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WHY PUBLIC HUMILIATION FEELS SO GOOD Why do we take pleasure in seeing others feel bad? Walden University’s Barbara Benoliel outlines schadenfreude in the workplace and how HR can minimise its impact SCHADENFREUDE – loosely translated as taking covert pleasure in the discomfort of others – is a complex concept. It is the kind of feeling you get when you see, for example, your manager’s nephew, who recently made VP, not appear at a very important meeting with a key client because he overslept. It is a feeling of just desserts combined with the discomfort of seeing another human being shown up for their human weakness in public.
which has brought our secret pleasure into the public domain and lowered the bar on the idea of what civility is in our society and the workplace. What we used to keep to ourselves, gloating privately, we now share via Twitter. This can’t be good for morale. While there has been a philosophical interest in the idea of taking pleasure in the distress of others, only recently has the study of the feeling been done scientifically.
Applied in the workplace, schadenfreude is a short-term means of providing employees an emotional lift Barbara Benoliel , Walden University Schadenfreude differs from irony or empathy in that it is a visceral feeling of pleasure in observing someone else’s debasement in public. Over the past few hundred years – in fact up until recently – public humiliation or public shaming was considered uncivil, and our secret emotional pleasure response to seeing someone in a compromising position was in fact just that – secret. Then reality TV came along and made public humiliation a form of entertainment,
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Some have equated the feeling to a sign of being evil; others have said it is a signal of a corrupt society. More recent research seems to confirm it is only human nature.
Embarrassment as entertainment There is a history of setting others up for a fall in entertainment, going back almost to the start of TV. The first Candid Camera show in the late 1940s set up hidden cameras to catch unsuspecting individuals in compromising
situations, which were then revealed to them, and we observed their response and embarrassment, and felt the uncomfortable – yet somehow satisfying – squirming sensation in observing others in that kind of distress. The additional emotional value of schadenfreude is the overwhelming sense of safety and survival it provides: you have personally escaped. It reaffirms our sense of identity and community. Schadenfreude specifically centred in the workplace as part of entertainment is a more recent phenomenon. One of the best examples of the practice is The Apprentice TV series, in which viewers can watch an individual be publicly fired for some judgment of their poor performance. Applied in the workplace, schadenfreude is a short-term means of providing employees with an emotional lift: if I can’t get a pay rise, a rise in self-esteem in a positive comparative analysis to my
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