To feel one’s well-being stronger when the misfortune of other people is put under our own well-being like a background to set it into brighter light, is founded in nature according to the laws of the imagination, namely that of contrast.
—IMMANUEL KANT1
For a few days I brought along Saul Bellow’s novel Herzog so I could feel a little better than everyone else in line.
—DON J. SNYDER, THE CLIFF WALK2
I’m Chevy Chase … and you’re not.
—CHEVY CHASE, “WEEKEND UPDATE” FROM SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE3
When my eldest daughter was four years old, she attended a day care center close to where I worked. One day, I came into the center to pick her up and saw her drawing with a piece of chalk on a low-slung chalkboard. She saw me and immediately begged me to help her sketch some people. I did, but, coincidentally, one of her friends had been drawing right next to her. Just as my daughter began to draw again, the girl’s mom showed up. The first thing her mom saw were my drawings next to her own daughter’s age-appropriate stick figures. Never have I seen a look of shock and confusion appear so forcefully on a person’s face.
“Did she do that … did she do that??!!!!”
“No, no, I drew them.”
Her expression swiftly changed to embarrassed relief.
I often think of this incident when considering the effects of how we compare with others on our everyday emotions.4 Identified as she was with her daughter, the gulf in apparent performance between her daughter and mine jolted her. The sudden knowledge that my daughter was blessed with so much greater talent than hers was painful. And if you think about it, revealing my contribution was a kind of bad news for me and good news for her. The diminishment in my daughter’s talents brought her relief and, I sensed, a touch of schadenfreude.
Comparisons with others, the conclusions we make about ourselves based on them, and the resulting emotions pervade much of our lives. As much as inferiority makes us feel bad, superiority makes us feel good. The simple truth is that misfortunes happening to others are one path to the joys of superiority and help explain many instances of schadenfreude.
This sometimes disquieting fact is more easily digested when we see it at arm’s length, in the context of entertainment. There are many examples from Frasier, the long-running sitcom that starred Kelsey Grammer as a neurotic, endearingly snobbish psychiatrist, Dr. Frasier Crane. In one episode, “The Perfect Guy,” Frasier is intensely envious because the radio station where he has his own call-in show has hired a new health expert, Dr. Clint Webber—who is extraordinarily talented and handsome. Along with an irritating, modest charm, Clint effortlessly outshines Frasier and gets the lustful attention of all the women. To convince people that he is not envious, Frasier throws a party for Clint. The event evolves into yet another showcase for Clint’s staggering set of talents. When Frasier tries to impress a Chinese woman with his (woefully rudimentary) Mandarin Chinese, he compliments her by trying to say that she looks “absolutely beautiful,” but his pronunciation translates this to “lovely as a chicken beak”—as she is quick to point out. Clint has partially overheard the conversation and interjects, “Who is as lovely as chicken beak?” He then proceeds to have a smooth conversation with the woman in perfect Mandarin.
Frasier, thoroughly defeated, concedes to his brother Niles that Clint must be entirely free of defects. But later, he finds himself alone in the kitchen with Clint, who thanks Frasier for arranging the party in his honor. In the background, a hired pianist is playing “Isn’t It Romantic” on Frasier’s grand piano, and Clint says how much he loves the song. Anticipating yet another domain in which Clint is superior to top off the evening, Frasier exits the kitchen as Clint begins to sing—way off-key! Frasier immediately recognizes this unexpected good fortune and turns with keen anticipation back into the kitchen. Clint apologizes for singing too loudly, but Frasier, now grinning broadly, says, “No, no, not at all. I can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying hearing it.”
Clint admits to being a bit of ham when he has a glass of wine in him and asks if he might “serenade” the guests. Frasier seizes this opportunity, leading Clint to the piano. As Clint prepares to sing, Frasier rushes over to Niles to tell him the good news: “Oh Niles, Niles, I’ve done it. I have found his Achilles’ heel. … I just heard him singing, the man’s completely tone deaf. He’s about to launch into a rendition of ‘Isn’t It Romantic’ that will simply peel the enamel from your teeth!”
Niles objects to the plan: “Are you sure you want to let him do that? … You have your victory, you’re a wonderful singer. Isn’t it enough to know that? Do you really need to see him humiliate himself?”
Frasier pauses for a moment, then says, “Yes.”
Humiliation is precisely what Frasier wants. He has had it with feeling inferior to Clint and is thrilled to discover his rival’s “Achilles’ heel.” Frasier gleefully anticipates the added pleasure of seeing Clint expose this flaw to all the guests. When Clint starts singing, Frasier is triumphant, delighted with the results. The guests try to be polite, but they are almost made ill by the horrid performance. And Frasier says with an ironic, rebuking air, “Please, everybody—nobody’s perfect.”5
It is funny and entertaining, but it is also just a sitcom. Even if, in identifying with Frasier, we half recognize his feelings in ourselves, we can also keep this recognition at a comfortable distance. And yet is Frasier more like ourselves than we want to admit?
Social comparisons not only help tell us whether we are succeeding or failing, but they also help explain the cause of our success or failure. If we “fail” because most people are performing better than we are, we infer low ability; if we “succeed” because most people do worse than we do, we infer high ability. Social comparisons deliver a double influence by defining whether a performance is a success or a failure and by suggesting that the cause probably results from high or low ability. No wonder misfortunes happening to others can be pleasing. They increase our relative fortunes and upgrade our self-evaluations.
It is worth stressing how much social comparisons can contribute to defining our talents and abilities. How do you know whether you are a fast runner? Is it enough to time how fast you can run a lap? No. You must compare this time with the times of other people who are similar to you in age, gender, and practice level. If you run faster, then you can say you are a fast runner.
Many have tried to capture the powerful role of social comparisons in human experience. Sometimes it comes through in a quip inspired by a lifetime of experiences, such as, “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. Believe me, honey, rich is better,” attributed to the American singer and actress Sophie Tucker.6 Or, it comes from a transforming event, such as when entertainer Walter O’Keefe was replaced by young Frank Sinatra at a New York nightclub in 1943. O’Keefe summed it up this way: “When I came to this place, I was the star. … Then a steamroller came along and knocked me flat.”7 Stand-up comedian Brian Regan once fantasized about what it would be like to be one of the few people in the world to have walked on the moon; then, in social situations involving “me-monsters” who like to dominate conversations by bragging about their accomplishments, he could break in and say, “I walked on the moon.”8 No one could beat this comparison.
A slew of utopian novels, such Walden Two by B. F. Skinner and Facial Justice by L. P. Hartley, reveal how people’s common use of social comparisons challenges societal efforts to maximize happiness. But I doubt anyone has been as effective in showing the importance of social comparisons in everyday life as 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In his classic work, A Discourse on Inequality,9 Rousseau imagines what life might have been like early in human history and speculates that people may have lived in a relatively solitary state. If this were so, the implications for our sense of self and our emotional life would have been huge. Natural differences among people in intelligence and strength, often the stuff of social comparison, would have carried little weight in this “state of nature.” As long as people were smart and strong enough to procure food and shelter, they would have needed no greater talents—nor would they have felt lacking. Rousseau suggests that with greater contact among people in our more recent history, an increase in social comparisons resulted, yielding likely effects. Rousseau writes:
People become accustomed to judging different objects and to making comparisons; gradually they acquire ideas of merit and of beauty, which in turn produce feelings of preference. … Each began to look at the others and to want to be looked at himself; and public esteem came to be prized. He who sang or danced the best; he who was the most handsome, the strongest, the most adroit or the most eloquent became the most highly regarded, and this was the first step toward inequality.10
Feelings about ourselves would also change. In a solitary state, we would feel good about ourselves if we had food in our bellies, a roof over our heads, and the absence of physical injury. Not so when living among others. Now, a kind of self-pride or “amour propre” takes over, inspired by a newfound desire to be superior to others and to be recognized as such. Rousseau highlights the feelings that dominate when self-feelings are powered by relative differences—shame and envy if we are inferior and vanity and scorn if we are superior.11
Psychologists, beginning with the pioneering work of Leon Festinger in the 1950s that linked social comparison with a basic drive to evaluate ourselves, have found many ways to give empirical weight to claims about the importance of social comparison in self-evaluations.12 Susan Fiske, in her recent book, Envy Up, Scorn Down: How Status Divides Us, provides an excellent distillation of this research done by her and many others.13 I am most fond of a study done in the late 1960s by Stan Morse and Ken Gergen.14 The design was simple, but the implications of the findings are far reaching. Participants who were students at the University of Michigan showed up in response to an ad for a job. The job promised good pay, so the stakes were higher than for a typical experiment. On arriving, they were placed in a room and asked to fill out a questionnaire as part of the application. After the students had completed half of the questionnaire, which contained an indirect measure of self-esteem, the experimenters arranged for another apparent applicant to enter the room and also begin completing the application. The appearance and behavior of this person were adjusted to create two conditions. In the Mr. Clean condition, this person was impressively dressed, well-groomed, and self-confident. He carried with him a college philosophy text and began completing the application with efficient ease. In a contrasting, Mr. Dirty condition, this person was shabbily dressed, smelly, and seemed a little dazed. While working on his application, he would occasionally stop and scratch his head, as if he needed help.
Participants then completed the final part of the application, which contained another embedded self-esteem measure. By subtracting the participants’ self-esteem scores before and after the second applicant entered the room, Morse and Gergen were able to test a number of possible predictions. One possibility was that comparing with “Mr. Clean” would decrease self-esteem, but comparing with “Mr. Dirty” would not increase it. This would suggest that an “upward” comparison typically affects self-esteem, but a “downward” comparison does not. Superiority in others makes us feel bad, but we may be indifferent to inferiority in others. A second possibility was that Mr. Dirty would increase self-esteem, but Mr. Clean would not decrease it. This would suggest that a downward comparison can affect self-esteem, but an upward one may not. We are indifferent to superiority in others, but inferiority in others gives us a boost. A final possibility—the one that actually occurred—was that both conditions would affect self-esteem. Applicants felt worse about themselves when the other applicant was superior and better about themselves when the other applicant was inferior. Superiority in others often decreases our self-esteem, but their inferiority provides a boost, especially in competitive circumstances—as many other subsequent studies have shown since this one by Morse and Gergen.
The results were revealing in other interesting ways. A staff person rated how similar the participants were to the accomplice in terms of demeanor, grooming, and overall appearance and confidence. As illustrated in Figure 1.1, most of the movement in self-esteem occurred for those participants who resembled Mr. Dirty—that is, those who appeared to have “inferior” characteristics themselves. They must have felt the contrast with the superior applicant most acutely, as their reports of self-esteem, when compared to Mr. Clean, took a big hit. But they also benefited most if they were lucky enough to be in the Mr. Dirty condition—comparing themselves to someone at least equally inferior appeared to give them a much-needed boost. Interestingly, participants rated as having superior characteristics were little affected by either accomplice. If anything, comparison with the superior applicant made them feel better. Perhaps the comparison confirmed their own feelings of superiority.
Figure 1.1. The association of resembling Mr. Clean or Mr. Dirty with self-esteem. Participants resembling Mr. Dirty had lower self-esteem after comparing themselves with Mr. Clean and higher self-esteem after comparing themselves with Mr. Dirty. In contrast, participants resembling Mr. Clean had no change in self-esteem after comparing themselves with Mr. Dirty and slightly greater self-esteem after comparing themselves with Mr. Clean.
It is hard to overstate the far-reaching advantages of superiority, as well as the obvious disadvantages of inferiority. The implications for understanding many instances of schadenfreude are important as well. Most of us are motivated to feel good about ourselves; we look for ways to maintain a positive sense of self.15 One reliable way to do this is to discover that we are better than others on valued attributes. When our self-esteem is shaky, comparing ourselves with someone inferior can help us feel better.
A series of studies by Dutch social psychologists Wilco van Dijk, Jaap Ouwerkerk, Yoka Wesseling, and Guido van Koningsbruggen gives strong support for this way of thinking.16 In one study, participants read an interview with a high-achieving student who was later found to have done a poor job on her thesis. Before reading the interview, as part of what appeared to be a separate study, they also filled out a standard self-esteem scale. Participants’ feelings about themselves were very much related to how much pleasure they later felt after learning about the student’s failure (items such as “I couldn’t resist a little smile” or “I enjoyed what happened”): the worse they felt about themselves, the more pleasing was this student’s failure. The explanation for these findings was reinforced by a closer analysis using a different measure. Immediately after reading about the high-achieving student, participants indicated whether reading about the student made them feel worse about themselves by comparison. The analysis showed that the tendency for participants with low self-esteem to feel pleased over the student’s poorly done thesis was linked precisely with also feeling that they compared poorly with this student. In other words, when the participants with low self-esteem felt schadenfreude, they had also felt the earlier sting of comparing poorly with the student.
A second study added further evidence. The procedure was exactly the same, except that half of the participants, immediately after reading the interview with the high-achieving student but before learning about her academic misfortune, were given a prompt to think “self-affirming” thoughts about their important values. The other half did not get this opportunity. Only this latter group showed the same pattern of reaction as in the first study. Participants in the first group, because self-affirming thoughts may have prevented the unpleasant effects of the social comparison, were less inclined to find the student’s academic misfortune pleasing.
There is nothing like a little success to blunt the influence of low self-esteem. I noted earlier that Frank Sinatra had the kind of talent to flatten the hopes of other singers. But even Sinatra went through a rough period in his career, and his self-esteem was at a low ebb by the end of the 1940s. Then he got the role of Maggio in the 1953 film From Here to Eternity and won the Oscar for best supporting actor. His psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, watched on television as Sinatra received it, and said to his wife, “That’s it, then. I won’t be seeing him anymore!” And he never did. Winning the Oscar was hugely self-affirming and was the start of a lasting comeback.
A third study by the Dutch researchers (van Dijk et al.) added yet another wrinkle. The starting point of the first two studies was existing variations in self-esteem. This time, the researchers “created” variations in self-esteem by giving false performance feedback to participants and then examined how they responded to others’ misfortune. Each participant performed a task described as highly linked with intellectual ability and was told that he or she scored among the worst 10 percent of the population (a control group received no feedback). Then the participant read a national magazine article that described a student who had tried to impress people at a party by renting an expensive car. But, after arriving and while trying to park the car, the student drove it into a nearby canal, causing severe damage to the car. Sure enough, participants receiving the negative feedback on intellectual ability found the misfortune more enjoyable than did those in the control condition who did not receive such feedback.17 As the 17th-century writer François de la Rochefoucauld expressed in a maxim, “If we had no faults of our own, we would not take so much pleasure in noticing those of others.”18
Thanks to the ingenuity of these researchers, we have a store of evidence demonstrating that people who stand to gain psychologically from another person’s misfortune indeed get a boost to self-esteem from comparing themselves with someone suffering a setback. People with low self-esteem and those who have experienced threat to self-esteem seem especially likely to benefit. Schadenfreude provides one way of spotting this process.
Evolutionary psychology highlights the important role of social comparisons in everyday life and also helps explain why inferiority in others should be pleasing. A simple fact crucial to understanding how evolution works is that people differ in ways that consistently matter in terms of survival and reproduction. Differences that provide advantages for survival contribute to natural selection. Much of life comes down to a competitive striving for superiority on culturally prized dimensions: to gain the status and many-splendored spoils following from such status. Superiority, literally, makes the difference. Attributes that underlie greater dominance or prestige compared to rivals allow us to rise in the pecking order and accrue benefits as a result. For these reasons alone, human beings should be highly attuned to variations in rank on any attributes that grant them advantages. And, given the huge adaptive implications of rank and status, inferiority should feel bad and superiority should feel good.19
How much we attend to social comparisons is nowhere more obvious than in the mating game. This makes sense in evolutionary terms because reproductive advantage is the bottom line. Survival means that our genetic material survives us (in our offspring), not so much that we survive individually. Thus, we must mate—and mating with those who give our offspring adaptive superiority is the name of this competitive game.20
Interestingly, couples are usually matched in terms of physical attractiveness. Why is it so? As much as we may desire to mate with the most attractive person around, we are competing against others with the same goal. Any overture we make must be reciprocated if the relationship is to proceed, and overreaching on this valued dimension usually doesn’t work. It leads to rejection.
In a graduate course I teach, I use a classroom demonstration to dramatize this point.21 The 15 or so students in the class are randomly given folded index cards that have their physical attractiveness “mate value” indicated inside (ranging from 1 to 15). They open up the cards and place them on their foreheads such that only others are aware of the value on the card. Ignoring their sex, they are told to pair up with someone with the highest mate value they can find. The pairing is initiated by offering to shake a potential mate’s hand. If the offer is accepted, then the pair is complete. Rejected offers require that the person keep making offers until an offer is accepted.
As things progress, a small number of unhappy people wander about until, finally, even they find a mate. Then everyone guesses their own mate value and writes it down before seeing the actual value. They also rate their satisfaction with their pairing. Using a computer, I quickly enter actual and perceived values and ratings of mate satisfaction. Simply correlating these values is instructive. First, actual values are highly correlated. People pair up with those of similar value. Second, actual and perceived mate values are also highly correlated. It only takes a rejection or two to realize that one is not high on the attractiveness totem pole. Finally, mate values, both perceived and actual, are highly correlated with satisfaction. Attractive pairs are pleased; unattractive pairs are not. The demonstration is artificial, of course, but it dramatizes the consequences of ranking in one important area of life. People easily sense their mate value from how they are treated by others, and their feelings of satisfaction parallel actual and perceived mate values.
For our primitive ancestors living in closely knit tribes, it would have been important to be superior relative to other group members because it would have enhanced competitive advantage. Economist Robert Frank notes an interesting benefit to relativistic thinking. He argues that the rule of thumb, “do the best you can,” leads to a quandary. When can you conclude that you have done enough? Frank suggests that the relativistic rule “do better than your nearest competitor” solves this problem in an efficient way.22 The adaptive goal is to be better than your competitor, not to keep on achieving ad infinitum. Having a natural focus on social comparisons should lead to efficient actions: stop striving when you have a clear relative advantage; this is the signal to get off the treadmill. The process of evolution is likely to disfavor those who are fully at ease having low status because those with low status have less access to resources and are less preferred by potential mates.23 No wonder there is mounting evidence that lower status is related to an array of ill effects on health and longevity.24 Most people are unhappy with low status, and this is adaptive to a degree—a signal to do something about it. Similarly, most people are happy with high status. This is also adaptive—a signal of having achieved the benefits of high status. This happy feeling is something to anticipate and seek, as well as to relish.
One route to high status and its pleasures is through the reduction in status of others, especially those of higher status. As the pioneering evolutionary psychologist David Buss suggests, the anticipated pleasure of seeing higher status people fail serves an adaptive goal as well: to bring about these misfortunes, the relative gain that results, and the experience of this pleasure.25
The adaptive benefits of a keen sensitivity to relative differences are supported by observing a parallel tendency in primates, who share great genetic similarity to humans. Researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University trained a group of capuchin monkeys in what they called a “no-fair” game.26 The monkeys were trained in pairs to hand a small rock to a researcher in exchange for a food reward, either a slice of cucumber or a grape, their much preferred food. When both received cucumber slices, both seemed satisfied. But when one received a cucumber slice and the other received a grape, the monkey receiving the cucumber became upset. The relative quality of rewards appeared as important as their presence versus their absence. As the lead researcher Sarah Brosnan noted, these disadvantaged monkeys “would literally take the cucumber from me and then drop it on the ground or throw it on the ground, or when I offered it to them they would simply turn around and refuse to accept it.”27 These monkeys’ reactions seemed to mirror what we see in ourselves when we are unfairly treated, relatively speaking: if we can’t have the best, don’t bother us with second best.
Even canines appear to show a concern over unequal treatment. The celebrated 18th-century scholar Samuel Johnson suggested that some people are superficial in their thinking and, in this sense, that they are like dogs and “have not the power of comparing.” They snatch the piece next to them, taking “a small bit of meat as readily as a large” even when they are side by side.28 A study on dog behavior indicates that Johnson may have underestimated canine abilities. A group of researchers at the University of Vienna examined domestic canines’ behavior. Paired dogs were given either a high-quality reward (sausage) or a low-quality reward (brown bread) if they placed a paw in the experimenter’s hand. Consistent with Johnson’s claims, the dogs seemed indifferent to the reward quality, even when they received the brown bread rather than the sausage. However, one procedural variation created a different reaction. When one dog received either of these rewards and the other got nothing, this seemed to make the disadvantaged dog much slower at offering his paws and more likely to disobey the command entirely. The disadvantaged dogs became more agitated and appeared to avoid the gaze of their advantaged partners. The researchers inferred from these findings that the dogs were having a negative “emotional” reaction to the unequal distribution—at least if being disadvantaged meant getting nothing. One piece was as good as the next, but “nothing” was upsetting when the other dog got something.29 If dogs appear bothered by disadvantage, we can easily infer that most humans will be at least as concerned.
There are important cultural variations in how much social comparisons affect people’s emotions.30 But if I meet people who doubt how powerful social comparisons can be, I often put aside the research evidence and evolutionary theory and ask them if they have kids. If they do, I ask what would happen if they treated one child more favorably than another. Their faces usually animate with instant memories of family clashes caused by making this mistake. They remember the fireworks, the wails of unfairness, and the leftover resentments. They typically need no more convincing, but, primed in this way, I complete the point by telling them of the challenges my wife and I had in giving out popcorn to our two daughters when they were very young. Popcorn and movies were a compulsory pairing, and, from the beginning of this tradition, our daughters often quarreled over who received more popcorn. The only way to avoid an argument was to take delicate care in making sure the mound of popped kernels in each matching bowl was exactly equal. Nevertheless, one often would claim the other was getting more and was “always” favored. Sometimes we tried to snatch a teaching moment out of the sibling conflict: “Does it really matter who gets more? And why not ask for the bowl with the smaller amount? Be happy that your sister is getting more,” and so on. As readers might expect, our teaching moments were usually no match for what our daughters perceived as favoritism. Now that they are grown, we laugh about these times. But the raw distress over disadvantage they showed when they were young is good evidence for the natural concerns people have over social comparisons.
In my introductory social psychology course, I take a different tack to show the importance of social comparisons. As social psychologist Mark Alicke demonstrates in many experiments, people are usually self-serving in their beliefs about how they compare with others. This “better-than-average effect” is very easily demonstated.31 One classroom activity that works spectacularly well begins by asking two questions, answered anonymously by each student, on a single sheet of paper:
1. How good is your sense of humor?
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
much worse |
much better |
than the average |
than the average |
college student |
college student |
2. How good is your math ability?
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
much worse |
much better |
than the average |
than the average |
college student |
college student |
After collecting the responses, I ask a few volunteers to do a quick tally of the responses. Figure 1.2 shows roughly what emerged when I conducted the exercise in a class of more than 100 students. For sense of humor, the distribution describes a near impossibility. Just about everyone in the class is reporting themselves above average. Most students see themselves as way above average. When it comes to sense of humor, this is easy to do. A highly subjective judgment lends itself to bias, and we seize the opportunity to see ourselves in a flattering way. The second distribution for perceived math ability shows the bias as well, but it is not nearly as extreme. Math ability is more objectively determined than sense of humor, and our judgments on such domains are more likely to be anchored by actual standing. And yet, even so, most people manage to see themselves as above average here as well.
Figure 1.2. Biased perceptions of relative standing. Students rated their sense of humor (top panel) and their math ability (bottom panel) compared to the average college student. Most rated themselves at or above the midpoint (number 4 on the scale).
Why are these perceptions so skewed? I think it is mainly because most of us like the idea of being superior to others, and we search for ways to come to this view whenever we can. The late comedian George Carlin captured the craving: “Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?”32 Such illusions help us maintain a sufficiently robust self-esteem.33 If superiority was superfluous for self-judgments, then there would be no need for biased construal. But we don’t throw objectivity completely out the window.34 On traits and abilities that are less subjective, we are more responsive to the realities of our actual relative standing, even though we may still give ourselves the benefit of the doubt.
The more we recognize how profoundly social comparisons permeate everyday judgments about ourselves—whether we are talented or mediocre, whether we are successful or unsuccessful, whether we are noticed or ignored by others—the clearer it becomes why another person’s misfortune might be pleasing. Not surprisingly, great novelists who understand the human condition bear out this pattern. In Stephen Crane’s Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage, the main character, Henry Fleming, eagerly joins the Union Army near the start of the war.35 But his excitement soon turns to dread when he confronts the possibility of dying. Naively, he had felt superior to his school friends who had not joined the army. All it took was to see the first dead soldier to reverse this perception. His friends were now the lucky ones. He also worries that he will run when he gets his first taste of battle, and this causes him to compare his worries with those of the other soldiers “to measure himself by his comrades.”36 Fleming’s fears get the better of him in his first battle: he speeds “toward the rear in great leaps”37 and soon feels ashamed and inferior because of his cowardly behavior. Of course, upward comparisons are hard for Fleming to ignore. He notices a proud group of soldiers marching toward the battle front, which makes him feel even more inadequate, as well as envious. He slips into another group of soldiers who have just come from a battle but soon feels acute shame because so many of these men, unlike himself, have wounds or “red badges of courage.” Happily for Fleming, he also meets other soldiers whose difficulties help him regain self-worth—sometimes leading to schadenfreude. Fleming notices a struggling friend, and this makes him feel “more strong and stout.”38 During the first battle, when he acted so cowardly, he takes some comfort in learning that many other soldiers also fled. Later, he notices a group of fearful, retreating troops and likens them to “soft, ungainly animals.”39 He takes pleasure in the flattering comparison and concludes that “perhaps, he was not so bad after all.”40 By the end of the novel, Fleming finds redemption in showing that he can act bravely in battle, but not before his sense of self is rehabilitated through pleasing comparisons with other soldiers.41 It is extraordinary how much social comparisons regulate Fleming’s emotional life, their influence on schadenfreude being just one example.
It is easy to find biographical examples conveying a similar pervasive role for social comparison in people’s everyday emotions, with schadenfreude inevitably punctuating the emotional landscape as a result. Born and raised in working-class Portsmouth, Virginia, journalist Nathan McCall illuminated the troubled terrain of racial comparison in his memoir, Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America.42 Although McCall grew up in a largely stable family and did well in school, by the time he was 15 he was carrying a gun and engaging in a range of criminal behavior from gang rape to armed robbery. He narrowly avoided a murder charge when a man he shot managed to pull through and survive, but, by his late teens, he was arrested for robbing a McDonald’s. McCall finds himself in prison, which, despite its challenges, helps him turn himself around. By the time he left prison, he had completed a degree in journalism. After several disappointments, he landed a job as a reporter for The Atlanta-Journal Constitution, and, eventually, The Washington Post.
The memoir takes the reader through a territory unfamiliar to most people. Few of us know what it is like to commit armed robbery or to engage in gang rape, and the people who commit such acts are rarely in the position to write about them with McCall’s effectiveness. His honesty is blistering, but for the reader interested in human psychology, the dividends are rich.
McCall is hyper-aware of social comparisons, especially those that involve race. Much of his downward spiral toward cruel behavior and crime can be traced to feelings of inferiority linked to his black identity. As a child of about seven or eight, he would watch TV and be “enchanted” by white people. He would think how much more fun white people seemed to have. In various ways, he got the message that white people were superior to blacks, such as when his mother would tell him to “Stop showing your color. Stop acting like a nigger!”43 Or his grandmother would compare his bad behavior with the good behavior of the kids from an affluent Jewish family for whom she did domestic work. These white boys were “nice” and did everything she told them to do—why didn’t he act like them also?44 Once, he tried to straighten his hair with some of his grandfather’s pomade, but it didn’t last. Within minutes, his hair went from “straight, to curly, and back to nappy.”45 He received a whack on the back of his head from his mother when she discovered what he had done and endured the scalding effects of washing out the pomade. Worst of all, he suffered the pride-wounding recognition that his hair would never be as straight as the privileged and superior white people around him.
Painful longings and confused frustrations ruled his life. Envy and resentment plagued him. McCall summed up this time in his life this way:
I’m certain that that period marked my realization of something it seemed white folks had been trying to get across to me for most of my young life—that there were two distinct worlds in America, and a different set of rules for each: The white one was full of possibilities of life. The dark one was just that—dark and limited.46
The accumulating toll of these experiences had corrosive effects on his psyche, and McCall suffered bitterly from consuming, explosive anger. He could hardly see straight well enough to make good decisions, which partly explained why he turned to various unhealthy and ultimately criminal behaviors.
One way he coped was by finding ways to see himself, and black folks in general, as superior to whites. During his time in prison, he learned how to play chess, conscious that white inmates considered themselves better at chess because it involved thinking. Thus, McCall approached any game against a white inmate as a war rather than a game. He focused every fiber of his being and every ounce of his concentration on winning. And he usually did win.
The win and the trophy (I still have it) were especially sweet because I beat an egotistical white inmate in the finals. I fasted for two days in preparation for that match and beat that white boy like he stole something.47
Later, as a reporter, he would constantly examine the behavior of his white colleagues and note when it seemed better or worse than the behavior of black folks. He was depressed by their superiority and was elevated by their inferiority. He attended a party at which “constipated-looking white folks” discuss politics and tell “corny jokes.48 While working at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he concluded that many of the white reporters were terrible at choosing clothing, having selected uncoordinated colors and patterns. He notes that they “couldn’t dress as sharp as the brothers and they felt insecure about it.”49 He enjoyed their ineptitude.
McCall also found satisfaction when the owners of the Journal-Constitution hired Bill Kovach, a former Washington bureau chief of The New York Times, to run the paper and upgrade its quality. Kovach brought in his own team and shook the place up. Many reporters were comfortable with the old ways and resented a “Yankee” coming in and changing things. It was as though they still hadn’t accepted the outcome of the Civil War. McCall could understand why his colleagues reacted this way and, to a degree, felt a kinship with them. He sensed that many Southerners suffered an inferiority complex that ran deep. Whites from the North had “worked a mojo number on their minds”50 that continued across many generations. Maybe there was a parallel in the ways black people had coped with the degrading legacy of slavery. Kovach’s actions, by suggesting that these white reporters couldn’t run a newspaper in a competent way, aggravated past wounds. McCall imagined that the stereotype of the “hick” Southerner was humiliating in ways not so very different from stereotypes of intellectual inferiority that black people had suffered. But this understanding did not take the edge off McCall’s schadenfreude.
Watching some of those good ol’ boys huddling conspiratorially in their clusters, grumbling all the time about “them damned Yankees coming in and taking over,” you would have thought they were planning to fight the fucking Civil War all over again. Some got mad and quit. Kovach fired others. It was interesting seeing white people warring against each other like that. I enjoyed watching the carnage.51
McCall’s sentiments are raw, but they are not mysterious. They come as no surprise in the light of the laboratory evidence that van Dijk and his colleagues provide. The pleasure that McCall experienced when he perceived inferiority in whites was fine-tuned by the insults to his racial dignity suffered as a child and the continued challenge of confronting racial stereotypes of black inferiority.
McCall enjoyed the highs of superiority. But notice that a big part of his enjoyment came from focusing on another person’s inferiority as much as on his own superiority. Perceptions of superiority and inferiority are interlinked, but our attention can be directed at either pole. As we’ll learn in Chapter 2, this second direction of focus, downward comparisons, provides many opportunities for schadenfreude. Indeed, they explain why many events hit an ingrained funny bone.