Why Are Some Happy When Other People Are in Trouble

You enjoy the evil of another, you feel pleasure when someone else is humiliated or troubled - this condition does not only occur in people with mental health problems.

It is a complex emotion that most people can experience and also has a name in German: Schadenfreude (from Schaden = trouble, evil and Freude = joy).

When someone we don't care about or envy suffers, we feel a certain satisfaction that we don't even recognize in ourselves.

An emotion we all experience

Even the best or most moral of us feel a wave of gratitude when a boss who has offended us is fired or a person who has hurt us in one way or another is in trouble.

We even tend to consider such things a divine punishment, and we say to ourselves, "It's worth it!"

But we do not rejoice in the evil of another only when someone has done something personal to us. And if we envy a person or if someone has ascendancy over us (he is richer than us, more beautiful, stronger), we tend to smile when something bad happens to him, or even something serious. Children have this kind of emotion more often, but adults are not immune to it either.

Why do we rejoice when others are in trouble?

Psychologists have shown that there are three primary reasons behind this complex feeling: human aggression, rivalry, and the need for justice. In addition, people with low self-esteem would experience Schadenfreude more often than other people.

This is because when someone falls, we feel stronger, and a person with low self-esteem experiences a feeling of comfort and security when the person they envy is hurting.

Every time we see someone failing, we think that we would have done the same thing better. Or that we shouldn't have even started it, as it was obvious that it would not turn out well.

When we are part of a group, we often rejoice when rival groups suffer, and this kind of joy also contains a lot of aggression, as, for example, in the case of football teams.

Competing with another person is also the basis for experiencing a feeling of pleasure when something bad happens to our rival. And as competitiveness is increasingly encouraged in society, it goes without saying that satisfaction with the plight of others has become more pronounced.

Brain scan tests have shown that pleasure from the evil of another is strongly correlated with feelings of envy. It seems that feelings of envy activate certain "painful" areas of our brain, while when we hear that the people we envy have done something bad, the centers of pleasure and reward in the brain are activated.

Interestingly, this feeling is experienced more and more often with the advent of social networks. It has been shown that people often feel unhappy when they see the successes of others (for example, on Facebook), especially if they are not satisfied with their own lives and consider that they have failed on several levels.

Several studies based on the theory of social comparison have shown that we enjoy the harm of others because it can make us grow in our own eyes and feel more at peace with our failures.

Regarding the idea of ​​justice, a 2006 study found that men, in particular, feel pleasure when the "wicked" are punished or suffer.

This is why the feeling of Schadenfreude is strongly correlated with the political vision of the people, explaining why many people feel satisfaction when bad things happen to those they consider guilty of various political crimes or who are part of a different political camp.