What is Schadenfreude: why we secretly enjoy other people’s pain
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KEY TAKEAWAYS
Schadenfreude is the pleasure derived from another's misfortune, a universal feeling with no direct English equivalent.
Neurologically, schadenfreude activates the brain's reward system, linking pleasure with both enjoyment and aggression.
There are three types of schadenfreude: rivalry-based, justice-based, and aggression-based, each with distinct psychological and moral implications.
Social media amplifies schadenfreude by making private feelings public and rewarding collective participation in others' downfalls.
Cancel culture often intertwines with schadenfreude, where the satisfaction from public shaming is more about social status and group belonging than justice.
GLOSSARY
Schadenfreude
A German term describing the pleasure felt at another person's misfortune, particularly when they are perceived as rivals or undeserving.
Ventral Striatum
A brain region associated with processing pleasure and reward, activated during experiences of schadenfreude.
Upward Social Comparison
Comparing oneself to someone perceived as better off, which can trigger schadenfreude when that person experiences a setback.
Rivalry-based Schadenfreude
Pleasure derived from a competitor's failure, rooted in evolutionary social dynamics and group competition.
Justice-based Schadenfreude
Pleasure linked to seeing someone face deserved consequences, tied to a sense of fairness being restored.
Aggression-based Schadenfreude
Enjoyment of another's pain independent of rivalry or justice, associated with darker personality traits like narcissism and psychopathy.
FAQ
Why does English lack a native word for schadenfreude?
English has borrowed many words for complex emotions but lacks a native term for the specific pleasure in others' misfortune. This absence suggests the feeling was culturally acknowledged but not explicitly named, leading to the quiet adoption of the German term.
How does schadenfreude manifest in the brain?
Schadenfreude activates the ventral striatum, a brain region involved in processing pleasure and reward. This activation links the feeling of pleasure from others' failures with the same neural pathways that respond to personal gains like food or social approval.
What are the different types of schadenfreude and their significance?
There are three types: rivalry-based, linked to competition; justice-based, tied to fairness and deserved consequences; and aggression-based, associated with enjoyment of pain without justification. Each type operates through different psychological mechanisms and carries distinct moral implications.
In what ways has social media changed the experience of schadenfreude?
Social media transforms schadenfreude from a private feeling into a public, collective event. Platforms reward engagement with others' misfortune, amplifying the feeling and encouraging widespread participation in public shaming or 'pile-ons.'
How is schadenfreude connected to cancel culture?
Cancel culture often involves justice-based schadenfreude but is frequently driven by rivalry and aggression-based forms. The collective satisfaction from canceling someone is less about justice and more about social status, group belonging, and the pleasure of seeing a high-status individual fall.
EDITORIAL NOTE
This piece is part of The Present Minds — essays on psychology, identity, and modern life.
Shaniya Naz writes about people, places, and the shifting rhythms of everyday life. Her work is guided by curiosity and a quiet interest in…
You scrolled past something this week that made you feel a small, quiet satisfaction. A person you find arrogant got publicly corrected. A company you dislike announced disappointing results. A celebrity whose confidence irritates you made an embarrassing mistake. An influencer who always appears perfect posted something that revealed they are not.
You did not celebrate out loud. You may not have even fully registered the feeling. But it was there. A brief warmth. A sense of something being briefly, quietly right with the world.
That was schadenfreude. And social media has turned it into one of the most powerful forces shaping human behaviour online.
The word with no English equivalent
Schadenfreude is the pleasure a person feels when someone else suffers. The word is German. The feeling is universal.
The English language has borrowed angst from German. It borrowed ennui from French. But for the specific, slightly embarrassing pleasure of watching someone else stumble, fall, or publicly fail, English has no native word at all. Only the German one, borrowed quietly, as though the concept itself needed to arrive through a back door.
That absence is telling.
The philosopher Aristotle described something close to it in ancient Greece. Spinoza referenced it in the seventeenth century. Nietzsche wrote about it in the nineteenth. It has always been there. Research confirms it is universal, experienced across cultures and across the entire span of recorded human observation.
What has changed is the environment it now operates in.
What lights up inside the brain
Schadenfreude is not simply a thought or a judgement. It is a measurable neurological event.
In a now-classic study at Princeton University, social neuroscientists recruited devoted fans of the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox, two of baseball’s most intensely competitive rival teams. They scanned the fans’ brains using functional MRI technology while showing them clips that either benefited their team or benefited the rival.
When fans watched a rival player fail, the brain lit up in the ventral striatum. This is the region associated with the subjective experience of pleasure. The fans described both personal victory and their rival’s failure as equally pleasurable. And the fans whose brains showed the greatest pleasure response to a rival’s failure were also the most aggressive fans in the study.
That final detail is the one worth sitting with. The pleasure and the aggression came from the same source.
The brain does not distinguish, at the level of chemistry, between winning something for yourself and watching your rival lose something. Both register as reward.
Neuroimaging studies have consistently found that intergroup schadenfreude engages the ventral striatum, the region involved in reinforcement learning. Activity in this region predicts not just pleasure but increased willingness to harm and decreased willingness to help members of the rival group.
Three kinds of pleasure in someone else’s pain
Research has distinguished three forms of schadenfreude. Understanding the difference matters because they operate through different psychological mechanisms and carry different moral weights.
The first is rivalry-based. This is the Yankees and Red Sox study in action. When we perceive someone as a competitor, their failure improves our relative standing without requiring us to do anything. Once a group is marked as competitive, the emotional response follows automatically. No learning is required. This suggests the mechanism is ancient, wired into the social brain long before social media gave it an audience.
The second is justice-based. This is the one most people reach for when they want to justify the feeling. Someone behaved badly and now they are suffering consequences. The corrupt executive faces a public reckoning. The bully gets called out. The fraudster gets exposed. Research confirms it is real and distinct from simple rivalry. People do feel greater schadenfreude when they perceive a target as deserving their misfortune.
The third, and least comfortable, is aggression-based. This is the form that emerges when a person genuinely enjoys another’s pain independent of any rivalry or justice narrative. It correlates with what psychologists call the Dark Triad: narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. Individuals with these traits show consistently elevated schadenfreude responses and greater interest in witnessing the suffering of others.
Most people operate primarily within the first two forms. The third exists on a spectrum distributed across the general population.
The engine underneath
At the core of all three forms is a single mechanism: social comparison.
Human beings have been evaluating their position relative to others since before language existed. Where do I stand? Who has more? Who has less? Who is rising? Who is falling? These questions run constantly, mostly below conscious awareness, as an ongoing background calculation.
Schadenfreude is most reliably triggered by upward social comparison. Comparison with someone perceived as doing better than us. When someone we envy experiences a fall, the gap between them and us narrows. Our relative position improves. The brain registers this as a gain, even though nothing in our actual circumstances has changed.
The more envied the person, the more satisfying the fall tends to feel. The brain does not verify whether the advantage was actually unfair. It only registers that someone was above us and is now lower.
Interestingly, when the depicted misfortunes are very severe rather than minor, the schadenfreude response decreases. This suggests that ordinary schadenfreude is not a desire for suffering as such. It is a desire for levelling. For the removal of an advantage that felt unearned.
Social media is an engine perfectly designed to amplify this.
What the internet did to it
Before social media, schadenfreude was mostly a private experience. You read about a celebrity’s downfall in a newspaper. You heard a colleague had been passed over for promotion. The feeling came, lasted briefly, and dissipated.
Now consider what changed.
The feeling no longer arrives and fades in private. It arrives in public, surrounded by thousands of other people experiencing the same feeling at the same moment, reinforcing and amplifying each other. The collective expression of schadenfreude became, on social media, its own form of social currency. The wittiest reaction gets the most likes. The sharpest pile-on gets the most shares. The whole infrastructure of the platforms rewards engagement with others’ misfortune.
The Justine Sacco case is one of the earliest and starkest illustrations. In 2013, Sacco, a communications director, posted a poorly judged tweet before boarding an eleven-hour flight from London to South Africa. While she slept, with no internet access, the tweet was picked up, spread, and became the top trending topic worldwide. People began tweeting “Has Justine landed yet?” in open anticipation of the moment she would wake up and discover her career was over.
The phrasing itself expressed schadenfreude precisely. Not just satisfaction that she had been held accountable. Pleasure in the specific moment of her realising what had happened to her.
The audience for her downfall numbered in the millions. None of them knew her. Very few had any personal stake in her behaviour. But the social mechanics of the platform turned her misfortune into a collective event, something to participate in, to be seen responding to correctly.
This is schadenfreude at industrial scale. And the architecture of every major social media platform is built to produce exactly this, because the engagement metrics that drive revenue do not distinguish between the excitement of good news and the excitement of watching someone fall.
Cancel culture and what it actually runs on
The relationship between schadenfreude and cancel culture is not identical. But it is close enough to examine honestly.
Cancel culture, at its best, is a legitimate form of collective accountability. People who have caused genuine harm facing social and professional consequences through the coordinated withdrawal of support. The justice-based form of schadenfreude is real here. There is such a thing as deserved consequences.
But research on the psychological dynamics of cancellation finds that the emotional driver for many participants is not primarily justice. It frequently produces a “we versus them” mentality, where the satisfaction of participation is tied more to group belonging and the shared performance of moral authority than to any outcome for the person harmed by the original behaviour.
The response to a transgression rarely scales with the actual severity of the transgression. What scales with it is the status of the person being cancelled.
This is rivalry-based and aggression-based schadenfreude operating under a justice-based justification. The target becomes a vessel for displaced competitive feeling. Their fall is satisfying not because it restores fairness in any specific sense but because it temporarily elevates everyone watching relative to someone who was, moments ago, higher than them.
The higher they were, the more satisfying the fall. The more envied, the more thoroughly their collapse is enjoyed.
What to do with the feeling
If schadenfreude is universal, neurologically hardwired, present in every culture and every era, and now amplified by platforms that profit from it: what is the honest response?
It is not guilt. Feeling a brief flicker of pleasure when someone you find arrogant stumbles is not evidence of a moral defect. It is evidence of a functioning social brain doing what social brains do.
The more useful question is what you do with the feeling. There is a considerable difference between noticing it and acting on it. Between recognising the brief warmth and joining the pile-on. Between privately registering that something felt satisfying and spending an afternoon enjoying someone’s documented humiliation.
Research shows that schadenfreude is negatively related to helping behaviour. The more pleasure a person takes in a target’s misfortune, the less willing they are to help that person, even when help is clearly warranted and easy to provide. The emotion, when it runs unchecked, does not stay contained to the person it started with. It erodes the general capacity for empathy in the direction where it is being consistently expressed.
The social brain evolved to keep track of relative status in groups of roughly 150 people. It is now operating in environments where millions of people are simultaneously visible and comparable, where misfortune is broadcast in real time, and where expressing pleasure in that misfortune earns social reward.
The mechanism is ancient. The environment is entirely new.
And the next time you feel that brief warmth while scrolling, you will already know exactly what it is. Whether you stop there is the only part that is actually up to you.
Shaniya Naz writes about people, places, and the shifting rhythms of everyday life. Her work is guided by curiosity and a quiet interest in how experiences shape perspective.
Schadenfreude is the pleasure derived from another's misfortune, a universal feeling with no direct English equivalent.
Neurologically, schadenfreude activates the brain's reward system, linking pleasure with both enjoyment and aggression.
There are three types of schadenfreude: rivalry-based, justice-based, and aggression-based, each with distinct psychological and moral implications.
Social media amplifies schadenfreude by making private feelings public and rewarding collective participation in others' downfalls.
Cancel culture often intertwines with schadenfreude, where the satisfaction from public shaming is more about social status and group belonging than justice.
Glossary
Schadenfreude
A German term describing the pleasure felt at another person's misfortune, particularly when they are perceived as rivals or undeserving.
Ventral Striatum
A brain region associated with processing pleasure and reward, activated during experiences of schadenfreude.
Upward Social Comparison
Comparing oneself to someone perceived as better off, which can trigger schadenfreude when that person experiences a setback.
Rivalry-based Schadenfreude
Pleasure derived from a competitor's failure, rooted in evolutionary social dynamics and group competition.
Justice-based Schadenfreude
Pleasure linked to seeing someone face deserved consequences, tied to a sense of fairness being restored.
Aggression-based Schadenfreude
Enjoyment of another's pain independent of rivalry or justice, associated with darker personality traits like narcissism and psychopathy.
FAQ
Why does English lack a native word for schadenfreude?
English has borrowed many words for complex emotions but lacks a native term for the specific pleasure in others' misfortune. This absence suggests the feeling was culturally acknowledged but not explicitly named, leading to the quiet adoption of the German term.
How does schadenfreude manifest in the brain?
Schadenfreude activates the ventral striatum, a brain region involved in processing pleasure and reward. This activation links the feeling of pleasure from others' failures with the same neural pathways that respond to personal gains like food or social approval.
What are the different types of schadenfreude and their significance?
There are three types: rivalry-based, linked to competition; justice-based, tied to fairness and deserved consequences; and aggression-based, associated with enjoyment of pain without justification. Each type operates through different psychological mechanisms and carries distinct moral implications.
In what ways has social media changed the experience of schadenfreude?
Social media transforms schadenfreude from a private feeling into a public, collective event. Platforms reward engagement with others' misfortune, amplifying the feeling and encouraging widespread participation in public shaming or 'pile-ons.'
How is schadenfreude connected to cancel culture?
Cancel culture often involves justice-based schadenfreude but is frequently driven by rivalry and aggression-based forms. The collective satisfaction from canceling someone is less about justice and more about social status, group belonging, and the pleasure of seeing a high-status individual fall.
Editorial Note
This piece is part of The Present Minds, essays on psychology, identity, and modern life.
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