Why we can't help breaking into a devilish smile when colleagues fail

Washington, Dec 11 (ANI): Scientists have found that experiencing a bit of enjoyment at the misfortunes of one's colleagues can be a sure way to make an individual feel better about oneself.

In the study, Wilco W. van Dijk, of Leiden University in the Netherlands and his colleagues had 70 undergraduate students, 40 women and 30 men, read two interviews about a high-achieving student who was likely to land a great job.

Then they read an interview with the student's supervisor revealing that the student had suffered a big setback in his/her studies. Next, they rated their level of agreement with five statements meant to gauge their schadenfreude, such as "I enjoy[ed] what happened to Marleen or Mark" and "I couldn't resist a little smile."

Those with low self-esteem, assessed at the study's start, were both more likely to be threatened by the overachieving student, and to experience schadenfreude. However, the researchers found that regardless of self-esteem, those who felt more threatened by this student also felt more schadenfreude.

The researchers thought that perhaps the reason for this was that schadenfreude was self-affirming for these "threatened" individuals.

As a follow-up experiment, the researchers gave about half of the students a self-affirmation boost by shoring up their beliefs about what the students had indicated was a very important value to them, and then asked them to repeat the same interview-reading stint.

Participants with low self-esteem were again more likely to experience schadenfreude, and also more likely to feel threatened by the high-achieving student. However, those who had been self-affirmed were less likely than those who hadn't to reap pleasure when reading about the other student's academic slip.

"I think when you have low self-esteem, you will do almost anything to feel better, and when you're confronted with the misfortune of others," LiveScience quoted Dijk as saying.

"In this study, if we give people something to affirm their self, then what we found is they have less schadenfreude - they don't need the misfortune of others to feel better anymore," he said.

According to Dijk, an evil sort of glee at the slip-ups of another does not make one a bad person as it's just about all of us experience schadenfreude at some point in our lives.

"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.

"Our society thrives on compassion and empathy," he added.

The study has been recently published in the journal Emotion. (ANI)