Haha, you suck.
Schadenfreude is enjoyment derived from another person's misfortune.
We've all watched fail compilations, shared vines, and cheered on Christy Teigen when she's out here roasting people.
We enjoy seeing someone get dragged, roasted, or cooked for a mistake and that
enjoyment is felt in our reward centers in our brain.
The striatum, the anterior cingulate cortex, and the amygdala, all contain dopaminergic
neurons that activate when experiencing schadenfreude.
It's a complicated emotional response, which feels good, but how much should it govern our decision-making?
Theme song time.
Seriously dude, you gotta get that theme song going.
You deserve everything that's coming to you, stupid.
Don't lie, I know you've gotten a chuckle when someone's taken an L on the internet or in real life.
I know I giggle when I see someone speed past me on the highway and get a ticket.
Or if someone gets a four-piece and some fries in a fast-food fight, you know what I'm saying? You know what I'm saying.
Is it cool to laugh another person's misfortune?
No, but do we do it?
Hell yeah,
because we're human.
Schadenfreude manifests more strongly when we perceive people deserve their misfortunes
or when misfortunes happen to people who are widely disliked.
Makes sense.
If a Nazi or racist gets cooked on Twitter we laugh because we think they're super wack and deserve to get flamed.
Right? Right.
It can also manifest in less desirable social conditions like envy.
Researchers found that when a subject felt that a person was superior and more important,
stronger envy and stronger anterior cingulate cortex activation was also seen.
Also, stronger schadenfreude and striatum activation were induced when misfortunes happened to an envied target.
So, schadenfreude pops up in our brains
whenever someone we perceive as higher status than us or people we don't like gets knocked down a peg or 20.
But schadenfreude could possibly also be a way of social learning from another person's mistakes.
A UCLA study put electrodes in the heads of 10 subjects playing a computer card game and found that observing and predicting errors
in the card game activated the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, part of the cerebrum,
that encodes learning, decision-making, and rewards. Make sense so far.
Made the wrong decision, we get a little bit of dopamine and hopefully you learn from the mistake that you're viewing.
Researchers came to that same conclusion and believed that neurons from that specific area
we're learning and calculating next moves. But wait, there's more. That's a reference.
This may sound a lot like one of my favorite topics, mirror neurons, but they're not the same.
Mirror neurons are neurons that respond equally when we perform an action and when we see someone perform that same action.
When we see someone make a mistake you're not thinking "man, let me go mess that up for myself."
You're learning from that mistake and making better life choices. Today's episode is brought to you by live choices...
When subjects in that card study found that they won, those areas activated much more than when they were let down by their
papapapa pokerface.
Reference.
Could be schadenfreude activated neurons, but remember, correlation does not equal causation.
So as always, more research is needed.
When we see a public figure take an L, it quickly turns into a dragging
competition on who can pull that person down the furthest. This manifests all the way at the top with politics.
America's famous for their two-party system and humans already have a tendency to have trouble identifying with out-group members,
preferring members of our own perceived tribes. And when people from outside of our tribes take serious Ls, ding dong, schadenfreude here.
A 2012 study found that participants felt more positive when misfortunes befell a high-status competitive target
as compared to other social targets with a less competitive streak.
They discovered this by measuring participants facial muscles and found activity consistent with smiling.
Politicians are running for the highest position of power in the country. If they crash, it's normally at high speed
and research suggests that we enjoy it.
That same study suggests that schadenfreude
decreases when a target group member is of a low status or is cooperative and learns from their mistakes
So it's no fun to punch down, only up. Good note for comedians.
Political affiliation has become a sort of tribe identifier in recent years.
In the last few elections, it always felt like a win for one party was a loss for the opposing party, when we live in one whole ass country.
When President Bush won in 2000, it was perceived as the Democrats losing.
When Obama won in 2008, a loss for the GOP.
A 2009 paper looked directly at schadenfreude and political affiliations in four studies, and across all four studies
participants political party affiliation and the intensity of in-group identification within those parties
strongly predicted whether their emotional reactions to news articles describing misfortunes happening to others produce schadenfreude.
Basically, stronger political allegiances correlated with more laughs at the opposing political party's misfortunes.
Schadenfreude has also been linked with anti-empathy, or the opposite of empathy.
Some people really deserve it like bullies, criminals, racists, sexists, people with way too much power.
Sometimes that's all the same person. And they will get what's coming to them.
But remember, research found that schadenfreude punches up, not down. If a more perfect union is the goal here, schadenfreude ain't it.
Okay, enough of this enjoying other people's failures.
I mean, what if there was a way to use neuroscience of the brain to do some good? To like...
Positively influence people. Oh, wait right here in this video. You're nerds. Watch it.
And while you're watching it, make sure you go down a little bell down there and hit subscribe.
We love you.