It is possible that some of you, at some point, have had that arrogant co-worker who always brags about his successes and makes a huge mistake that resonates throughout the company. At that moment, more than one person may be happy about this failure and immediately ask themselves: Am I a bad person for this? And the reality is that, in general terms, the answer is no.
It is documented. This reaction for science has a specific name, which is ‘schadenfreude‘, which comes from German Schadendamage, and Freudehappiness. And academic evidence warns us that reducing it to a simple “evil” or, on the contrary, a harmless reaction, is to ignore the fascinating wiring of our social brain.
Understanding it. To understand the schadenfreude You don’t have to look at psychiatry manuals looking for a clinical disorder, but at functional magnetic resonance imaging. And research published in 2009 in the journal Science, where researchers discovered that envy and schadenfreude They are intimately connected in the brain.
What happens in the brain. In this way, it could be seen that when the people studied felt envy, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex was activated, a region associated with physical pain. But when that envied person suffered misfortune, the activity moved to the ventral striatum, the central nucleus of our brain’s reward circuit.
In other words, we can say that, neurologically, seeing someone we envy fall generates a genuine reward. However, fundamental studies such as those by neuroscientist Tania Singer qualify this by pointing out that these responses do not arise because we have a sadistic “evil gene” or “happiness hormone”, but because our brain networks are constantly monitoring social comparison and perceived justice.
The thermostat of empathy. If the schadenfreude If it were pure cruelty, we would laugh at the misfortunes of our loved ones, and we really don’t. This is where a piece of research comes in that showed that pleasure in the failure of others is triggered under very specific conditions.
For example, when a person is perceived as a rival, when they have a higher status or when they represent a threat to our self-esteem, it is when we feel this pleasure that they make some type of mistake. That is why the schadenfreude It is the dark reverse of empathy, since our ability to empathize is temporarily “turned off” when the suffering of the other balances a scale that we considered unfair or when it reaffirms the position of our “tribe.”
Since children. This is not a reaction that appears in adulthood, but rather in experiments with young children have shown that there is also this response of joy to an event of this type, especially in contexts of inequality. For example, if one child sees another child receiving unfairly favorable treatment and then the latter suffers a minor mishap, the first child shows signs of satisfaction.
Images | Alexey Demidov
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings