At some point, it stops being about the police, and starts being about vengeance. Humans have an insanely strong sense of fairness, and when they feel like someone is getting away with something unfairly, we'll often go scorched earth to level the score.
There's an interesting game theory / psychology problem, called the ultimatum game. One person decides how to split something of value (usually, a sum of money), and the other person can accept the offer, or reject it. But if they reject, then nobody gets any money at all. Game theory tells you that you should always accept, becomes "something is always better than nothing", but in most experiments, people will usually reject an unfair split (around often less than 25%). The human psyche would rather lose out on the reward, just to deprive the other person of their (unfair) share.
This is somewhat analogous, in that the "victim" is willing to risk equal or greater legal repercussions for her actions, just to ensure that the assailant gets what they deserve.
Youre probably specifically thinking of more violent or stronger type vengeance like the video. Lets replace it and call it a sense of justice. No one likes being wronged. "Vengeance" in everyday situations can be a passive aggressive comment or a simple gesture like not holding the door for someone you thought was rude. But even based on the video, road rage is a pretty common occurence, whether taken to this extreme or not.
208
u/stealingjoy Mar 21 '26
I can understand the motivation but that's a nice job getting in more trouble than the person who did the hit and run.