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Predicting pleasure at others’ misfortune: Morality trumps sociability and competence in driving deservingness and schadenfreude

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Abstract

Schadenfreude occurs when people feel pleasure at others’ misfortunes. Previous research suggested that individuals feel such a malicious pleasure when the misfortune befalls social targets perceived as highly competent but lacking human warmth. Two experiments explored whether the two components of warmth (i.e., sociability and morality) have distinct roles in driving schadenfreude. Study 1 (N = 128) compared a competent but immoral individual to a competent but unsociable person and found that people felt more schadenfreude when a misfortune befell an individual lacking morality. Study 2 (N = 199) confirmed the primary role of morality in driving schadenfreude by manipulating not only morality and sociability, but also competence. Moreover, both experiments showed that social targets lacking moral qualities elicited higher levels of schadenfreude because their misfortunes were perceived as deserved. Overall, our findings suggest that morality has a primary role over other basic dimensions of person perception (i.e., sociability and competence) in driving schadenfreude.

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Notes

  1. A follow up study (N = 50) manipulated only moral information (high vs. low) and included a control condition (i.e., no information about the target person was provided unless the basic information provided in the previous studies: “An Italian guy who is 27 years-old”). It revealed that participants felt more schadenfreude in the immoral condition than in the moral condition and control condition, p = .001. By contrast, scores did not differ between the moral and control condition, p = .72. Together, these findings confirmed the key role of negative moral information in driving schadenfreude.

  2. The analysis also revealed an unexpected two-way interaction between sociability and competence, F(1, 191) = 6.51, p = .01, η 2p  = .03. Participants reported higher levels of deservingness when the target was depicted as highly competent and highly sociable than when the target was depicted as highly sociable but lacking competence. Despite this interaction, deservingness scores did not play any mediational role neither when competence, nor when sociability were taken into account as independent variables.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Piazza dell’Ateneo Nuovo, 1, 20126, Milan, Italy

    Marco Brambilla & Paolo Riva

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  1. Marco Brambilla
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  2. Paolo Riva
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Correspondence to Marco Brambilla.

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The studies reported in this paper have been approved by the Ethics Committee at the University of Milano-Bicocca, and informed consent was obtained from all participants. All procedures were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Brambilla, M., Riva, P. Predicting pleasure at others’ misfortune: Morality trumps sociability and competence in driving deservingness and schadenfreude. Motiv Emot 41, 243–253 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-016-9594-2

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