Schadenfreude

• 1. Introduction

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  Schadenfreude is the pleasure a person feels on learning that someone else has failed, suffered or been humiliated. The German word means, literally, harm-joy.

  Researchers have detected the feeling in children as young as 24 months. Some think it may be an important social emotion, one that helps establish inequity aversion, a dislike of unequal outcomes.

  Yet English has no everyday word that matches it precisely, and speakers simply borrowed the German one. Where did the word come from, and what did other languages call the feeling? What happens in a brain that enjoys a rival's bad day? And why have so many writers across the centuries treated a feeling many people recognize as something shameful?

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• 2. A Borrowed Word

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  In 1852 and 1867, English texts mentioned the German term for the first time. It did not appear in running English text until 1895.

  German has a longer record. The word was first attested there in the 1740s, and one early appearance seems to be a Leipzig work on Old Testament interpretation, published by Christoph Starke in 1750.

  Other languages settled on their own words long ago. Dutch has leedvermaak, Swedish has skadeglädje, Danish has skadefro, and Hungarian has káröröm. Czech offers škodolibost, and Slovak offers škodoradosť.

  English has no commonly used single word that fits exactly. The nearest is gloat, which means to look at or dwell on something with triumphant and often malicious satisfaction, as when someone gloats over an enemy's misfortune.

  A seldom-used English alternative is epicaricacy, borrowed from the Greek epichairekakia. That Greek word is first attested in Aristotle, and it joins epi, meaning upon, with chara, joy, and kakon, evil. Aristotle placed the word inside a larger scheme of feelings about other people's fortunes.

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• 3. Old Verdicts

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  Late in the 4th century BCE, Chinese writers already had words for taking joy in another person's hardship. In the ancient text Zuo zhuan, xing zai meant joy at hardship, and le huo meant happiness drawn from someone's misfortune. Those two phrases later fused into the chengyu xing zai le huo, which Chinese speakers still use. Japanese has its own saying, hito no fukō wa mitsu no aji, which sources offer as an example of the same feeling.

  The Book of Proverbs, at 24:17-18 in the King James Version, gives an instruction: "Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be glad when he stumbleth." The verse warns that God might see the gladness, be displeased, and turn his wrath away from the enemy.

  In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle arranged three feelings in a triad. Epikhairekakia, pleasure in another's ill fortune, stands opposite phthonos, a painful response to any good fortune of another, deserved or not. Between them sits nemesis, a painful response to another's undeserved good fortune. The epikhairekakos is the person who enjoys the misfortune of others.

  Lucretius drew the feeling as a scene at sea in De rerum natura. His line reads, in translation, "It is pleasant to watch from the land the great struggle of someone else in a sea rendered great by turbulent winds." The shortened Latin tag suave mare magno called the whole passage to mind for generations who knew the Latin classics.

  Caesarius of Heisterbach, in his Dialogue on Miracles, counted delight in the adversity of a neighbour among the daughters of envy, which follows anger. In the seventeenth century, Robert Burton gave the Greek word a place among the passions. He called it "a compound affection of joy and hate", felt when we rejoice at other men's mischief and are grieved at their prosperity.

  The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer went further and named the feeling the most evil sin of human feeling. His famous line was "To feel envy is human, to savor schadenfreude is diabolic." English never produced a word of its own for the feeling, but it gathered a crowd of relatives around it.

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• 4. The Word Family

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  Byron's poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage supplied the phrase Roman holiday. In it, a gladiator in ancient Rome expects to be "butchered to make a Roman holiday" while the crowd enjoys watching him suffer. The phrase carries a hint of debauchery and disorder on top of cruel enjoyment.

  The medieval church had a sin that sits nearby. Morose delectation, delectatio morosa, meant the habit of dwelling with enjoyment on evil thoughts. The French writer Pierre Klossowski argued that this was the real appeal of sadism. Sadism itself differs from schadenfreude. The sadist takes pleasure in inflicting pain, while the person feeling schadenfreude enjoys watching misfortune, especially when the victim seems somehow to have deserved it.

  Tall poppy syndrome describes a culture in which people of high status are resented, attacked or cut down for being classed above their peers. A close cousin is begrudgery, the resentment of a peer's success. Anyone who felt joy at the fall of such a person would be feeling schadenfreude.

  English also lacks a common word for pleasure at another's happiness. People reach for celebrate, cheer, congratulate, applaud or rejoice instead, and the pseudo-German coinage freudenfreude turns up occasionally. The Hebrew slang term firgun names happiness at another's accomplishment. Displeasure at another's unhappiness has a plain name: sympathy, pity or compassion.

  Sorrow at another's success is freudenschade, another pseudo-German coinage. The correct form would be Freudenschaden. The coinage wrongly treats the n in Schadenfreude as a linking letter. It also treats the adjective schade, meaning unfortunate, as a noun.

  Gluckschmerz, meaning displeasure at another's good fortune, was coined in 1985 as a joke by the pseudonymous Wanda Tinasky. The correct German form would be Glücksschmerz. The word has since been used in academic writing.

  The pun has also been mined for headlines. In 1993, Lincoln Caplan wrote Skadden: Power, Money, and the Rise of a Legal Empire and coined Skaddenfreude. It described the delight that rival law firms took in the troubles Skadden Arps suffered in the early 1990s. The Economist coined spitzenfreude for the fall of Eliot Spitzer. Toronto Life minted Schadenford for the Canadian politician Rob Ford.

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• 5. The Insecure Mind

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  Researchers have found three driving forces behind schadenfreude: aggression, rivalry and justice. A further finding concerns self-esteem. People with lower self-esteem tend to feel schadenfreude more often and more intensely.

  The suggested explanation is that people defend their own identity and that of their group. A person with high self-esteem may feel a tiny, negligible lift on seeing someone fail. That observer sees the failing person as no real threat to their own status, so they have little emotional stake in how the other fares.

  For someone with low self-esteem, a more successful person is a threat to their sense of self. Watching that person fall brings comfort, because the observer perceives a relative improvement in their own standing or their group's.

  A New York Times article in 2002 cited a number of scientific studies, and many of them rest on social comparison theory. The idea is that when people around us have bad luck, we look better to ourselves. Rivalry, the second of the driving forces, is easiest to see in sport, and researchers went looking for it there.

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• 6. Inside the Scanner

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  A 2003 study of an international football competition focused on the German and Dutch teams and their fans. It found that schadenfreude is very sensitive to circumstances that make malicious pleasure toward a rival seem more or less legitimate.

  A 2011 study by Cikara and colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging on Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees fans. When the rival team had a bad outcome, such as a strikeout, fans showed more activity in the ventral striatum, an area correlated with self-reported pleasure. When their own team had a bad outcome, the anterior cingulate and insula became more active instead.

  A 2006 experiment on "justice served" measured empathy by scanning subjects as they watched someone receive an electric shock. Researchers expected empathy centers to respond more strongly when the person shocked was seen as good than when seen as bad. That held true. But in men, and not in women, the brain's pleasure centers also lit up when the shock went to someone the man thought deserved it.

  Other scans link schadenfreude to envy. Strong envy activated pain-related nodes in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. Reward centers such as the ventral striatum responded to news that an envied person had suffered misfortune. The size of that schadenfreude response could even be predicted from how strong the earlier envy response had been.

  A study conducted in 2009 asked whether political misfortunes could produce the feeling. They can. Whether a person felt schadenfreude depended on whether their own party or the opposing party was suffering harm. The study suggests politics is prime territory for the emotion, especially for people who identify strongly with a party.

  In 2014, an online survey looked at schadenfreude and the Dark Triad traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. Respondents scoring higher on those traits also scored higher on schadenfreude and engaged in more anti-social activities. They also showed a greater interest in sensationalism.

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• 7. Uneasy Defenders

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  Rabbi Harold S. Kushner, in his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, treats schadenfreude as universal and even wholesome. He describes "the embarrassing reaction of relief we feel when something bad happens to someone else instead of to us." In his view, people do not wish their friends ill, yet they cannot help feeling an embarrassing spasm of gratitude that misfortune landed elsewhere.

  The philosopher and sociologist Theodor Adorno gave a colder definition. He called it "largely unanticipated delight in the suffering of another, which is cognized as trivial and/or appropriate."

  Susan Sontag's book Regarding the Pain of Others, published in 2003, asks how one person's pain affects those who see it. Her question is whether war photography and war paintings can work as anti-war tools or whether, for some viewers, they only feed a sense of schadenfreude.

  The musical Avenue Q includes a song titled "Schadenfreude", a comedic exploration of the general public's relationship with the emotion.

  According to Google, the word itself is steadily becoming more popular.

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