Personality Correlates of Revenge-Seeking: Multidimensional Links to Physical Aggression, Impulsivity, and Aggressive Pleasure

Abstract

People differ in how much they seek retribution for interpersonal insults, slights, rejections, and other antagonistic actions. Identifying individuals who are most prone towards such revenge‐seeking is a theoretically‐informative and potentially violence‐reducing endeavor. However, we have yet to understand the extent to which revenge‐seeking individuals exhibit specific features of aggressiveness, impulsivity, and what motivates their hunt for retribution. Toward this end, we conducted three studies (total N = 673), in which revenge‐seeking was measured alongside these other constructs. Analyses repeatedly demonstrated that revenge‐seeking was associated with greater physical (but not verbal) aggressiveness, anger, and hostility. Revenge‐seeking's link to physical aggression was partially accounted for by impulses toward enjoying aggression and the tendency to use aggression to improve mood. Dominance analyses revealed that sadism explained the most variance in revenge‐seeking. Revenge‐seeking was associated with greater impulsive responses to negative and positive affect, as well as greater premeditation of behavior. These findings paint a picture of revenge‐seekers as physically aggressive curators of anger, whose retributive acts are performed with planned malice and motivated by the act's entertaining and therapeutic qualities.

Facet‐level analysis of the relations between personality and laboratory aggression

“…For the current analyses, we utilized three existing datasets. Some of the data from each dataset have been published previously (Chester & DeWall, 2018; Hyatt, Weiss, Carter, Zeichner, & Miller, 2018; Seibert, Miller, Pryor, Reidy, & Zeichner, 2010), and we refer readers to these published manuscripts which describe the methods in full detail. None of the current results are published elsewhere.…”

“…These analyses provided statistical outputs that described which FFM facets accounted for the most variance in CRTT aggression. Although the interpretative aim of these analyses is similar to multiple regression, dominance analyses represent a more complex approach to investigating the relative predictive value among a set of predictor variables (e.g., Budescu, 1993; Chester & DeWall, 2018; Kraha, Turner, Nimon, Zientek, & Henson, 2012). In our multiple regression analyses, a set number of predictors (e.g., β N1 + β N2 + β N3 + β N4 + β N5 + β N6 ) were entered simultaneously into a single model which yields estimates (i.e., β ) of how much variance in the dependent variable each predictor accounts for after shared variance with each of the other predictors has been removed.…”

“…These analyses provided statistical outputs that described which FFM facets accounted for the most variance in CRTT aggression. Although the interpretative aim of these analyses is similar to multiple regression, dominance analyses represent a more complex approach to investigating the relative predictive value among a set of predictor variables (e.g., Budescu, 1993;Chester & DeWall, 2018;Kraha, Turner, Nimon, Zientek, & Henson, 2012 Given a large number of FFM facets, we deemed it important to winnow the results down even further by reconducting our analyses with the six FFM facets that were identified as having the largest relations with CRTT aggression in terms of the absolute magnitude of weighted mean. We computed one additional multiple regression model and one additional dominance analysis with these six largest predictors.…”

Sadism and Aggressive Behavior: Inflicting Pain to Feel Pleasure

“…Nascent research has hinted at a link between sadism and aggression. For instance, sadism correlates positively with trait physical aggression and is a core feature of trait revenge-seeking (Chester & DeWall, 2018). However, such correlations use selfreport instead of overt behavior.…”

Internet trolling and everyday sadism: Parallel effects on pain perception and moral judgment

“…To date, some of the most compelling evidence for everyday sadism involves pleasure-driven aggression evoked in the lab Chester, 2017;Chester & DeWall, 2017a, 2017b. Chronic appetitive aggression may be contrasted with instrumentally motivated aggression (Jones & Paulhus, 2010) and masochistic self-harm (Lämmle, Oedl, & Ziegler, 2014), which are linked to other personality tendencies.…”