外刊阅读20240724｜别人痛苦时你为什么会快乐

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Most of us are sad when we see someone who is sad. It’s called empathy or, a slight variant , sympathy. But what about those times, rarely acknowledged in public – or even to oneself – when we feel glad about someone’s disappointment, distress, even pain? I’m not thinking here of taking pleasure in causing pain (sadism), or indifference to another’s distress (psychopathy) but rather the typically private, yet remarkably widespread feeling of satisfaction, even joy, upon seeing or learning about someone else’s troubles.

There is something disreputable , hence embarrassing, about admitting to feeling good when someone else feels bad, but emotions and inclinations (jealousy, envy, impulsiveness) don’t go away just because we aren’t proud of them. Schadenfreude might even have biological adaptive significance, because the key evolutionary concept of fitness is based on relative success, calculated as a fraction whose numerator is the subject’s reproductive performance, with the denominator based on the larger population.

A fitness of 1.0 thus indicates equilibrium ; less than 1.0 means reduced fitness; and greater than 1.0, enhanced fitness. Hence, fitness isn’t increased only when personal success increases, but also when that of others goes down – especially if those others aren’t genetic relatives. And so, a case can be made that another’s distress or decline can work to one’s benefit. Maybe that’s part of why schadenfreude is so widespread. There is no evidence, on the other hand, that a rabbit jumps for joy when another bunny slips on a banana peel.

At the same time, there is research evidence that the propensity for schadenfreude varies inversely with one’s self-esteem, which makes sense insofar as individuals who are better off are less diminished by the success of others, hence they can afford to be more indifferent.