Study on partisan schadenfreude and neural responses to unfairness

Unsurprisingly, Democrats expressed more pleasure from reading about Bush’s bicycle accident, whereas Republicans were more joyful over Kerry’s bizarre space suit. Surprisingly, Democrats also expressed pleasure from reading about the economic downturn, and more pleasure than the Republicans who were more likely to express negative feelings about this situation. Thus, despite the fact that the economic downturn hurt everyone, the Democrats expressed pleasure over the added damage this inflicted on the Republicans —— who they held responsible — and conversely, the added benefit it brought to the Democrats who could wag their fingers. In a second study, Smith found that Democrats experienced more schadenfreude than Republicans over the number of casualties reported out of the Iraq war, even though Iraqis were certainly not preferentially targeting Republicans. The pleasure they experienced was entirely driven by the fact that this was a war sponsored by a Republican government, and thus, the fatalities could be blamed on the Republicans. From a Democrat’s perspective, even though everyone loses when soldiers die in war, it is a bigger loss for Republicans, and thus, a bigger gain for Democrats. With schadenfreude, it is all about comparative shopping. It is all about satisfying our desires relative to others. As noted above, schadenfreude appears to emerge strongly when an individual’s misfortune is deserved. To explore what is happening in the brain when such pleasure is experienced, and the situations that might trigger it, the German cognitive neuroscientist Tania Singer set up a study involving healthy men and women. In the first phase, subjects played a bargaining game for money against an unfamiliar partner; prior to the game, and unbeknownst to the subject, Singer set things up so that the partner played cither fairly or unfairly. After the game, each subject entered a scanner, and watched their partner receive a painful shock to the hand. Predictably, Singer discovered that both men and women liked the fair players better than the unfair players, and showed more empathy to fair players when they were shocked. Proof of empathy was read off the images of brain activation, especially the brain circuitry known to be involved in pain empathy, and mentioned earlier in my discussion of Joan Chiao’s work on social hierarchies: the insula and anterior cingulate. Unpredictably, Singer discovered that the level of activity in this pain empathy circuitry was reduced when men — but not women — saw unfair players receive pain. She also observed that in men — but not women — there was increased activity in the nucleus accumbens — an area mentioned earlier on that, in rats, monkeys and humans is consistently associated with the experience of reward and liking. The more individual men desired revenge for an unfair offer, the more activity they showed in this reward area. Singer’s findings are joined by many others showing that the nucleus accumbens, together with other reward areas, are activated in a wide variety of situations in which we gain from others’ pain. But because these same areas also respond to non-social, non-comparative experiences, such as eating, we Hauser Chapter 2. Runaway desire 7d HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_012821