TY - JOUR
T1 - Schadenfreude is higher in real-life situations compared to hypothetical scenarios
AU - Gonzalez-Gadea, Maria Luz
AU - Ibanez, Agustin
AU - Sigman, Mariano
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 Gonzalez-Gadea et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2018/10
Y1 - 2018/10
N2 - Schadenfreude (i.e., the pleasure derived from another's misfortune) has been widely studied by having participants imagine how they would feel in hypothetical scenarios describing another person's pain or misfortune. However, research on affective forecasting shows that self-judgments of emotions are inaccurate in hypothetical situations. Here we show a study in which we first presented a hypothetical schadenfreude situation and few months later, due to an exceptional circumstance, the situation turned out to happen in reality. This fortuitous circumstance allowed us to compare people's imagined emotional reactions with their actual feelings. Results showed that schadenfreude was higher in the real situation than in the hypothetical one. More importantly, participants used different proxies to predict their emotional reaction: while out-group dislike served as a proxy of schadenfreude in both types of scenario, the degree of in-group identification also increased schadenfreude in those who had experienced the real event, arguably a mechanism to promote positive self-evaluation. These results highlight the importance of assessing schadenfreude in the heat of the moment.
AB - Schadenfreude (i.e., the pleasure derived from another's misfortune) has been widely studied by having participants imagine how they would feel in hypothetical scenarios describing another person's pain or misfortune. However, research on affective forecasting shows that self-judgments of emotions are inaccurate in hypothetical situations. Here we show a study in which we first presented a hypothetical schadenfreude situation and few months later, due to an exceptional circumstance, the situation turned out to happen in reality. This fortuitous circumstance allowed us to compare people's imagined emotional reactions with their actual feelings. Results showed that schadenfreude was higher in the real situation than in the hypothetical one. More importantly, participants used different proxies to predict their emotional reaction: while out-group dislike served as a proxy of schadenfreude in both types of scenario, the degree of in-group identification also increased schadenfreude in those who had experienced the real event, arguably a mechanism to promote positive self-evaluation. These results highlight the importance of assessing schadenfreude in the heat of the moment.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85054715386&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0205595
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0205595
M3 - Article
C2 - 30308075
AN - SCOPUS:85054715386
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 13
JO - PLoS ONE
JF - PLoS ONE
IS - 10
M1 - e0205595
ER -