The Joy of Pain (21 page)

Throughout this book, I have highlighted the personal benefits that result from downward comparisons. I have argued that just about any misfortune befalling another person, from a social comparison perspective, is a potential boost to self-esteem. Where such misfortunes reside, opportunity knocks. If any misfortune suffered by another person has the potential to yield benefit, a misfortune befalling an envied person is a windfall.
¹¹
Since envy thrives best in competitive circumstances, the gain from the misfortune will often be direct and palpable. Also, if we envy someone, by definition, the dimension of comparison is important to us, thus adding greater value to what the misfortune brings. An extra bonus is that the misfortune eliminates the painful feeling of envy—no small thing. It is transformational: inferiority and its unpleasantness become superiority and its joys. A painful upward comparison, in an instant, becomes a pleasing downward comparison. What a turnaround! The late American novelist and curmudgeon Gore Vidal famously confessed, “Every
time a friend succeeds, I die a little.”
¹²
If this can be true, then the reverse can also be true: “Every time a friend fails, I am more alive.”

Mark Twain, in his autobiography
Life on the Mississippi
, describes a boyhood event in Hannibal, Missouri, that illustrates the joys of seeing an envied person fall. In his retelling, Twain notes that
every
boy in Hannibal, Twain heading the list, wanted to be a riverboat pilot and wanted it badly. One boy had the job that they craved. He also knew more than they did about everything that mattered, and he pulled it off with the kind of style that had the girls riveted. Twain's and his friends' hostile envy was about as intense as one sees it—and great was the
schadenfreude
when the boy suffered a misfortune on his riverboat. Twain described the feeling: “When his boat blew up at last, it diffused a tranquil contentment among us such as we had not known for months.”
¹³

Novelist Walker Percy also captures the easy path from envy to
schadenfreude
in his eccentric self-help book,
Lost in the Cosmos
:
¹⁴

Your neighbor comes out to get his paper. You look at him sympathetically. You know he has been having severe chest pains and is facing coronary bypass surgery. But he is not acting like a cardiac patient this morning. Over he jogs in his sweat pants, all smiles. He has triple good news. His chest ailment turns out to be hiatal hernia, not serious. He's got a promotion and is moving to Greenwich [CT], where he can keep his boat in the water rather than on a trailer.

“Great, Charlie! I'm really happy for you.”

Are you happy for him?
¹⁵

No, Percy argues. For the “envious self,” this kind of news is hardly cheering. He asks the question, “how much good news about Charlie can you tolerate without compensatory catastrophes …?”
¹⁶
It is as if something unfortunate happening to Charlie is the only possible cure for the envy and unease that his good news is actually causing in you. What are the chances that your own fortunes will change? Also, is there a morally acceptable or doable way to bring Charlie down? Percy bets that if you find out later that the promotion failed to come through, this would not be bad news at all—although you may try to deny, suppress, or hide the joy the news brings.

Cognitive psychologist Terry Turner and I were part of a group of researchers who collaborated on an experiment testing a connection between envy and
schadenfreude
.
¹⁷
We first evoked envy in our undergraduate participants by showing them a videotaped interview with a student who had plans to attend medical school. We hired an actor to play the role of either a superior (enviable) student or an average (unenviable) student (eventually, we let the participants in on our deception). As he discussed his academic and extracurricular activities, we added scenes in which he was engaging in these activities. In the envy version, we showed him working away on his organic chemistry homework, peering through a microscope in a cutting-edge biology lab, and walking across Harvard Yard on his way to a summer class that should help him get into Harvard Medical School. We also included a scene showing him entering an expensive condo that his father had bought for him while he was in school, driving a BMW, and cooking a meal with an attractive girlfriend. In the average version, we showed him struggling with his homework and washing test tubes in a biology lab. We also showed him entering an unappealing high-rise dorm, riding crowded public transportation, and eating pizza with an average-looking female acquaintance. Toward the end of each version, we paused the tape for a minute and asked participants to complete a mood questionnaire. Some of the items measured envy. Then, an epilogue appeared on the screen to update the participants about what had happened to the student since the interview. This was where we inserted a misfortune. The epilogue noted that the student had been arrested for stealing amphetamines from the lab where he worked and thus had been forced to delay plans for medical school. A second questionnaire contained items tapping pleased reactions (such as “happy over what happened to the student since the interview”), camouflaged by other items designed to distract the participants from our actual focus.

As we expected, participants felt more
schadenfreude
when the enviable student suffered than when the average student suffered. Even more telling, any envy reported after the initial pause in the video “explained” much of this effect. Participants who actually reported feeling envy while watching the first part of the interview were most likely to find the later misfortune pleasing.
Also, participants who reported higher scores on a personality measure of envy completed before viewing the interview (i.e., “envious types”) were more likely to find the misfortune pleasing.

Research using brain-scan technology also supports the links between envy and pleasure—if the envied person suffers.
¹⁸
A Japanese team of researchers monitored the brain activity of people as they imagined themselves in scenarios in which another person was of either higher or lower status. Imagining envy activated the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), an area of the brain also associated with experiencing physical pain. The participants were then asked to picture this other person suffering various forms of misfortune, from financial trouble to physical illness. This produced greater brain activity in a different brain region, the striatum, a pleasure or reward center. This pattern of activation was particularly true for those participants who had reported the most envy at first. The lead researcher, Hidehiko Takahashi, summed up the results using the Japanese phrase translated as: “The misfortunes of others are the taste of honey.”
¹⁹
A Korean might add: Especially if the stomach has been twisting because of envy.

Envy is a blend of ingredients, each of which helps explain why it should be so closely connected to
schadenfreude
. Twain's account highlighted the envied boy's superiority, and envy indeed contains feelings of inferiority. But without
accompanying hostility, the
schadenfreude
produced by the boat exploding would hardly have been so gratifying. People do not feel warmly toward those whom they envy. In fact, hostility may just be the feature of envy that distinguishes it from other unpleasant reactions to another person's superiority, such as discontent alone.
²⁰
One can readily see this in Twain's account. The envy that he and his friends felt is far from benign. The hostility in their envy clearly contributed to why the explosion caused such contentment.
²¹

There is something distinctive about envious hostility. People feeling envy are willing to take a loss themselves, as long as it also means that the envied person will suffer
to the same or greater relative degree
.
²²
This can seem self-defeating, unless one realizes that, to the envious, the pleasure of gaining in an absolute sense is often insufficient compensation for the pain produced by witnessing the envied person's relative advantage.

It is no surprise that envy is usually a hostile emotion. Envy is triggered by noticing a desired attribute enjoyed by another person, but it is largely a frustrated desire.
²³
Imagine the experience of noticing and wanting another person's advantage, all the while knowing that one could easily obtain the advantage eventually. Perhaps there would be a brief feeling of discontent, but this would go away quickly when the path to acquiring the advantage was clear. This is a type of envy, but it is benign in nature.
²⁴
The experience would also be quite different if the prospect of obtaining the advantage were naught. The comparison itself may seem irrelevant. We envy people who are
similar
to ourselves,
except
that they have something that we dearly want but lack. The similarity allows us to imagine the possibility of our having the longed for thing, even if we know that our desires are likely to be frustrated. When we envy in a hostile way, we have the tantalizing sense of what it might be like to obtain what we want—we can almost taste it—but we feel unable to realize this desire. The frustration of any keen desire, the blocking of an important goal, is a dependable recipe for anger and hostility—and will often trigger
schadenfreude
if the person causing the frustration suffers.

The editors of popular tabloid magazines such as
The National Enquirer
would appreciate the observations of Edmund Burke, the 18th-century philosopher
and statesman. He suggested that theatergoers anticipating a tragic performance on the stage would quickly lose interest and empty themselves from the theater if they heard that a criminal was just about to be executed
outside
in a nearby square.
²⁵
Burke believed that people have “a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pains of others.”
²⁶
Moreover, in his view, real misfortune probably trumps the “imitative arts” every time.

Some have taken this way of thinking even further. In their recent biography of Mao Tse-tung,
Mao: The Unknown Story
, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday make a persuasive case that Mao was someone who took a special joy “in upheaval and destruction.”
²⁷
But Mao also believed that he was not alone in this preference. For instance, he claimed that
most
people would choose war over perpetual harmony:

Long-lasting peace is unendurable to human beings, and tidal waves of disturbance have to be created in this state of peace. … When we look at history, we adore the times of [war] when dramas happened one after another … which make reading about them great fun. When we get to the periods of peace and prosperity, we are bored.
²⁸

Still others, such as Walker Percy, referred to earlier, have also claimed that people have a pleasure-linked fascination with disasters and calamity, at least when these things are happening to
other
people. The appeal of the tabloid press and the heavy coverage of crime, accidents, and natural disasters in the media testify to the validity of such claims.

In addition to its reliance on real misfortunes, another consistent feature of the tabloid press is its focus on troubles happening to celebrities. A study of
The National Enquirer
that I conducted with psychologist Katie Boucher confirmed this feature.
²⁹
We examined approximately 10 weeks of the magazine. For each story, we rated the status of the person who was the main focus of the story and how much the story detailed a misfortune happening to that person (e.g., divorce, scandal, weight gain, health problem, etc.). As the status of the person in the story increased, so did the likelihood that the story would also focus on misfortune. Although the rich and famous fascinate us, most of us feel infinitely less successful than they and probably a little envious. The chance to read about celebrities' setbacks can be irresistible—which explains much of the success of these tabloid magazines.

Let's examine the case of Martha Stewart,
³⁰
whose indictment and ultimate conviction for insider trading was made to order for the tabloids. Stewart is a remarkable American success story.
³¹
But, as Michael Kinsley noted in an article for
Slate
, her period of troubles represent “a landmark in the history of
schadenfreude
.”
³²
Following an early career as a model and then as a successful stockbroker, she began using her long-time interests in cooking, decorating, and gardening to develop a series of hugely successful business ventures. After releasing her first book,
Entertaining
, which was a
New York Times
best seller, she published an almost yearly series of other books on topics ranging from pies, hors d'oeuvres, and weddings to pulling off a good Christmas celebration. Along the way, she wrote many magazine articles and newspaper columns and was a frequent guest on national television programs. By the time of her indictment for insider trading in 2002, she had created a media empire, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. It included her own magazine,
Martha Stewart Living
, a daily television program, a catalogue business (Martha by Mail), and a floral business (marthastewartflowers.com), among other ventures. When the company went public on the New York Stock Exchange, she became a billionaire by the end of the first day.