[T]he child cannot allow himself to be second-best or devalued, much less left out. “You gave him the biggest piece of candy!” “You gave him more juice!” “Here’s a little more, then.” “Now she’s got more juice than me!” “You let her light the fire in the fireplace and not me.” “Okay, you light a piece of paper.” “But this piece of paper is smaller than the one she lit.” And so on and on. … Sibling rivalry is a critical problem that reflects the basic human condition: it is not that children are vicious, selfish, or domineering. It is that they so openly express man’s tragic destiny: he must desperately justify himself as an object of primary value in the universe. … 32
HAPPY AND SAD FOR YOU, RELATIVELY SPEAKING
Psychologist Heidi Eyre and I did an experiment that captures some sense of how our reactions to events happening to others are anchored by our own relative experiences.33 Female undergraduate participants in our study thought that the purpose of the study was to evaluate ways students get feedback on exams. Another student participant would take an IQ test and then be given feedback about her performance using different methods (e.g., oral vs. written). Participants would observe this feedback and evaluate its effectiveness. The actual purpose of the study (revealed when the experiment was over) was to assess how the participants’ own relative performance on the test would influence their emotional reaction to the other student’s performance. To achieve this, we also asked participants to take the test, for the ostensible purpose of their being in a better position to appreciate the experience of the other student. And, as part of their evaluation of the feedback given to the other student, they completed a questionnaire tapping their own emotional reactions (such as “happy for” and “sad for”). In addition, we randomly determined whether the participant and the other student appeared to have done well or poorly on the IQ test (again, at the end of the experiment, the actual nature of what was happening was revealed). We did not measure schadenfreude in this study. But it was clear from examining these emotional reactions that participants’ sympathy for the other student when she failed, for example, was in part anchored by their own relative performance. Participants’ feelings did not simply follow from the objective fact that the other student had “failed.” If she failed, participants were less sad for her when they themselves had failed than when they had succeeded. If she succeeded, they were also less happy for her when they themselves had failed than when they had also succeeded.
In sum, participants’ reactions to the success and failure of the other student were partly dictated by their own relative performance and not only by the simple fact of the other student’s success or failure. It was easy to feel sad for someone else’s failure from the vantage point of one’s own relative success. It was hard to feel happy for someone’s success from the vantage point of one’s own relative failure.
THE BALANCE OF SELF-INTEREST AND EMPATHY: A COMPLEX DUALITY
It is important to recognize that even participants who failed usually reported some sympathy for the other failed students—and some happiness for those students who succeeded. That is, they had mixed feelings. None of my suggestions about the self-interested aspect of human nature, let me emphasize once again, aims at cheapening other empathic motivations. I like the way that 18th-century Scottish thinker Adam Smith made a similar point:
How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasures of seeing it. … That we often derive sorrow from the sorrow of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it. … The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it.34
It is easy to marshal telling examples of empathy in human beings, and many researchers continue to explore this aspect of human nature.35 Our dependence on others at all stages of life alone suggests that empathy is itself a product of our evolutionary heritage. Overly self-interested people are likely to be rejected by group members. At the very least, human motivation reflects a complex interplay between concern for self and concern for others.36 But in trying to comprehend schadenfreude, the self-interested side of human nature provides a window into understanding why the misfortunes of others can give us pleasure rather than provoke feelings of empathy.
In Chapter 1, I referred to the research on primates done at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center.37 When both monkeys were given cucumbers, both seemed satisfied. But when one received a cucumber and the other received a grape, the monkey receiving the cucumber became distressed. These monkeys seemed to show concern over unequal treatment. What I did not mention is that these monkeys appeared unconcerned when getting more than their share. Gaining an “unfair” advantage over other monkeys did not seem to cause them distress. Researcher Sarah Brosnan notes: “The capuchins’ sense of inequity seems to be very one-sided. It’s all about whether or not ‘I’ got treated unfairly.”38 Not surprisingly, although humans beings are capable of feeling stressed from both unfair advantage and unfair disadvantage, unfair advantage is generally less troubling than unfair disadvantage.39
Psychologists Roy Baumeister and Brad Bushman, in their widely used textbook Social Psychology and Human Nature, characterize this duality of self- and other-interest in an interesting way.40 They emphasize the view that self-interested impulses are especially likely to be rooted in our evolutionary heritage because traits furthering individual survival and reproduction should be favored. This is why Aristotle could suggest that luck is when “a missile hits the next man and misses you.”41 It is hard to imagine living beings surviving without a strong impulse to serve themselves. Baumeister and Bushman also stress that human beings respond to the demands of culture, which typically urges that we adjust our own narrow interests to fit the needs of the group. Even if we want the larger share of the popcorn, we learn to share it equally. This was certainly true as my wife and I watched our daughters mature. As I described in Chapter 1, when they were very young, the disadvantaged one did the protesting and the advantaged one was less perturbed. As they got older, they broadened their concerns, insisted on equality all around, and indeed felt good and took increasing pride in generosity and self-sacrifice. But, even now, if we were to sit down and watch a holiday movie, they would feel puzzled, even a little wounded, if I were to make the mistake of violating the rule equality in distributing popcorn.
Baumeister and Bushman note that many of the rules that we learn, such as turn-taking and respect for the property of others, are based on moral principles that inhibit self-interested behavior. Especially when we are among people we know well, moral emotions such as guilt and shame help in this process. We feel guilty if we satisfy only our own needs and disregard the interests of those in our own group or family, and we feel ashamed when our selfish actions are made public. But our self-interested concerns surface easily. It often requires deliberate, planful efforts on our part to act in culturally appropriate ways. Baumeister and Bushman put it nicely:
Generally, nature says go, culture says stop. … The self is filled with selfish impulses and with the means to restrain them, and many inner conflicts come down to that basic antagonism. That conflict, between selfish impulses and self-control, is probably the most basic conflict in the human psyche.42
We can recognize this tension in Mr. Johnson’s mind as he struggled with what to do with Mr. Clutter’s check, in Dr. Haas’s mind as he instinctively changed places with his sick fellow prisoner, and in children’s minds when they react to how desired things are divvied out to themselves and others.
Any factor that amplifies the benefits of others’ misfortunes for ourselves, such as competition, should promote an “anesthesia of the heart,”43 to use philosopher Henri Bergson’s phrase, and thus intensify our schadenfreude. This is one reason we see so much schadenfreude in the realms of sports and politics. As the studies I
reviewed in Chapter 3 show, misfortunes happening to rival teams and rival political parties produce quick pleasure, especially for people highly identified with their own team or party. This is because when our group identity is important to us, a rival group’s loss is good for our own group and thus good for us. In these studies, the perception of self-gain was highly associated with schadenfreude. In fact, without this perception, unless our participants had reasons to dislike the rival, there was very little schadenfreude reported. Self-interest, through the impact of group identification in these cases, inverted the emotional landscape. For the highly identified fan or political devotee, “bad things” happening to others (if they were rivals) were experienced as good for the group and therefore for the self. In sports, this was true even if the misfortune was a severe injury. In politics, this was true even if the misfortune entailed the death of soldiers. Although schadenfreude was typically low in intensity, especially in the case of reactions to troop deaths, and was mixed with concern, misfortunes happening to others created a boost in pleasure to the extent that these events led to self-gain.
In the next chapter, I shift to another important reason why we often feel schadenfreude, and this has to do with justice. We care deeply about justice and fairness. Our emotional reactions to both good and bad events happening to others are guided in part by whether these events seem deserved or undeserved, fair or unfair. Misfortunes are bad things, but when we believe that they are deserved, schadenfreude is almost sure to follow.
CHAPTER 5
DESERVED MISFORTUNES ARE SWEET
When someone who delights in annoying and vexing peace-loving folk receives at last a right good beating, it is certainly an ill, but everyone approves of it and considers it as good in itself, even if nothing further results from it.
—IMMANUEL KANT1
Every decent man will kvell when that sadist goes to jail.
—LEO ROSTEN2
Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they always made me glad.
—MALCOLM X3
It is hard to imagine the film industry without the revenge plot. There are inexhaustible variations on the theme, but the basic pattern is simple, predictable—and preferred by viewers. The villain treats the hero badly, and the arc of the story completes itself with the hero taking satisfying revenge. No one is more pleased when justice is served than the eager audience. The villain gets no sympathy. We cheer the outcome. It is highly pleasing to see bad people get what they deserve.
The regular merging in films of justice-inspired revenge with its resulting pleasure suggests a natural link between justice and schadenfreude.4 No manner of bloody end can cause us to blanch. I make this claim confidently because of a two-year stint working as an assistant manager at a movie theater during the late 1970s. The catbird seat in the projectionist booth was a good place for observing audience behavior. We showed many films that made audiences cheer when the villain got what was coming to him, but the one I remember best was the Brian De Palma film, The Fury. The villain in this film is an intelligence operative, Ben Childress, played by John Cassavetes, who pitilessly experiments with the lives of two teenagers who happen to have telekinetic powers that could be useful for intelligence purposes. When his actions lead to the death of one of the teens, the other teen turns her telekinetic powers on Childress. Driven by her anger and hatred, she levitates him a few feet off the ground and spins him around with increasing speed until he explodes. The theater audiences were untroubled by the grotesque scene. Some whooped and hollered. They hated this man, played so effectively by Cassavetes. Not only did they want him dead, but they also wanted him minced and pulverized. He deserved it. A ghastly end—but pleasing even so.5
There seems little question that seeing a just misfortune befalling another causes us to feel pleased, with schadenfreude being part of the feeling. Philosopher John Portmann, who has written more on schadenfreude than any other scholar, argues it is an emotional corollary of justice.6 It follows seamlessly from a sense that the misfortune is deserved. And experiments by social psychologists Norman Feather, Wilco van Dijk, and others confirm what one would expect: participants in experiments report more schadenfreude over deserved than undeserved misfortunes.7
WHAT IS A DESERVED MISFORTUNE?
Typically, we use shared standards to resolve whether a misfortune is deserved. For example, we think people who are responsible for their misfortunes also deserve their suffering, and schadenfreude is a common response.8 Brazen swindler Bernie Madoff will go down in history for his Ponzi scheme, breathtaking in scale. Investors appeared to earn returns that were actually generated by later investors. Many high-profile individuals, charities, and nonprofit institutions lost staggering amounts of money, with the tally of the crime reaching $60 billion.9 In June 2009, when Madoff received his sentence of 150 years, cheers and applause filled the courtroom packed with many of his victims.10 Even Madoff appeared to finally grasp the enormity of his wrongdoing. After receiving this maximum sentence, he turned to address his victims: “I live in a tormented state knowing the pain and suffering I have created.”11
Another shared standard for deservingness, often related to responsibility, has to do with balance and fit. We believe that bad people deserve a bad fate, just as good people deserve a good fate. We believe that extremely bad behavior deserves extreme punishment, just as extremely good behavior deserves great reward. And so villains such as the character played by Cassavetes in The Fury deserve their demise because of their villainous natures and wicked behaviors. They receive their “just desserts.” This is pleasing to observe because it agrees with our ideas of how fate should play out. Part of this pleasure is aesthetic. The righting of the balance achieved when bad behavior leads to a bad outcome produces a kind of poetic justice.12
Reactions to Madoff’s punishment fit this standard as well. He did indeed create extreme suffering and betrayed the trust of many in the process—shamelessly, it seemed—until he was caught.13 His victims, when given the chance to describe their personal losses before the sentencing, pulled no punches. One victim, Michael Schwartz, whose family used their now lost savings to care for a mentally disabled brother, said, “I only hope that his prison sentence is long enough so that his jail cell will become his coffin.”14 The judge concurred, labeling Madoff’s crimes as “extraordinarily evil,” which is why for each of the crimes to which Madoff confessed, the maximum sentence was imposed. “It felt good,” said Dominic Ambrosino, one of Madoff’s many victims, who was outside the courthouse in the crowd when the news of the verdict spread.15
One of the most unfortunate tales from the Madoff scandal involved Nobel Peace Prize recipient and Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel. Because of Madoff’s scheme, Wiesel lost $15 million of funds for his Foundation for Humanity. This was virtually all of the Foundation’s endowment. Wiesel was in no forgiving mood. “Psychopath—it’s too nice a word for him,”16 Wiesel said and then went further to recommend a five-year period in a prison cell containing a screen depicting the faces of each of Madoff’s victims—presented morning, noon, and night.17
Nor was there a trace of sympathy for Madoff when he landed in prison. In fact, some even expressed disappointment that he was sentenced only to a minimum security facility populated largely by other white-collar criminals. The maximum punishment allowed by law seemed hardly enough. Most people took what pleasure they could from the event, nonetheless. This was especially evident on the internet, where most comments were exultant and often crude. A post on one site contained a photo of Madoff’s prison bed and included comments such as the following:18
Isn’t there a bed of nails we could put in there?
There’ll be a lot of outrage when people see that he gets a pillow for his head.
I hope those beds are filled with bedbugs.
Madoff’s swindle was epoch-making. He betrayed the trust of friends, charities, and, evidently, even his family. He so deserved his punishm
ent by any standard one could point to that no one seemed sorry for him. Rather, just about everyone was openly happy to see this money man with the counterfeit Midas touch reduced to prison inmate.
Schadenfreude clearly thrives when justice is served. As a basis for schadenfreude, deservingness has the advantage of seeming to be unrelated to self-interest because the standards for determining justice appear objective rather than personal and thus potentially biased.19 It is less an “outlaw” emotion, less a shameful feeling. John Portmann describes the example of the influential Roman Catholic theologian Bernard Haring, who declared that schadenfreude is an evil, sinful emotion to feel. And yet Haring qualifies this characterization by noting,
Schadenfreude is evil, it is a terrible sin—unless you feel it when the lawful enemies of God are brought low, and then it’s a virtue. Why? Because you can then go to the lawful enemies of God and you can say “see, God is making you suffer because you’re on a bad path.”20
I am unaware of any examples in the Gospels of Christ approving of schadenfreude. However, Haring’s sentiments echo those of other religious thinkers, such as 13th-century Catholic priest St. Thomas Aquinas21 and 18th-century Christian preacher Jonathan Edwards. The title of one of Edwards’s sermons was “Why the Suffering of the Wicked will not be Cause of Grief to the Righteous, but the Contrary.”22 Evil schadenfreude may be, but not when the lawful enemies of God get what they deserve. If sanctified justice is served, then schadenfreude is—well—justified.
THE SINGULAR PLEASURE OF THE FALL OF A HYPOCRITE
Some types of deservingness produce an especially satisfying schadenfreude. I suspect that few things can top the fall of the hypocrite. The archetype of this general category is Jimmy Swaggart, who stands out among a congested group of unforgettable cases. Swaggart, a talented, charismatic entertainer, helped create a particular brand of Christian proselytizing: the TV evangelist. His program, The Jimmy Swaggart Telecast, at its peak, was broadcast on hundreds of stations around the globe. Swaggart continues to this day to entertain and attract a large following. He is a remarkable person, a self-made American original. However, he got himself in trouble in the late 1980s. Swaggart not only preached about the consequences of sin, but he also went about exposing the sins of others. Most notably, he accused another well-known evangelist, Jim Bakker, of sexual misconduct. But Swaggart soon lost his high moral footing. A church member, whom Swaggart also accused of sexual misbehavior, hired a private detective to monitor Swaggart’s activities. The detective produced photographs showing Swaggart’s regular visits to a prostitute. When the leadership of his church, the Assemblies of God, learned of this behavior, they suspended him for three months. In a public confession—a now iconic event in popular culture—Swaggart came before his congregation and television audience to admit his sin and ask for forgiveness.23
The Joy of Pain Page 9