Tiffany Watt Smith is a British cultural historian and in her 2018 book “Schadenfreude, The Joy of Another’s Misfortune,” she tries “to understand why we experience pleasure at other people’s misfortunes at all and what it feels like when we do.” She starts off by pointing out that many famous philosophers have spoken about schadenfreude: Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Hobbes, Emmanuel Kant, Nietzsche and how many languages have a word for it. She claims “Over time and in many different places, when it comes to making ourselves happy, we humans have long relied on the humiliations and failures of other people.” And further along: “If we peer more closely at this hidden and much-maligned emotion, liberate ourselves from its shame and secrecy, we will discover a great deal about who we really are.” There are five themes that the author has detected in the common expressions of schadenfreude in English. 1) “Schadenfreude is usually thought an opportunistic pleasure, a spectator sport, felt when we stumble across another’s misfortune which we have not caused ourselves.” This is therefore different than sadistic pleasure which we have caused. 2) “Schadenfreude is usually thought of as a furtive emotion.” Because its unbridled expression is associated with villainy especially in the cinema. 3) “[W]e often feel entitled to it when the other person’s suffering can be construed as a comeuppance—a deserved punishment for being smug or hypocritical, or breaking the law.” 4) “we tend to see Schadenfreude as a form of respite—the failures of others appease our own envy and inadequacy, and give us a much-needed glimpse of superiority.” And lastly 5) “Schadenfreude is usually thought of as glee at minor discomforts and gaffes rather than at dire tragedies and deaths.”
The author then wonders if we live in an age of schadenfreude. Although we cannot say that we moderns feel it more, we can say that we have many more opportunities to experience it as a result of the internet and social and popular media. Part of the malignment of schadenfreude in our modern world is that it appears as the opposite of empathy which is rightly highly valued. “Schadenfreude is a testament to our capacity for emotional flexibility, as opposed to moral rigidity, and our ability to hold apparently contradictory thoughts and feelings in mind simultaneously. Schadenfreude and sympathy are not either/or responses as is sometimes suggested, but can be felt all at once.”
Our culture has developed an amazing amount of opportunities to enjoy accidents. Consider the slapstick of Abbott and Costello or of Mr. Bean. Consider the popularity of a genre known as “fail videos” The author notes sardonically that fail videos and their hundreds of subclasses enjoy a popularity on YouTube at least an order of magnitude higher (and often two orders of magnitude higher) than the most popular TED talks which are supposed to be inspirational, educational, informative and useful. Laughter is healthy and good for us. Researchers have suggested that the laughter associated with schadenfreude must have helped our prehistoric ancestors to survive. They speculate that it may have facilitated equality and bonding within small groups that need to rely on each other for survival.
The author then asks: “Is it possible to imagine sports without Schadenfreude?” while it might be possible it would certainly be very boring. Studies of spectators at sporting events have shown that “our own success is not half so enjoyable as our bitter rival’s failure.” Some scientists hypothesize that in our prehistoric hunter days catching and killing our prey was absolutely necessary for survival and therefore we evolved a pleasure from that type of success – that is the failure of the animal to get away. Now in historical times we have sublimated this instinct into sports but the failure of our rival still elicits this emotion.
Justice is highly emotional and one place we are allowed to show our schadenfreude. When someone deserves a punishment we are almost encouraged to talk about it and enjoy it. How do you feel that most of Trump’s election team has been indicted? How would you feel if Trump himself were impeached? Or if you happen to be a Republican, how did you feel that Hillary Clinton lost in 2016? Seeing justice done is very pleasurable and in some games people will forgo a benefit in order to punish an unjust action. Emmanuel Kant described this feeling and punishing action as “not malicious, but stem[ing] from the relief of seeing moral equilibrium restored.” This sense of schadenfreude can lead to awkwardness which is defined as uncertainty from having two competing value systems. We are allowed to gloat over retributive justice but only to a point. The question of when it becomes excessive is the part that creates awkwardness when we get it wrong. Although justice may be the only one we are allowed to publicly feel schadenfreude for, “hubris is the flaw we are most excited to see punished. It is a special kind of Schadenfreude, akin to that of seeing justice restored, but rather more open to abuse, since vanity and conceitedness in other people—like most of their personality flaws—is firmly in the eye of the beholder.” The standard evolutionary biology explanation for this is to maintain an equality within the small bands that need each other to survive. But the abuse of this is also quite easy so we have developed a psychological mechanism to overcome the awkwardness: if there is a teaching moment then we can say that schadenfreude is for their own good. Public humiliation is thus part of justice but also group dependent for the sake of transforming the offending party and returning them to the fold.
In the field of love, schadenfreude can be at its highest: “the strongest Schadenfreude is felt when a direct sexual competitor meets some misfortune linked to qualities conventionally associated with their gender’s attractiveness.” Thus feeling this emotion at this precise time may have emboldened people to pursue mating opportunities they would not have otherwise pursued. Evolutionarily it appears to be successful based on the high degree of emotional intensity science has detected. The author then goes into “relative deprivation theory” to show that we feel worse when we drop in the pecking order than when we actually lose something. We also have developed a “downward social comparison” technique to feel better about ourselves when we compare ourselves to someone worse off.
In our society, “few things elicit such guilty spasms of delicious schadenfreude as the disappointments of our most successful friends.” There are two aspects of schadenfreude here: one is the pure schadenfreude of being able to downwardly compare yourself to your disappointed friend and the second is “a little undertow of smugness that your shoulder was the one picked to cry on; enjoy the chance to reimagine yourself as Helpful, Kind and Good in a Crisis. We know that self-congratulatory pleasure can coexist with compassion, but not everyone does.” Then Watt Smith suggests that there is a social good that comes out of this schadenfreude: “A flicker of Schadenfreude can neutralize … envy, catching it before it turns into hostility and spite.” Envy, defined as “the lust for other people’s things, qualities or accomplishments”, is a much more socially destructive force therefore if schadenfreude nips it in the bud we have saved our group from a good chance of disintegration.
One historically relatively new place that creates conflict in new ways is the office. “[W]ork is a far more awkward blend of competitiveness and collegiality, our colleagues at once friends and threats”. Since the office did not exist in prehistory, our natural schadenfreude may not be well evolved for success in the office and thus our nature is in conflict with our expectations and how we earn a livelihood. Passive aggressive acts, which appear to be a uniquely modern phenomenon, help us overcome the indignities and tediousness of work life and are therefore very pleasurable in terms of the schadenfreude they induce. However they do diminish the organizational effectiveness and its social cohesion.
Developing group cohesion is relatively easy. Studies have shown that groups are easy to form on the slimmest of commonalties. However the hard part is keeping the group together. In this way schadenfreude is very useful studies have shown that the more one identifies with a particular group (sports team, political party, nation, etc.) the more they feel schadenfreude at their rival groups misfortune. This has most certainly been exploited through propaganda, news stories, and advertising.
Watt Smith ends her book with some suggested “rules of engagement” she writes: “I have become something of a connoisseur of Schadenfreude, with a fine nose for its subtle, ever-changing palate, savoring its movements from glee to triumph, from quite satisfaction to smugness and contempt—before settling, inevitably, into that familiar sour aftertaste of self-disgust.” 1) We should understand that schadenfreude helps. “I don’t think Schadenfreude is either ‘good’ or ‘evil’: sometimes it stirs up problems, but mostly it’s harmless fun. But let’s focus on its benefits, and there are many: it makes you feel good when you are feeling inferior; it is a way of celebrating the fact that everyone fails; it helps us see the absurdity in life; it can spark a rebellious streak, or provide the little jolt of superiority that might give us the boldness to push ourselves forward; it can even help change conversations at a political level.” 2) We should understand that Schadenfreude does not define us. 3) It will tell us things we do not want to know. “Being able to recognize the fine differences in our emotional weather is an important part of emotional intelligence, and particularly valuable when it comes to those feelings we habitually ignore because they make us feel ashamed of ourselves.” 4) Under safe circumstances, we should probably own up to our schadenfreude. And 5) understand that schadenfreude can always go two ways: when directed at you don’t point it out in others but understand you are a worthy opponent.