Retribution and the Death Penalty

Symposium theme — Evolving Standards of Decency in 2003: Is the Death Penalty on Life Support

The bitter taste of payback: the pathologising effect of TV revengendas

The thirst for vengeance is a timeless subject in popular entertainment. One need only think of Old Testament scripture; Shakespeare\u27s Hamlet; Quentin Tarantino\u27s Kill Bill or the TV series Revenge, and we immediately conjure up images of a protagonist striving to seek justice to avenge a heinous wrong committed against them. These texts, and others like it, speak to that which is ingrained in our human spirit about not only holding others responsible for their actions, but also about retaliation as payback. This article seeks to problematise the way the popular revenge narrative effectively constructs the vendetta as a guilty pleasure through which the audience can vicariously gain satisfaction, while at the same time perpetuates law\u27s rhetoric that personal desires for vengeance are to be repressed and denied. In particular, the article will demonstrate the way such popular revenge narratives contribute to the pathologising of human desire for payback

Egoistic and Nonegoistic Motives in Social Dilemmas

Many of the world\u27s problems (e.g., overpopulation, pollution, and the depletion of nonrenewable resources) may be characterized as social dilemmas. The solutions to social dilemmas, then, are very important. In this article, we argue: (a) that social psychologists have approached the problem of social dilemmas with an egoistic bias, (b) that this bias limits the number and types of solutions to dilemmas that psychologists investigate, (c) that egoistically based solutions to social dilemmas are not adequate in many real-world dilemmas, and (d) that viable solutions to these dilemmas may be found in nonegoistic motives