Why revenge feels good — and what it costs

All In The Mind

ABC

Life Sciences, Health & Fitness, Science

4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 6 September 2025

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Revenge feels sweet... At least for a moment. James Kimmel Jr knows that better than most.

As a lawyer, he made a career out of helping clients get payback. But the drive for revenge started to eat away at him, threatening to destroy his work life and relationships.

Coming back from the brink, he started to wonder — why are we drawn to payback? What impacts does it have on the brain? And can revenge ever be addictive?

In this episode, we explore some of the neuroscience of revenge: what's going on in the brain when we seek it out, the rewards we get from it, the damage it causes and how to stop it. Plus, are we hardwired for forgiveness?

Just a heads up, there is a brief mention of animal cruelty in the intro of this episode, so please take care while listening.

You can catch up on more episodes of the All in the Mind podcast with journalist and presenter Sana Qadar, exploring the psychology of topics like stress, memory, communication and relationships on the ABC Listen app (Australia) or wherever you get your podcasts.

Guest:

James Kimmel, Jr., JDAssistant Clinical Professor, PsychiatryYale School of MedicineAuthor, The Science of Revenge

Credits:

Presenter/producer: Sana Qadar
Senior producer: James Bullen
Producer: Rose Kerr
Sound engineer: Simon Branthwaite

Thanks to freesound.org users craigsmith, Scott_Snailham and EwanPenman11.

More information:

The neural basis of altruistic punishment

The sunny side of fairness: preference for fairness activates reward circuitry (and disregarding unfairness activates self-control circuitry)

The neural basis of economic decision-making in the Ultimatum Game

"An eye for an eye"? Neural correlates of retribution and forgiveness

Transcript

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0:00.0	ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more.
0:08.8	Hey, it's Anthony Burke here.
0:10.8	Radio National presents The Homefront.
0:13.1	What if the housing crisis was a chance to rebuild something better,
0:16.4	to reimagine a new Australian dream?
0:18.9	In the Homefront, we're diving into bold ideas, clever design,
0:22.8	and new ways to think about home in Australia. To hear the Homefront, search Radio National
0:27.6	presents on the ABC to say. Revenge is a dish best served cold. That's how the saying goes, right? But as
0:37.3	delicious as the dish might be, for the
0:39.5	server anyways, usually you're better off not serving it at all. Um, where are you in New Haven
0:47.3	at the moment, James? Where are you? Uh, no, uh, in Pittsburgh, actually, today. When James Kimmel was
0:52.3	12, his family moved from the suburbs of Philadelphia
0:55.3	to his grandfather's hobby farm in central Pennsylvania. We had about 200 acres. We had maybe 10 to 15
1:04.1	black angus cattle and some pigs and chickens. Despite how big a change the move was, he loved his new pastoral setting.
1:12.6	It was a fabulous wonderland to be in, and one of the things that I wanted to do as part of that was
1:18.2	befriend and hang out with the neighboring kids on their much larger farms. So they lived on
1:25.4	working farms. My farm was not. This might seem like a minor
1:30.3	detail, but to the neighborhood kids, this was an unforgivable character flaw. Their dads
1:36.6	were all farmers, and James's dad was an insurance agent. That meant James was different.
1:43.4	And so they resisted my overtures to befriend them and
1:47.1	didn't want to admit me into their community. And as we grew older, their shunning of me moved
1:54.0	towards bullying. And the bullying started with, you know, verbal attacks at first, then more physical
	...

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