The Biology of Malicious Envy and Schadenfreude in Politics

The NPR program Hidden Brain discusses the role of malicious envy and schadenfreude in society and politics. The 52 minute podcast can be downloaded here.

This discussion focuses on the last 16 minutes, which considers the core research and postulated impacts on politics.

Malicious envy in society (~ 35-41 minutes): Researcher Mina Cikara found that schadenfreude can arise in members of a group when failure or mishap happens to a member of an out-group, such as a member of an opposing group. She wrote:

“ People who identify strongly with their social groups frequently experience pleasure when they observe threatening out-group members’ misfortunes: a phenomenon termed intergroup Schadenfreude. Though people are generally averse to harming others, they may learn to overcome this aversion via the consistent pairing of subjective pleasure with out-group pain, thereby lowering the barrier to participating in collective violence. e. In neuroimaging studies, intergroup Schadenfreude is associated with engagement of ventral striatum (VS), a brain region involved in reinforcement-learning. In these experiments, VS activity predicts increased harm and decreased help toward competitive out-group members. Experiencing this pleasure-pain association in intergroup contexts is particularly pernicious because it can generalize to people who are merely affiliated with a threatening out-group, but have done nothing to provoke harm.”

Her research team used brain scans (fMRI) and facial muscle smile responses (facial electromyography) to dissect the biology of schadenfreude pleasure that arises when a target group experiences mishaps or failure. Pleasure responses arise when out-groups or members of an out-group experience failure or mishap. The amount of schadenfreude pleasure a person experiences, e.g., high VS activity, is an accurate predictor of how likely the person is to engage in physical violence to eliminate the source of malicious envy.

Especially envied groups are ones that are seen as competitive and/or high status in society. These groups are more likely to elicit feelings of malicious envy and resulting behavior to eliminate the source.

Malicious envy in politics (~ 41-50 minutes): Researchers hypothesize that the relative economic success of Jews in Germany and Austria in the 1930s and 1940s when most of the the rest of society was struggling could have triggered malicious envy in some members of society. They suggest that emotion was effectively played on and amplified by Nazi propaganda. Engineered Jewish group misfortunes such as Kristallnacht generated schadenfreude among the populace. Over time, feelings of schadenfreude decreased social resistance to further assaults on local Jewish populations.

This hypothesis is consistent with brain scan and other data sources that indicate people can become desensitized to discrimination or even violence against an out-group. One needs to slowly build that resistance to accepting violence, but it can be done.

Sometimes people and groups that are to powerful to pull down or socially neutralize. In those situations, researchers have found a powerful, innate human desire to wind up in last place among all groups. Last place aversion, a topic of interest in various fields of research,[1] leads people to accept being anywhere in social status except at the bottom. That urge can lead people to actively support political policies that undermine their own interests so long as their own status does not sink into last place.

Apparently, humans have a powerful biological need to not be socially dead last as an individual or group member.

Malicious envy and schadenfreude playing out among groups can be socially destructive. In politics, these emotions play out as partisan politics. Researchers find that people who are the most partisan and the most strongly affiliated with a party tend to view political events through a lens of envy and schadenfreude. Evidence of this appears among both democrats and republicans. These emotions are postulated to be a gateway to violence and brutality.

The program points out that this line of research is fairly new and its full impact on politics and social and international violence is still unknown.[2] The program ends with this thought: “The first step to fighting envy is to admit we have it.”

Footnote:
1. For example, in organizational management: “We find that the rank response function is U-shaped. Subjects exhibit ‘first-place loving’ and ‘last-place loathing’, that is subjects increase their effort the most after being ranked first or last. We discuss implications of our findings for the optimal design of firms’ performance feedback policies, workplace organizational structures and incentives schemes.”

2. In her paper, Cikara comments: “This area of inquiry lies at the intersection of two questions: (i) why does acting on behalf of a group sometimes make individuals behave in ways that violates their personal beliefs and moral standards, and (ii) how do people overcome their aversion to doing harm in order to participate in collective violence?”

B&B orig: 9/17/18