{"id":14867,"date":"2019-01-05T17:52:08","date_gmt":"2019-01-05T17:52:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=14867"},"modified":"2019-01-06T01:03:45","modified_gmt":"2019-01-06T01:03:45","slug":"why-does-it-feel-good-to-see-someone-fail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/why-does-it-feel-good-to-see-someone-fail\/","title":{"rendered":"Why does it feel good to see someone fail?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Shensheng Wang<\/a>, Emory University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

In the Pixar animated film \u201cInside Out<\/a>,\u201d most of the plot plays out inside protagonist Riley\u2019s head, where five emotions \u2013 Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust and Anger \u2013 direct her behavior.<\/p>\n

The film was released to glowing reviews. But director Pete Docter later admitted<\/a> that he always regretted that one emotion didn\u2019t make the cut: Schadenfreude.<\/p>\n

Schadenfreude, which literally means \u201charm joy<\/a>\u201d in German, is the peculiar pleasure people derive from others\u2019 misfortune.<\/p>\n

You might feel it when the career of a high-profile celebrity<\/a> craters, when a particularly noxious criminal is locked up<\/a> or when a rival sporting team<\/a> gets vanquished.<\/p>\n

Psychologists have long struggled with how to best understand, explain and study the emotion: It arises in such a wide range of situations that it can seem almost impossible to come up with some sort of unifying framework. Yet that\u2019s exactly what my colleagues and I have attempted to do.<\/p>\n

Schadenfreude\u2019s many faces<\/h2>\n

One challenge continues to plague those who research schadenfreude: There\u2019s no agreed-upon definition.<\/p>\n

Some think it\u2019s best to study the emotion in the context of social comparison, so they\u2019ll tend to focus on the way envy<\/a> or resentment<\/a> interacts with schadenfreude.<\/p>\n

Others view the emotion through the lens of justice and fairness, and whether the sufferer deserved his or her misfortune<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Finally, the last group thinks that schadenfreude emerges out of intergroup dynamics<\/a> \u2013 members of a group deriving joy out of the suffering of those outside of the group.<\/p>\n

In our view, the different definitions point to multiple sides of schadenfreude, each of which might have distinct developmental origins.<\/p>\n

The blossoming of schadenfreude<\/h2>\n

Perhaps the writers of \u201cInside Out,\u201d when deciding to jettison \u201cSchadenfreude,\u201d thought that it would prove too difficult for children to grasp.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s evidence, however, that children begin to experience schadenfreude early in life.<\/p>\n

For example, at four years old, children found someone else\u2019s misfortune \u2013 like tripping and falling into a muddy puddle \u2013 funnier if that person had previously done something to hurt other children<\/a>, such as breaking their toys.<\/p>\n

Researchers have also found that two-year-old kids primed to be jealous of a peer experience glee when that peer suffers a mishap<\/a>. By the age of seven, children feel more pleased after winning a game if a rival lost than when both won the game<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Finally, in a 2013 study, researchers had nine-month-old infants observe puppets interacting with one another. Some puppets \u201cenjoyed\u201d the same types of food that the infants enjoyed, while others had a different set of tastes. When some puppets \u201charmed\u201d the other puppets, the researchers discovered<\/a> that the infants would rather see the puppets who didn\u2019t share their tastes be hurt over the ones who did share their tastes.<\/p>\n

Bringing it all together<\/h2>\n

Together, these studies show that schadenfreude is a complex emotion that seems to be deeply ingrained in the human condition.<\/p>\n

Psychologists Scott Lilienfeld<\/a>, Philippe Rochat<\/a> and I<\/a> wondered if there could be a way to unite the multiple facets of schadenfreude under the same umbrella.<\/p>\n

Eventually, we settled on seeing schadenfreude as a form of dehumanization<\/a> \u2013 the act of depicting and viewing another person as less than human.<\/p>\n

When most people hear the term \u201cdehumanization,\u201d they probably go to the worst-case scenario: a complete denial of someone\u2019s humanity, a phenomenon relegated to torture chambers, battlefields and racist propaganda.<\/p>\n

But this is a misconception. Psychologists have shown that people often view their own group in more human terms, and \u2013 in subtle ways<\/a> \u2013 can deny the full humanity of those outside of their group.<\/p>\n

In our review<\/a>, we hypothesized that the more empathy<\/a> someone feels toward another person, the less likely they are to experience schadenfreude when that person suffers.<\/p>\n

So in order for someone to feel schadenfreude toward another person \u2013 whether it\u2019s a rival, someone in an outgroup or someone who\u2019s committed a crime \u2013 they\u2019ll need to subtly dehumanize them. Only then does the sufferer\u2019s misfortune become rewarding.<\/p>\n

This theory hasn\u2019t been tested yet, so at the end of our review, we suggest ways schadenfreude\u2019s early origins and individual differences can be placed under scientific scrutiny to study this novel hypothesis.<\/p>\n

Linking schadenfreude with dehumanization might sound dark, especially because schadenfreude is such a universal emotion. But dehumanization occurs more often than most would like to think \u2013 and we believe it\u2019s behind the pang of pleasure you feel when you see someone fail.\"The<\/p>\n

Shensheng Wang<\/a>, Ph.D. Candidate in Psychology, Emory University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Shensheng Wang, Emory University In the Pixar animated film \u201cInside Out,\u201d most of the plot plays out inside protagonist Riley\u2019s head, where five emotions \u2013 Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust and Anger \u2013 direct her behavior. The film was released to glowing reviews. But director Pete Docter later admitted that he always regretted that one emotion […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":14864,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[293],"tags":[3550,3606,415,458,228,461,5702],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14867"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14867"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14867\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14872,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14867\/revisions\/14872"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}