Have you ever been driving down the highway when you encounter a new looking luxury automobile at the side of the road being ticketed by a police officer for speeding? How did you react? What did you feel? Did you feel sympathy toward the driver because you know what it is like to be pulled over for speeding? Or is your immediate feeling pleasurable? A smirk might come to your face, a chuckle because you feel that a form of poetic justice has been served.
Usually we react to others' good fortune and misfortune in a social acceptable and consistent way. When something good happens to another we are happy for them, and when a misfortune befalls an individual we feel sorry for them. Sometimes we stray from this pattern and someone's, usually a person we envy, misfortune brings us pleasure. Smith, Turner, Garonzik, Leach, Urch-Drusat, and Weston (1996) call this pleasure derived from the misfortune of another, Schadenfreude, and have designed the current study "Envy and Schadenfreude" to get a better idea of how the two emotions are interrelated.
Smith et al. (1996) define Schadenfreude as pleasure at another's suffering. The hypothesis of the current study is to show that envy and Schadenfreude are closely linked. More specifically, that envy is a precursor and creates the condition which Schadenfreude should occur if a person should experience a misfortune.
The design of the study was very creative. Undergraduate psychology students at the University of Kentucky were under the impression that they were helping a company put together a video series on premedical training. The subjects were told they were going to view a video recorded interview of a student who had intentions to attend medical school. They were given materials to evaluate whether or not the video portrayed effectively the things involved in getting into medical school. Among the forms were three mood scales which were filled out at different times during the study. After subjects were told the cover story, they immediately filled out a mood scale. Subjects then watched either an interview of an exceptional medical school candidate (the envy condition) or an interview of an average medical school candidate (the control). After ten minutes of the interview, the subjects were given a second mood scale to assess envy. They were then shown the last two minutes of the interview which concluded with an epilogue that informed the subjects that the medical school candidate had been charged with stealing and denied admission to medical school. A third mood scale was then administered in order to measure Schadenfreude.
Smith et al. (1996) found that dispositional envy and target person superiority were both associated with greater episodic envy. People higher in dispositional envy experienced greater episodic envy. Whereas, subjects experienced greater episodic envy in regards to a superior target person compared to an average target person. It was also found that dispositional envy and target person superiority had significant effects on Schadenfreude. People experienced a greater degree of Schadenfreude at the misfortune of the superior target person than at an average target person. People higher in dispositional envy also experienced greater degrees of Schadenfreude at another's misfortune. Smith et al. (1996) also concluded that episodic envy was the only factor that could predict Schadenfreude. Which in turn means that target person superiority and dispositional envy influence Schadenfreude only to the extent of their effects on episodic envy. Liking was also found to affect both Schadenfreude and sympathy for the target person. The more liked the target individual is, the more sympathy the subject felt toward them. The more the target individual was disliked, the more the subjects experiences a greater feeling of Schadenfreude. Smith et al.'s (1996) Figure 1 shows a very nice representation of this findings and relationships.
The idea of Schadenfreude is one that intrigues me, because I know from experience that I have felt the Schadenfreude in the above mentioned luxury automobile example. I think the Smith et al. did an excellent job functioning as an exploratory study into this phenomena known as Schadenfreude, but I feel that there might be different facets of envy to study.
I believe that Schadenfreude is a real phenomena. Envy is an intense complex emotion that is often categorized as painful. Is it one I can really experience toward a complete stranger? In the above mentioned luxury car example, do I really envy the person who is driving the car? All I really know about the person is that they drive a nice car. Is that enough for me to feel that the driver's car is undeserved, and that there must be some injustice if he drives that luxury car and that I do not? Or does envy elicit comparisons that often point out how poorly one compares to an envied individual? I feel that the key to understanding this phenomena Schadenfreude may exist in theses comparisons between an individual and someone they envy. This comparison might affect one's self esteem negatively. Schadenfreude might occur when the envied person fails, because it may boost one's self esteem because the perceived difference between the two individuals has lessened. The comparison may also elicit feelings of Schadenfreude by demonstrating to an individual that a person they envy is not perfect and they are more comparable, even if it is comparable by misfortunes, than they were before.
A possible problem was that Smith et al. (1996) reported that overall their subjects' reports of envy were mild. This may have been remedied by choosing a subject pool of pre-medical undergraduate students rather than psychology undergraduate students. Future studies should continue to explore factors other than envy, such as possibly a comparative process, when explaining Schadenfreude.