The next night, Mallard and two friends dumped Biggs’s body in a nearby park. An informant told police that she had joked about the event later.
It was several months before the police received the tip that would lead them to Mallard. After her arrest, Mallard was tried and convicted of murder. She was sentenced to 50 years in prison. At her sentencing hearing, Biggs’s son Brandon had the opportunity to make a victim impact statement. Instead of using this opportunity to request the harshest possible sentence, Brandon said to the court and to Mallard’s family, “There’s no winners in a case like this. Just as we all lost Greg, you all will be losing your daughter.” Later, Brandon would go on to say, “I still want to extend my forgiveness to Chante Mallard and let her know that the Mallard family is in my prayers.”
An act of forgiveness like this is astonishing, but Brandon Biggs is hardly unique. In more than a decade of researching forgiveness, I’ve come across hundreds of stories like Brandon’s—acts of forgiveness for transgressions small and large. Over and over, I’ve been amazed by stories of people who seem to transcend the natural urge for revenge and, instead, find a way to forgive.
But for every one of those stories, you could probably counter with an equally astonishing story of vengeance. I also know these stories welclass="underline" The grieving father who murders the air traffic controller he blames for his family’s death. The disenfranchised loner who, feeling abused by the system, takes a giant bulldozer, converts it into an assault vehicle, then razes the homes and workplaces of people who have caused him pain. The men whose desire for vengeance against what they view as an unjust foreign occupation leads them to capture westerners, behead them, and incinerate their bodies for the world to see.
In light of these outrageous, often tragic stories of revenge, you might be tempted to assume that people like Brandon Biggs possess some special trait that enables them to bypass the desire for vengeance. At the same time, it may seem that people who act on those urges for revenge are somehow defective, sick, or morally misshapen.
Both of those assumptions are wrong. My research on forgiveness has led me to this unsettling conclusion: The desire for revenge isn’t a disease that afflicts a few unfortunate people; rather it’s a universal trait of human nature, crafted by natural selection, that exists today because it helped our ancestors adapt to their environment.
But there’s some good news, too. Evolutionary science leads us squarely to the conclusion that the capacity for forgiveness, like the desire for revenge, is also an intrinsic feature of human nature, crafted by natural selection. Because revenge and forgiveness both solved problems for ancestral humans, these capacities are now typical of modern humans.
If the capacity to forgive and the desire for revenge really are standard-issue human social instincts, then there’s a hopeful possibility waiting in the wings: that we can make the world a less vengeful, more forgiving place, even when we’re forced to work with a fixed human nature. How do we do that? By making our social environments less abundant in the factors that elicit the desire for revenge and more abundant in the factors that elicit forgiveness. In other words, to increase forgiveness in the world, it doesn’t make sense to try to change human nature. It makes a lot more sense to try to change the world around us.
But to do that, we need to make sure that we’re seeing human nature for what it really is. Consider these three simple truths about forgiveness and revenge and their place in human nature.
TRUTH #1: THE DESIRE FOR REVENGE IS A BUILT-IN FEATURE OF HUMAN NATURE
A century of research in the social and biological sciences reveals a crucial truth: Though we might wish it were otherwise, the desire for revenge is normal—normal in the sense that every neurologically intact human being on the planet has the biological hardware for it.
When evolutionary biologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson looked at data on 60 different societies from around the world, they tried to determine how many of those societies showed evidence of blood feuds, capital punishment, or the desire for blood revenge. They found that 57 of the 60 societies they examined—95 percent—had “some reference to blood feud or capital punishment as an institutionalized practice, or specific accounts of particular cases or, at the least, some articulate expression of the desire for blood revenge.”
“What our survey suggests,” Daly and Wilson write in their book Homicide, “is that the inclination to blood revenge is experienced by people in all cultures, and that the act is therefore unlikely to be altogether ‘absent’ anywhere.”
When a behavior is this universal, that suggests it’s not just the product of particular cultures or social factors. Instead, it’s essential to what it means to be human.
There are three very good reasons why revenge might have evolved in humans. First, revenge may have deterred would-be aggressors from committing acts of aggression against our ancestors. Ancestral humans were group-living creatures who lived, worked, and ate in the presence of others. Thus, the outcomes of their aggressive encounters with other individuals quickly became public knowledge. If our ancestors saw that someone didn’t seek revenge after being harmed, they may have concluded that he was an easy mark, then tried to take advantage of him themselves.
Research suggests that these social dynamics still play out today. Social psychologists have shown in the laboratory that a victim will retaliate more strongly against his or her provoker when an audience has witnessed the provocation, especially if the audience lets the victim know that he or she looks weak because of the abuse he or she suffered. In fact, when people find out that bystanders think less of them because of the harm they’ve endured, they’ll actually go out of their way—even at substantial cost to themselves—to retaliate against their provokers. Moreover, when two men have an argument on the street, the mere presence of a third person doubles the likelihood that the encounter will escalate from an exchange of words to an exchange of blows.
Second, when ancestral humans were harmed by others, the propensity for revenge may have helped them deter the aggressors from harming them again. In highly mobile modern societies such as ours, often we can simply end relationships in which we’ve been betrayed. But in the close societies in which our earliest hominid ancestors lived, moving away usually wasn’t a good option. In fact, ostracism from the group was often a severe punishment that carried the risk of death. Therefore, our ancestors often had to find more direct ways to cope with the despots and bullies in their midst. One way to cope with someone who has taken advantage of you is to make it less profitable for that person to do so again.
This punishment function of revenge is quite prevalent in many animal societies. For example, if a rhesus macaque monkey finds a source of a highly valued food but doesn’t issue one of the “food calls” used to alert others to the big discovery, the animal is likely to be attacked when others realize what he’s done. In a scenario like this, you can almost see the evolutionary logic at work: If you don’t want to share your food with us, then we’re going to make it less profitable for you to try and be sneaky about it. In this way, revenge may have evolved because of its ability to teach our aggressors that crime doesn’t pay.