The feeling you get after spilling tea is called ‘Schadenfreude’
When you’re surrounded by your own non-judging breakfast club, some conversations that slip your lips might sound terrible when other people hear them. But you all have an unspoken understanding of how there’s no harm when you smile or laugh when something unfortunate happens to whoever you’re talking about. There’s actually a word for what you just did: schadenfreude.
The German word describes one’s pleasure or amusement in response to the misfortunes, pain, humiliation, or mistakes of other people. It’s composed of the words Schaden, meaning “harm or damage”, and Freude, which means “joy”.
In case you’re still in denial about having schadenfreude-filled moments, everyone is most likely to have experienced it at one point in their lives. The usual situations can be seen as early as when you were a kid. Remember watching funny videos on the television like seeing someone fall off a chair or getting hit by a ball on the head? Yup, those count if you laugh at it.
If you love watching sports tournaments live, seeing sad faces of the crowd after their bet lost and your favorite team wins could give you a kick of schadenfreude. When it comes to romantic relationships, you may have a sense of glee when you secretly like someone who’s taken, but they suddenly break up. It could also boil down to politics when a certain candidate you didn’t vote for fails to clinch the position.
There are countless scenarios when you feel elated over someone else’s misadventures, but there’s also a logical explanation behind it. According to Wilco W. van Dijk, a professor of social psychology at Leiden University in The Netherlands, feeling schadenfreude could stem from having low self-esteem. A person would do anything to feel better, even when it means looking at the slip-ups of others.
Together with his colleagues, van Dijk also conducted a study that showed people who appeared more self-assured felt less schadenfreude to the point that they don’t need to know the misfortune of others to feel better.
‘We know that it’s very good to feel empathy and sympathy for people, so if you feel schadenfreude without any sympathy or compassion for that other person,’ that would not be good, van Dijk said. ‘Our society thrives on compassion and empathy.’
In a study on Psychology Today, Professor Aaron Ben-Zeév, a leading expert on the philosophy of psychology and practices at the University of Haifa in Israel, shared his take on why people are pleased with others’ misfortune. He suggested three additional typical characteristics to elaborate schadenfreude:
The first one is when other people’s misfortune appears to be something they deserve. It’s a belief that shows “moral people” don’t want to harm others; The second characteristic concerns how the misfortune is relatively minor, meaning that when something too drastic happens, then pleasure changes into pity; The last one is the passiveness in creating others’ misfortunes, which shows that it is something that we have no control over.
‘When we consider pleasure in others’ misfortune as pertaining to minor misfortunes and involving our belief that justice has been done, and we are not responsible for eliciting the misfortune, then this emotion is not so reprehensible from a moral point of view,’ Ben-Zeév explained.
He added, ‘The conventional view, which severely condemns pleasure in others’ misfortune, stems from considering cruelty and sadism as prototypical cases of this emotion. We have seen that this view is mistaken.’
At the end of the day, schadenfreude comes naturally like anything else that you feel. Even Inside Out‘s director Pete Docter said that he regrets not including the emotion you get from seeing other people’s misery. So next time you gather with friends or spill some tea in your group chat about someone else’s mishaps, you know what feeling will be lurking around afterward.
Banner edited by Justine De Vera
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Source: we the pvblic
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