Episode Details

In 2009, neuroscientist Hidehiko Takahashi at the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Chiba, Japan published a study in Science, one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed journals in the world, that showed for the first time what happens inside the human brain when someone takes pleasure in another person’s suffering.

Takahashi put 19 volunteers inside an fMRI scanner and told them stories about fictional people. Some of these fictional people had better jobs, more money, and more success than the volunteers. Others were described as average. Then Takahashi told the volunteers that these fictional people had experienced misfortune. They lost the job. The money disappeared. The success collapsed.

Two things happened inside the brain.

When the volunteers read about someone who was more successful than they were, the anterior cingulate cortex activated. That is the same brain region that processes physical pain. Envy, at the neurological level, is not a thought. It is a wound. The brain processes it the same way it processes being hit.

Then, when the volunteers read about that same successful person losing everything, the ventral striatum activated. That is the brain’s reward center. The same region that lights up for food, sex, and drugs. Watching an envied person fail produced the same neurological signature as a reward.

And the correlation was direct. The volunteers who showed the strongest envy response in phase one showed the strongest pleasure response in phase two. The deeper the wound of comparison, the greater the joy at watching the other person fall.

The German word for this is schadenfreude. Pleasure derived from another person’s suffering.

Takahashi’s study proved that schadenfreude is not a character flaw. It is a neurological event. The brain is processing real pain from social comparison and then processing real pleasure when that comparison is eliminated by the other person’s destruction. It is not metaphorical. It is measurable. It lights up on a scan.

Who Feels It the Most

In 2011, psychologist Wilco van Dijk at Leiden University in the Netherlands ran two studies that answered the question Takahashi’s research left open. Takahashi showed that envy predicts schadenfreude. Van Dijk wanted to know what predicts the envy.

The answer was self-esteem.

Van Dijk found that people with low self-esteem experienced significantly more schadenfreude when watching a high achiever fail. The mechanism was straightforward. People with low self-esteem feel more threatened by someone who has accomplished more than they have. That threat is what produces the envy. And the envy is what produces the pleasure when the high achiever falls.

Van Dijk tested this further by giving some participants a self-affirmation exercise before exposing them to the same scenarios. When people with low self-esteem were given an opportunity to affirm their own value first, the schadenfreude decreased. The pleasure at watching someone else fail was reduced because the underlying wound, the feeling that they were not enough, had been temporarily treated.

This finding reframes the entire mechanism. Schadenfreude is not about hating successful people. It is about hating yourself. The envy is a symptom of inadequacy. The pleasure at someone else’s suffering is the only relief available to a person who cannot generate self-worth from their own life. Watching someone who has more lose it is, for a person with low self-esteem, the closest thing to winning they have ever experienced.

Why Envy Turns Political

Takahashi was studying individuals. He was not studying political movements. But the mechanism he identified does not stop at the individual level. It scales.

Consider what happens when millions of people share the same wound. Millions of people who feel like the world passed them by. Who expected more from their lives and did not ge