r (15) .40, between time spent ruminating about the free rider

and the severity of the punishment, forecasters thought the rela-

tionship ran in the other direction, r (15) .19. A test of the

difference of these two correlations yielded z 1.48, p .07.

Thus, people thought that punishing the free rider made them feel

better, and perhaps even allowed them to “move on” and forget

about the free rider. In reality, the opposite occurred: They con-

1320

CARLSMITH, WILSON, AND GILBERT

tinued to think about the free rider and continued to experience

negative affect.

ticipants were from the same university the participants were from

in Study 1; 25 were from a different, though academically com-

parable, university. Seventy-seven participants were women, and

21 were men.

Materials and procedure. Participants read a detailed descrip-

tion of the basic paradigm used in Study 1 and were asked to imagine

that they were one of the participants. They were told that they and the

2 other cooperative players had invested $3.87 and received $1.85

profit at the end of the game. The free rider, however, had only

invested $1.00 yet received $3.43 profit at the end. (Earnings and

investments were based on the actual average results from a pilot

version of the free rider game.) Participants then forecasted how they

would feel at that point in the game on the same affect measures used

in the previous study. These measures are the equivalent of the

no-punish control condition of Study 1. Participants then learned

about the punishment options and were asked to report how they

would feel if they had decided to punish the free rider, and also how

they would feel if one of the other players had punished the free rider

(yielding a within-subjects design). In one condition they were told,

“In the game that you just finished, you decide to spend $0.25 on

penalties, a move that will reduce the winnings of [the free rider] by

$0.75.” In the other condition they were told that “ one of the other

players ” spent the $0.25. Thus there were three within-subject con-

ditions: a no-punish control condition; a punisher condition, in which

the participant imagines instigating the punishment; and a witness

condition, in which the participant imagines witnessing another player

punishing the free rider. The order of presentation of the punisher and

witness conditions was counterbalanced across participants.

In addition to affect measures, participants reported the extent to

which they would be thinking about the free rider (i.e., the rumi-

nation question from Study 1) after each set of affect measures. At

the conclusion of the survey, participants completed manipulation

checks regarding details of the game. Participants completed this

survey in one of two formats: as a stand-alone web survey or as a

paper-and-pencil survey appended to the end of an existing survey.

Discussion

We created a real situation in which people were angry at a free

rider and then manipulated whether or not they could retaliate

against the free rider by means of financial penalties. The result of

the punishment was that both the participants and the free rider lost

money, and the punishers were less happy than were those who did

not have the opportunity to punish. Ten minutes after the game was

over, punishers were thinking about the free rider significantly

more, and this increased rumination partially mediated the persis-

tent negative affect. Although the actual affective consequences of

punishment were clear, people in the punishment condition did not

seem to understand these consequences. In fact, each and every

participant in the punishment condition reported that their affect

would have been lower had they not been allowed to punish. This

is a remarkable finding, given that these participants were at the

time experiencing more negative affect as a result of the punish-

ment. Further, forecasters failed to predict the negative affective

consequences of revenge, in part because (a) the act of punishment

led people to ruminate about the perpetrator more, (b) this rumi-

nation prolonged the negative affect, (c) the negative affect pro-

longed rumination, and (d) people failed to predict the effects of

punishment on rumination and affect.

Another reason that people mispredicted the effects of punish-

ment may be that they thought only about the pleasure they

anticipated from the free rider’s imminent misfortune and failed to

anticipate the negative affect that would accrue as a result of

instigating the punishment. That is, the negative impact of pun-

ishment may stem from the fact that participants had, so to speak,

to thrust the knife themselves, which may have violated their sense

that they were good people who do not harm others. Further,

people had to spend some of their own money in order to punish

the free rider. Perhaps people could avoid the unpleasant effects of

revenge if they were not the agent responsible for it. If they learned

that someone else punished the free rider, they would see her get

her comeuppance while avoiding the psychological and financial

costs of delivering the punishment themselves.

In Study 2 we tested the hypotheses that people fail to appreciate

the distinction between instigating and witnessing a negative event

befalling the free rider, namely, that people would expect to feel

better after the free rider received a financial punishment but that

they would be indifferent to the source of that punishment. An-

other purpose of Study 2 was to compare directly people’s fore-

casts about how they would feel if they could versus if they could

not exact revenge. As mentioned earlier, in Study 1 it was difficult

to compare people’s forecasts about how they would feel if they

could punish with the experiences of people who could not punish

in the absence of a condition in which people forecasted how they

would feel if they could not punish. In Study 2 we asked people to

provide both forecasts to better test the prediction that people

believe punishing would improve their affective states.

Results

Preliminary analyses. There were no main effects or interac-

tions involving the order of question presentation, the format of the

survey, or university affiliation and so these variables are not dis-

cussed further. As before, the positive and negative affect items were

highly correlated and produced reliable affect scales. We thus col-

lapsed across valence for each of the three conditions and created

unitary affect scales as in Study 1 ( .78, .81, and .77, respectively).

Predictions of affect. Overall, people expected that they would

feel quite negative after playing the game in which the free rider

reaped profits at their expense. The mean affect score in the control

condition (prior to any mention of punishment) was 2.36 (on a

scale of 1 to 7) with a standard deviation of .84. However, there

was also a strong belief that the opportunity to punish would have

salubrious effects on mood, F (2, 190) 98.71, p .001. Partic-

ipants predicted a mean affect of 4.33 ( SD 1.05) if they insti-

gated the punishment and a mean affect of 4.76 ( SD

Study 2

.99) if they

witnessed someone else instigating the punishment. The no-

punishment condition was significantly different from the two

punishment conditions ( p s .001), and the two punishment

conditions did not differ from each other ( p .16).

Method

Participants. Ninety-eight undergraduates participated in par-

tial fulfillment of a course requirement. Seventy-three of the par-

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