Is It Wicked to Feel Glee Because the President Is Sick? - Persuasion - 0 views
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schadenfreude empathy trump illness justice emotion
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Is schadenfreude ever justifiable? Why do people feel it? And should they be ashamed?
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we are calling experts for insight into news stories. In this case: Tiffany Watt Smith, a historian of emotions at Queen Mary University of London, and the author of Schadenfreude: The Joy of Another’s Misfortune.
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From research in psychology and neuroscience, there is a lot of evidence that we get a pleasurable kick from seeing justice done.
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But that is not quite what is at stake with the Trump situation. It’s not that you’re enjoying seeing someone suffer in a random way. And it’s not that you’re enjoying a moment of slapstick. It comes down to this question of justice and just desserts.
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Thinkers like William James in the 19th century thought a lot about why we might enjoy seeing someone else suffer in a visceral, bloody way. He thought it was an evolutionary throwback to our more violent past, a glitch
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But the question of what is justice and who deserves what—of course that is based on our own perspectives and the groups we form.
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Research has shown that schadenfreude is experienced very strongly when people divide themselves into camps or tribes because you’re using that schadenfreude to denigrate your rival, and also using it to bond your group, and give yourself a feeling of swagger and triumph.
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Watt Smith:There is a question about how we share it and how we act on it.Face-to-face, it’s much harder to confess to your schadenfreude. Online, it is incredibly easy. So this mob sense can evolve fast and at no cost. I encourage people to take a breath and pause before being triumphant and gleeful on Facebook or Twitter—that’s the moment when it rolls out of private experience into something that has serious consequences.
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Watt Smith: One of the motivations for writing my book was: “Are we living in an age of schadenfreude?” It’s a lot to do with the internet and the new social environments through which we’re navigating life. But it also has to do with this growing interest in empathy.
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Empathy has become a hugely significant and loaded term in public discourse. In the last 10 to 15 years, it’s taught in our schools, seen as an unquestioned public good—something that we should all cultivate. In a lot of research on empathy, people say the opposite of empathy is schadenfreude, or that schadenfreude is the emotion felt by psychopaths.
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[this emotion] is a window into parts of human life that are understandable and normal and relatable: things that make us most human, like justice—wanting to see hypocrites and queue dodgers taught a lesson.