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Authors: Marc Hauser
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deficiencies. Envy also represents a situation in which our positive sense of self conflicts with the negative sense of self engendered by social comparison. Our brain informs us that we are less accomplished when compared with others. Envy is socially imposed pain generated by comparison shopping.
The experience of envy highlights what we don’t have, which fuels the system of desire, which seeks satisfaction. Unsatisfied, wanting keeps hunting for pleasure. The experience of schadenfreude delivers some prey — a morsel of joy that emerges from witnessing someone who is worse off.
O Schadenfreude
When the envied fall down or experts fail, we often perversely enjoy the knock out. This is schadenfreude, a German word that describes the joy we feel in witnessing another’s misfortune. Though the emotion is universally understood, recognized in our written records at least as far back as Aristotle, the German language is one of only a handful of languages to capture the feeling in a single word, combining the word for harm (
schaden
) with the word for joy (
freude
). Like envy, schadenfreude is a social, comparative emotion. It erupts when those we envy fall down, when someone we dislike meets his comeuppance, and when a misfortune is deserved. And like envy, schadenfreude presents two faces, one elevating and virtuous, the other deflating and divisive. We should feel good when a person is caught crossing a moral line, and when justice is served. Such feelings not only reinforce our own adherence to moral norms, but encourage us to punish those who transgress. But these same feelings can emerge when we harm those who have been dehumanized. Dehumanizing another, as we shall see in chapter 2 , provides one method of justifying morally abhorrent behavior. When members of another group are seen as parasites, eradicating them is not only justified but necessary for survival. Our desire for eradication continues until there is an extinction. Let’s look more closely at how schadenfreude works, and the evidence to support these general observations 20 .
Schadenfreude, like envy, can trigger self-evaluation, looking inside of ourselves to assess our net worth relative to others. We know from a large body of studies, several carried out by the social psychologist Roy Baumeister, that when an individual’s sense of self-worth is threatened, especially those individuals with more narcissistic and overly confident personalities, aggression often follows. The more personally threatened we feel by another individual or group, the more pleasure we should feel when they suffer. The psychologist Wilco van Dijk tested this idea with an experiment. Subjects filled out a questionnaire that they believed evaluated their intellectual strengths. Upon completing the questionnaire, some were told that they had utterly flopped, scoring in the lowest 10% of all subjects, while others were told that they performed brilliantly, scoring in the upper 10%. Next, all subjects read a scenario in which someone suffers a misfortune. For example, in one scenario, a student rents an expensive car to show off at a party, but then drives the car into a river, not only damaging the car but requiring the fire department to tow it out. Those whose sense of self-worth was threatened by the abominable test score were more likely to say that they felt good about the misfortune, including smirks and laughter in response to the show off who submerged his rented car, as well as other similar cases.
van Dijk’s results show that schadenfreude serves the beneficial function of hoisting our own self-worth. This feeling even arises in cases where we have no connection with the injured party. When our self-worth has been challenged, for whatever reason, we feel better knowing that someone else is worse off, regardless of context or direct relevance. We evaluate our self-worth in much the same way that we evaluate potato chips: it’s all relative to someone or something
The experience of envy highlights what we don’t have, which fuels the system of desire, which seeks satisfaction. Unsatisfied, wanting keeps hunting for pleasure. The experience of schadenfreude delivers some prey — a morsel of joy that emerges from witnessing someone who is worse off.
O Schadenfreude
When the envied fall down or experts fail, we often perversely enjoy the knock out. This is schadenfreude, a German word that describes the joy we feel in witnessing another’s misfortune. Though the emotion is universally understood, recognized in our written records at least as far back as Aristotle, the German language is one of only a handful of languages to capture the feeling in a single word, combining the word for harm (
schaden
) with the word for joy (
freude
). Like envy, schadenfreude is a social, comparative emotion. It erupts when those we envy fall down, when someone we dislike meets his comeuppance, and when a misfortune is deserved. And like envy, schadenfreude presents two faces, one elevating and virtuous, the other deflating and divisive. We should feel good when a person is caught crossing a moral line, and when justice is served. Such feelings not only reinforce our own adherence to moral norms, but encourage us to punish those who transgress. But these same feelings can emerge when we harm those who have been dehumanized. Dehumanizing another, as we shall see in chapter 2 , provides one method of justifying morally abhorrent behavior. When members of another group are seen as parasites, eradicating them is not only justified but necessary for survival. Our desire for eradication continues until there is an extinction. Let’s look more closely at how schadenfreude works, and the evidence to support these general observations 20 .
Schadenfreude, like envy, can trigger self-evaluation, looking inside of ourselves to assess our net worth relative to others. We know from a large body of studies, several carried out by the social psychologist Roy Baumeister, that when an individual’s sense of self-worth is threatened, especially those individuals with more narcissistic and overly confident personalities, aggression often follows. The more personally threatened we feel by another individual or group, the more pleasure we should feel when they suffer. The psychologist Wilco van Dijk tested this idea with an experiment. Subjects filled out a questionnaire that they believed evaluated their intellectual strengths. Upon completing the questionnaire, some were told that they had utterly flopped, scoring in the lowest 10% of all subjects, while others were told that they performed brilliantly, scoring in the upper 10%. Next, all subjects read a scenario in which someone suffers a misfortune. For example, in one scenario, a student rents an expensive car to show off at a party, but then drives the car into a river, not only damaging the car but requiring the fire department to tow it out. Those whose sense of self-worth was threatened by the abominable test score were more likely to say that they felt good about the misfortune, including smirks and laughter in response to the show off who submerged his rented car, as well as other similar cases.
van Dijk’s results show that schadenfreude serves the beneficial function of hoisting our own self-worth. This feeling even arises in cases where we have no connection with the injured party. When our self-worth has been challenged, for whatever reason, we feel better knowing that someone else is worse off, regardless of context or direct relevance. We evaluate our self-worth in much the same way that we evaluate potato chips: it’s all relative to someone or something
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