Keegan D. Greenier Ph.D. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Schadenfreude |
| Schadenfreude is a fascinating concept. Taking pleasure in the misfortunes of others is not our finest moment as people. When bad things happen to others, ideally we should feel sympathy, and that does often occur. However, sometimes when bad things happen to others, we feel happiness, joy, or smugness. Why? Past research has found that we are more likely to experience the Schadenfreude emotion when (a) we don’t like the target person, (b) we are envious of the person, and/or (c) we feel that the person is undeserving of his/her initial high standing.
All of the past research on Schadenfreude had involved studying it from the perspective of a passive observer. Researchers would present research participants with fictional scenarios or crafted newspaper articles describing another’s misfortune, and participants would indicate how that made them feel. In my study, I wanted to investigate two things that had not been looked at previously. First, I wanted to create an actual, real-life situation in which participants would be experiencing a potential Schadenfreude situation in vivo, so to speak. Second, I wanted to see if the Schadenfreude experience changed if the participant was the actual cause, or agent, of the other’s downfall. To do this, in each experimental session I had one participant and one confederate (actor) compete on an anagram task. During this round of anagrams, the confederate behaved either nicely (complimenting the participant’s correct answers), neutrally (saying nothing), or rudely (making obnoxious, gloating comments). The task was rigged so that the confederate would win the competition and thus win extra research participation credits for her class. In a second round of anagrams, the confederate wagered all of her winnings and then lost them (hence downfall, misfortune). She did this either playing against the clock (participant as observer) or against the participant again (participant as agent). The results of the study are remarkable. The agency variable proved to be a very important predictor of the Schadenfreude emotion, particularly in combination with a rude confederate. Participants took great pleasure in personally bringing about the downfall of a rude other. There were significant increases in feelings of pride, and decreases in bad mood, anger, frustration, inadequacy, and being upset. Below is the graph for “pride,” just to demonstrate. You can clearly see (on the left) that people were very proud of themselves for taking down a rude other, but there was no such effect if they were merely a passive observer of the event.  The findings are very interesting, and the role of agency in the experience of Schadenfreude is clear. I also fervently believe that schadenfreude research should use these kinds of real-life situations for participants to react to, rather than rely simply on hypothetical scenarios. This research is currently under review for publication. |
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