Scientific evidence shows people are naturally programmed to take pleasure in others' pain, according to a new study.
According to CBS News, four experiments in the study showed biological and self-reported evidence that people experienced happiness when someone they were jealous of or despised had something negative happen to them.
The phenomenon in which people take pleasure in others' pain is called "Schadenfreude."
"We were interested in the conditions under which people fail to empathize with one another and how, for some of those people, they experience happiness at another's expense," Mina Cikara, one of the researcher, said in a statement.
The first experiment measured subjects' physical responses to various people and situations. Researchers measured the electric activity of cheek muscles in which they found that people had a broader smile when someone they envy met misfortune or discomfort.
For the experiment, participants were shown photos of various stereotypical people: the elderly, to elicit pity; students or Americans to elicit pride; drug addicts to elicit disgust and rich professionals to bring forth envy. Then, the photographs were paired with positive, neutral or negative events like winning five dollars, going to the bathroom or getting soaked by a taxi. The subjects were then asked how they would feel if this event happened to the person in the picture.
No matter what people said, the scientists saw that people tended to smile more when something negative happened to the rich individuals.
In the second experiment, researchers used functional MRI and self-reporting to discover whether participants were willing to inflict harm on certain groups.
"People were willing to hurt an envy target, saying, 'Yes, let's shock her,'" Cikara said. "We found that surprising because we weren't certain participants would self report that."
The participants said they felt the worst about the positive events happening to the rich individuals, and felt the best about the negative occurrences happening to people in that group.
Manipulating the stereotypes was the goal of the third experiment. Researchers switched up the stereotypes of the rich individual in order to get rid of stereotype bias. The subjects were asked to read various scenarios about an investment banker that signified envy, pride, disgust and pity.
As the previous experiments showed, the subjects were less understanding about the envy and disgust scenarios than they were about the pride and pity.
In the final experiment, subjects were asked to watch a game between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees. All participants had been prescreened for "intense fandom" for either team.
Princeton Professor and researcher Susan Fiske said she thought of the study as a simulation or model of group envy or harm.
"In our larger model of stereotypes, we find that when things go smoothly, people go along to get along with these envied groups," she said. "It's when the chips are down that these groups become real targets of Schadenfreude."
