Social submersible schadenfreude and your health

Yes, there were a lot of "mean" memes about rich people and whales, but can schadenfreude hurt your own health?

TL;DR:

• Some people on the Internet are always mean, but expressions of schadenfreude (pleasure at another’s misfortune) were extra noticeable after the Titan incident.

• We feel more schadenfreude when we think the people suffering deserved what they got, we generally envy (or dislike) them, or we perceive them as hypocritical.

• Some people are more likely to experience schadenfreude, and it may be linked to poor mental health outcomes.

• Social norms dictate expressions of schadenfreude and features of social norms can also change how willing we are to publicly express an “antisocial” emotion.

• Feelings of schadenfreude after a public figure gets sick have been shown to actually demotivate us to take preventative actions to avoid the same health threat. This may be because it is technically a positive emotion and those make us feel “safe.” Or, it could be because schadenfreude exacerbates the feeling of “otherness” we have with the sick person and we subconsciously infer we are not like them and therefore would not get sick, so, why be so careful?

Why y’all so mean?

Last week I spoke to NBC News, The New York Times, Smerconish, and the CBC about why there were so many memes making fun of the Titan submersible and its five passengers. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, social media quickly filled with “eat the rich” sentiment after news broke that seats on the ill-fated Titanic tourism outing cost $250,000 each and that the OceanGate founder had ignored many red flags around safety issues. Take the Game of Thrones orca…

Or this fake Facebook post, for example:

The underlying messages of the memes are clear: these people deserved what they got and there are some situations (but, not many) that you cannot buy your way out of.

After the meanies made their posts and the rest of the world shared them, some public figures started denouncing this wave of “crassness” or “lack of empathy.” News outlets wanted me to help them explain why people were not nicer in the face of the loss of life. In my head I wanted to say, “um, have you been on the Internet before?” But, I bit my tongue. Because, actually, they were right: This was a notable increase in how much open disbelief, curiosity, schadenfreude (more on that later), and even downright anger we saw expressed online, both during the search and even after it became clear there were deaths involved.

As I told the news outlets, my guess is that this incident drove online engagement due to a mix of emotions, with curiosity and disbelief initially prompting people to start researching aquatic exploration, much like we all suddenly became immunology experts during the development of the COVID-19 pandemic. But then, as more news broke about OceanGate and the Titan’s passengers, class differences and the contrast with poor refugees drowning as they sought a better life likely shifted the emotional tone (and, the memes) quickly toward schadenfreude.

Before I review the scientific literature on schadenfreude, it is important to note that what we feel inside and what we express to others can be quite different. In the past (i.e., pre-social media), perhaps it was more polite to not make fun of a tragedy (lack of emotional expression), but that does not mean people were not feeling any antisocial emotions.

In fact, some news headlines after the Titanic sank in 1912 suggest that not everyone was super sympathetic about the loss of the wealthy individuals on board. For example, The Evening News of Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, wrote after the original 1912 disaster: “It was kind of the Titanic to provide a ballroom for the mermaids.”

Schadenfreude, or pleasure at another’s misfortune, is a well-documented emotional state. Psychologists have found that certain misfortunes, though, are more likely to evoke the “socially undesirable” emotion. The first is when we (that is, the news-consuming public in the case of the Titan) gain from the misfortune. We could be gaining in social status or something more tangible. However, this is unlikely to be the case with the Titan as most of us don’t run competing Titan-visiting submersible companies. The next situation that is more likely to evoke schadenfreude is when think the victims are hypocrites who deserved their misfortune. Finally, people tend to experience more schadenfreude when the misfortune occurs to someone they envy (or who belongs to an envied group).

Conditions 2 and 3 seem much more plausible to me: People thought the voluntary and exclusive nature of the Titan journey likely meant they deserved their fate while the fact that the well-funded elite control so many aspects of ours society likely engenders some envy of the rich, even if do not readily want to admit that.

Journalists asked me how social media, in particular, may be shaping the level of “crassness” or “lack of empathy” that was seen in the aforementioned schadenfreude-filled Titan memes. One factor, I believe, is the small number of victims. You could post a crass meme on Twitter and be fairly sure none of your followers had family members directly affected. I am not saying that is a good reason to do it, but psychologically it means you are unlikely to directly hurt anyone’s feelings or receive much negative blowback from your own social network. On the contrary, the more outrageous and witty the Titan meme, the more attention and social reinforcement you can receive on social media. It is an attention economy, after all.

Because there was the direct contrast in the news (or lack thereof) of a migrant boat sinking off the coast of Greece that also gave the Titan incident, and all the public resources it sucked up, a moral dimension. When we experience moral outrage, or a mix of anger and moral disgust, research shows that social media facilitates a quicker spread of that feeling than do traditional media or old-fashioned interpersonal communication.

In one of my favorite studies on the interplay of social media and emotions, William Brady and his colleagues help us understand why we share our outrage online. The first reason is it can generate positive social feedback (in the form of shares and likes), especially if our social network is pretty ideologically similar to us. Secondly, social media norms of expressions can change over time. As we see others expressing outrage (or the more “pleasurable” emotion of schadenfreude), we subconsciously adjust our own emotional expressions (called “norm learning”) and end up matching the tone of our own posts, or shares, to what we believe is normal from observing our online peers. This norm learning gets amplified when we decide who to follow—or unfollow—based on our shared emotional overtones and ideological beliefs.

Is schadenfreude bad for your mental health?

There is research that has linked more frequent and intense experiences of schadenfreude to something called the “dark triad,” or personality traits of narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism. Basically, people who are self-absorbed, antisocial, and/or manipulative feel pleasure at others’ misfortunes more often and with greater gusto. Schadenfreude is also correlated with depression (and here’s another study supporting that link), but we all know that correlation is not causation.

Another consideration is that being the target of others public schadenfreude, either individually or through association, may not be great for us. A study looking at Reddit users found that those users who scored high on the dark triad traits where then more likely to experience schadenfreude in response to seeing posts about misfortune on the site. Then, those feelings of schadenfreude predicted greater trolling of other Reddit users. And we do know that cyberbullying is associated with a number of negative mental health outcomes, meaning that other social media users’ schadenfreude can indirectly hurt your health if you are their target.

Schadenfreude and your health behavior

Additionally, media-generated schadenfreude has another connection to our own health-related behaviors. My colleague Dr. Jin Chen and I published a paper about how feelings of schadenfreude toward public figures who get sick can actually demotivate us from protecting our own health. Let me explain.

In 2020, we ran two surveys. The first was in February immediately after Rush Limbaugh was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, after years of publicly smoking cigars and claiming they did not cause cancer. Respondents to our survey who reported higher levels of schadenfreude, or pleasure at Limbaugh’s diagnosis, also reported being less likely to avoid common causes of lung cancer, take other actions to prevent cancer, or to see a doctor to talk about their own cancer risks. This seemed a little odd—wouldn’t people who didn’t like Limbaugh want to try even harder to avoid his same fate?

So, we repeated the study in a different context. A month later, COVID-19 and started spreading in the U.S. Kentucky Republican Rand Paul was one of only three senators who voted against a multibillion-dollar rescue bill to combat the virus. And then, wouldn’t you know it, he was the first U.S. Senator to come down with COVID-19.

We launched a new survey, this time asking people if they felt schadenfreude learning this news and what their intentions were to avoid getting COVID (e.g., staying away from people, washing hands, staying home if experiencing any cold symptoms, etc.). The same exact pattern emerged: the more schadenfreude they felt toward Senator Rand, the less likely they were to engage in this preventative health behaviors.

Although we did not have the time to pull off another survey after then-President Trump was diagnosed with COVID-19 in October of 2020, we did witness expressions of schadenfreude on social media then, too.

Why do people do less to protect themselves after someone they dislike gets sick? A few explanations come to mind. It may be because schadenfreude is technically a positive emotion and those make us feel “safe.” When we are psychologically feeling safe, then we tend to not want to change much or take extra action, hence we disturb our lovely, pleasurable state. Another possibility is that because schadenfreude exacerbates the feeling of “otherness” we have with the sick person, then perhaps we (again, subconsciously) infer that we are not like them and, therefore, would not get sick from the same thing, so, why be so careful?

After talking to journalists last week about Titan memes and then reflecting on my own research on schadenfreude and our own health intentions, I am still pondering if we are all a bunch of meanies or not, and what that means for society at large. If people do experience these emotions, isn’t expressing them actually making social media a more authentic place? Or, does the high quantity of schadenfreude we see expressed start to, over time, shift social norms away from the type of empathy that we would like to see more of in the world? As for our own health, I think it at least is helpful to know that this type of dark pleasure can accidentally trick our brains into becoming more lax about our health. As such, we can still bask in a moment of pleasure but then remind ourselves to wash our hands.

We will need more research to find out exactly what the effects of seeing spikes in schadenfreude whenever news breaks that a disliked person or group has encountered some bad luck. And, as is always the case with media psychology, it will depend on the type of media content we see, its source, and the type of user who sees and shares it. But, I have a strong hunch that the Titan will not be the last time we see schadenfreude on social media. When your least favorite sports team loses their next game to an underdog, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

That’s all I’ve got for now. More next week!

Thanks for reading.

P.S. There was a notable lack of pugs in my first post. To please the fanbase, please see Gilly and Pancake below.