Schadenfreude

There's a natural human tendency to want the people who hurt us to suffer.  It's not nice, it's not productive, but it's pretty universal.

And now some psychologists have demonstrated that there is a neurological underpinning to our love of schadenfreude.

David S. Chester and C. Nathan DeWall of the University of Kentucky Department of Psychology set up a group of 156 test subjects to have the opportunity to gain (harmless) revenge for perceived hurts.  Each of the subjects was instructed to write an essay on a personal subject, and the essays were traded among the group for feedback. Unbeknownst to the participants, however, some of the feedback wasn't from other test subjects -- instead, the researchers had substituted their own, and harsh, feedback.  ("One of the WORST essays I've ever read," for example.)

The participants took a survey to rate their mood before and after the feedback.  After receiving an awful response, test subjects said (understandably) that their mood suffered.  But then the researchers allowed the recipients of bad feedback to use a computer simulation to stick pins in a voodoo doll symbolizing the person who had trashed their essay, and found that when they did that, their mood recovered -- almost to pre-feedback levels.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

A second experiment refined the response even further.  A group of 154 people were given a pill -- a placebo, of course -- but told that the pill would have two effects: enhancing their cognitive abilities, and stabilizing their mood.  They were then allowed to play a simple computer game, a three-person ball-passing game.

What they didn't know -- in addition to the fact that they'd been given a placebo -- was that they weren't playing against other humans, they were playing against a computer that had either been programmed to ignore them most of the time (the ball gets passed mostly between the other two "participants") or to play fair (the ball gets passed equally among all three).

After playing that game, and either getting frustrated and ignored or not, they were told to play a second game, involving being the fastest to press a button.  This time, however, the slowest player received an annoying burst of noise through headphones.  And the fastest player got a perk -- (s)he was able to adjust the volume to determine how badly the slowest player got penalized.

Both the players that had been treated fairly in the first game, and those who had been treated unfairly but given a "mood stabilizer," felt no need to adjust the volume.  But the ones who had been treated unfairly and not given the "mood stabilizer" indulged their schadenfreude to the hilt, cranking the sound up to 100 decibels.

"Together, these findings suggest that the rejection–aggression link is driven, in part, by the desire to return to affective homeostasis," Chester and DeWall write.  "Additionally, these findings implicate aggression’s rewarding nature as an incentive for rejected individuals’ violent tendencies."

The researchers emphasized that they were not recommending revenge as a way of improving your mood, and suggested that other options (such as meditation or reconciliation) might actually work better.  But they found that the old adage "revenge is sweet" is uncannily accurate.

So there you are.  Another rather humbling feature of human psychology.  What I find most fascinating about all of this is not that we like to see those who have hurt us suffer -- that's not all that surprising, frankly -- but that when told we're being given something that will stabilize our mood, our desire for revenge evaporates.  Illustrating once again the rather terrifying fact of how easily manipulable we are.  We have undeserved confidence in our impulses, motives, and justifications -- when in fact, a more reasonable stance considering the research is to doubt pretty much everything we feel.

Complexity, uncertainty, and motives

Humans are complex beasts.

I know, it doesn't take a Ph.D. to figure that out.  (Fortunately for me, since I don't have one.)  But I was thinking about this today with regards to Omar Seddique Mateen, the perpetrator of Sunday's slaughter of 49 men and women in an Orlando nightclub.  Mateen himself was killed in the incident, leading to speculation about his motives for committing such a horrific act.

Immediately after he was identified, his obviously Middle Eastern name fueled talk that he was acting on anti-LGBT beliefs that came from Islam.  This idea was bolstered by the revelation that in a 911 call he made in which he pledged himself and his actions to ISIS.

Then his father came forward, and said that his son had committed the crime because he was "angered over seeing two men kissing."  So for a time, it seemed like the origin of his violent acts was clear enough.

But the father added a comment that made a lot of us frown in puzzlement: he said that his son's actions "had nothing to do with religion."  Really?  If so, why would he be angry over two guys kissing?  It's not like rational secularism would give you the impetus to be so furious over gay guys showing affection that you'd shoot up a nightclub.

Shortly after that, Mateen's ex-wife, Sitora Yusufiy, came forward and said that Mateen had been physically and verbally abusive to her.  In her statement, Mateen comes across as not just angry, but mentally unstable.  "He was two totally different people," Yusufiy said.  "He would turn and abuse me, out of nowhere, when I was sleeping...  He was not a stable person.  He beat me.  He would come home and start beating me because the laundry wasn't finished, or something like that."  As far as his religious ideology, she said he was religious, but had never expressed sympathy with ISIS, terrorist organizations, or extremists.  "He wasn't very devout," Yusufiy said.  "He liked working out at the gym more."

Then things got even murkier when it was revealed that Mateen himself was a "regular" at Pulse himself, and "used gay dating apps."  This put yet another spin on things -- that Mateen was gay and leading a double life, pretending to be straight to keep the peace with his conservative father.  The image developed of Mateen as a tortured young man, steeped in self-loathing, who used the attack as a way of atoning for his own "sinfulness" through jihad against homosexuals.

Here's the problem, though.  It's always a losing proposition trying to parse the thoughts and motives of someone who died without leaving any hard evidence about what he was thinking at the time.  And even if he had -- left a note, called a friend, whatever -- there's still the problem that we'd only have his own words from which to draw a conclusion.

It's frustrating to say, "We don't know, and almost certainly will never know."  After a tragedy, we want to know the reason, to understand how such appalling things could happen.  Somehow, if we could just pin the cause on one thing -- Islam, availability of guns, mental instability, his anguish over being a closeted gay man, growing up in a narrow, judgmental household -- we could attain closure.

But in this case, it doesn't seem to be possible.  His motives could be any or all of the above, or something else we haven't even considered.  People seldom do anything based on one straightforward, clear reason, much as it'd make life simpler if that were so.  At this point, it's probably pointless to engage in further speculation; we need to be putting our thoughts and efforts into helping the survivors and the families of the victims, and -- most importantly -- taking steps to build a society in which such horrific acts never happen again.