Schadenfreude in Psychology Why We Enjoy Others Misfortune

Schadenfreude, the Secret Teacher in Our Minds

Hook: The smile you didn’t mean to smile

On a rainy morning, a commuter train stalls. Everyone sighs—until a notification buzzes: the office rival who always takes credit for your work will be late to the meeting where promotions are discussed. You feel a small, unwelcome lift in your chest. You don’t want to be happy about it. But there it is.

The Germans have a word for this feeling: schadenfreude—pleasure at another person’s misfortune. It’s a word that travels well because the experience does too. From sports fans watching a rival team lose, to social media users pausing a little longer on bad-news posts about famous people, the emotion pops up everywhere. And yet it’s rarely discussed with kindness or curiosity.

What if schadenfreude isn’t just a moral slip? What if, in small doses, it’s a teacher—an emotional cue that helps us learn about fairness, status, and our place in the social world?

What “schadenfreude in psychology” means in this interpretation

In this article, I treat schadenfreude as a learning and behavioral scaffold. That means it’s not merely a guilty pleasure; it’s a signal that participates in how we:

• Track status and competition
• Judge fairness and deservingness
• Calibrate self-worth through comparison
• Learn the unwritten rules of groups and hierarchies

Like scaffolding around a building, the emotion isn’t the final structure of morality or character. But it supports the construction process—sometimes helpfully, sometimes hazardously—while our social minds are at work.

The science behind it (in plain language)

Psychologists usually explain schadenfreude using three simple ingredients:

1) Social comparison

Humans constantly (often unconsciously) compare themselves to others. When someone who is ahead stumbles, the comparison gap narrows. That can feel like relief or even pleasure—not because we love suffering, but because our own status anxiety eases.

2) Fairness and deservingness

We care deeply about whether outcomes feel deserved. If a person seen as arrogant, unfair, or rule-breaking fails, the brain may register it as moral balance restored. The pleasure is less “they hurt” and more “the world makes sense again.”

3) The brain’s reward system

Neuroscience shows that social information can activate the same reward circuits as food or money. In certain contexts, another person’s loss—especially a rival’s—can trigger those circuits. That doesn’t make us monsters; it makes us predictably human.

Put together, schadenfreude becomes an emotional feedback signal. It tells us something about how we’re evaluating status, justice, and belonging—even when we’d rather not hear it.

Experiments and evidence

Below are three influential lines of research. Where details are well-known, I report them; where exact parameters vary across papers, I keep the description careful and general.

1) The brain on rival failure

Researchers: Takahashi et al. Year & venue: 2009, Science

• Research question: Does the brain treat a rival’s misfortune like a reward?
• Method: Participants lay in an fMRI scanner while reading scenarios about people they envied experiencing either good or bad outcomes.
• Sample/setting: Adult volunteers in a laboratory neuroimaging study.
• Results: When an envied person experienced misfortune, regions associated with reward processing (including the ventral striatum) showed increased activity.
• Why it matters: This was a striking demonstration that schadenfreude isn’t just a metaphorical “guilty pleasure.” In some contexts, the brain literally processes it like a reward. That supports the idea that the emotion plays a role in how we learn and reinforce social comparisons.

2) Deservingness changes everything

Researchers: Wilco W. van Dijk, Jaap W. Ouwerkerk, and colleagues Year & venue: 2006 (and related papers), Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

• Research question: When does another person’s misfortune feel good rather than bad?
• Method: Participants read stories about targets who experienced setbacks. The stories manipulated whether the target was likable, arrogant, fair, or unfair.
• Sample/setting: University student samples in controlled lab experiments.
• Results: Schadenfreude was much stronger when the misfortune happened to someone perceived as undeserving or arrogant. When the person seemed decent and unlucky, participants mostly felt sympathy instead.
• Why it matters: This shows schadenfreude is not random cruelty. It is tightly linked to moral evaluation. The emotion appears to help us track whether social outcomes align with our sense of justice.

3) Teams, tribes, and group-based joy

Researchers: Mina Cikara, Susan Fiske, and colleagues Year & venue: 2011–2014 (multiple papers), including Journal of Experimental Social Psychology and Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

• Research question: How does group identity (e.g., sports fans, political groups) shape schadenfreude?
• Method: Studies measured emotional and sometimes neural responses of fans when their own team or a rival team succeeded or failed.
• Sample/setting: Sports fans and other group-identified participants, using surveys, behavioral measures, and sometimes brain imaging.
• Results: People often felt pleasure when a rival group failed, even if no direct benefit followed. The stronger the group identity, the stronger the effect.
• Why it matters: This work shows schadenfreude helps cement group boundaries. It teaches us who is “us” and who is “them,” and emotionally reinforces loyalty—sometimes at the cost of empathy.

Important caution: These studies do not claim schadenfreude is good or morally right. They show it is systematic, predictable, and psychologically meaningful.

A simple thought experiment you can try

Title: The Two Stories Test

1. Think of two people:
   • Person A: Someone you see as arrogant or unfair.
   • Person B: Someone you see as decent and hardworking.
2. Now imagine both experience the same mild setback (for example, missing a promotion or getting a public correction).
3. Notice your emotional reactions. Don’t judge them—just observe.
   • Do you feel a small spark of satisfaction in one case and sympathy in the other?
   • If so, that contrast is the deservingness filter in action.

This isn’t about confessing bad thoughts. It’s about seeing how your moral evaluations shape your emotions automatically.

Real-world applications

1) Understanding online behavior

Social media thrives on public wins and public failures. Outrage, call-outs, and “gotcha” moments spread partly because they offer a moralized form of schadenfreude: the sense that a rule-breaker has been exposed and balance restored.

Recognizing this doesn’t excuse cruelty—but it helps explain why such content is so sticky.

2) Managing envy at work

In competitive environments, schadenfreude often rides on the back of envy. If you notice yourself secretly enjoying a colleague’s mistake, it may be a signal that:

• You feel threatened or undervalued, or
• You believe the system is unfair and are hungry for correction

Used wisely, that signal can point you toward constructive actions—asking for feedback, renegotiating roles, or changing goals—rather than quiet resentment.

3) Parenting and education

Children notice very early when “the teacher’s pet” gets in trouble or when a rule-breaker is caught. Their reactions can look unkind, but they are also part of learning how rules and fairness work.

The adult task is not to deny the emotion, but to teach what to do with it: how to move from “they deserved it” to “and how can we make things better?”

4) Conflict and polarization

In politics and culture wars, schadenfreude can become a fuel source: each side emotionally rewards itself for the other side’s mistakes. That strengthens identity—but weakens the possibility of understanding.

Knowing this mechanism doesn’t end conflict. But it gives us a lever: we can choose not to build our sense of meaning on the humiliation of others.

Limitations, controversies, and open questions

1) Not all pleasure is schadenfreude

Researchers are careful to distinguish between:

• Relief (“I’m glad it wasn’t me”),
• Justice satisfaction (“a wrong was corrected”), and
• Genuine pleasure at suffering

In real life, these often mix. Measuring them cleanly is hard.

2) Cultural differences

Most experiments have been done in Western or East Asian university samples. How schadenfreude is expressed, suppressed, or moralized likely varies across cultures more than we currently understand.

3) When does it become harmful?

A little schadenfreude may be a byproduct of normal social learning. But chronic, identity-based schadenfreude—especially toward whole groups—can erode empathy and justify cruelty. Psychology is still working out where that tipping point lies.

4) Can we train ourselves out of it?

There is some evidence that perspective-taking and compassion training reduce hostile emotions in general, but schadenfreude specifically has not been as thoroughly studied in interventions. This remains an open and important field.

Inspiring close: From secret pleasure to useful signal

Schadenfreude is an uncomfortable mirror. It shows us where we feel small, where we feel wronged, where we care about fairness and status more than we admit.

But mirrors are not enemies.

If you treat this emotion not as a sin to deny, nor as a pleasure to indulge, but as information, it can become a quiet teacher. It can tell you:

• Where you feel insecure
• Where you think the world is unjust
• Where you are craving recognition, balance, or meaning

From there, a more generous response becomes possible—not because you are pretending to be better than human, but because you are working with human nature instead of being dragged by it.

The hopeful future of this research is not a world where we never feel schadenfreude. It is a world where we notice it, learn from it, and choose what kind of people we want to be next.

Key takeaways

• Schadenfreude is a common, structured social emotion, not a random moral failure.
• It is closely tied to envy, fairness judgments, and group identity.
• Brain and behavioral studies show it can activate reward systems in specific contexts.
• Treated as a signal rather than a vice, it can reveal unmet needs and moral concerns.
• The real work is not erasing the feeling, but deciding what to build on top of it.

References (compact)

• Cikara, M., Botvinick, M. M., & Fiske, S. T. (2011). Us versus them: Social identity shapes neural responses to intergroup competition. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
• Cikara, M., & Fiske, S. T. (2014). Their pain gives us pleasure: How intergroup dynamics shape schadenfreude. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.
• Takahashi, H., et al. (2009). When your gain is my pain and your pain is my gain: Neural correlates of envy and schadenfreude. Science.
• van Dijk, W. W., Ouwerkerk, J. W., Goslinga, S., & Nieweg, M. (2006). Deservingness and schadenfreude. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
• Smith, R. H., et al. (1996). Envy and schadenfreude. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.