Malicious joy: Sadism moderates the relationship between schadenfreude and the severity of others' misfortune Birga M. Schumpe a, ⁎, Marc-André K. Lafrenière b a Helmut-Schmidt University, Hamburg, Germany b McGill University, Montréal, Canada abstract article info Article history: Received 12 October 2015 Received in revised form 1 January 2016 Accepted 4 January 2016 Available online 14 January 2016 Sadism was established as a moderator of the relationship between the severity of others' misfortunes and schadenfreude. In Study 1, we measured sadistic personality traits, and afterwards, participants were presented with a video clip of a cyclist's accident that was described as having resulted in minor (low misfortune condition) or severe (high misfortune condition) injuries. Individuals high in sadism experienced greater schadenfreude in the high misfortune condition. Conversely, we found lower schadenfreude in the high misfortune condition for individuals low in sadism. In Study 2, we were able to replicate our findings while controlling for deservingness of the target person and impression management tendencies. Moreover, we manipulated the importance of the cycling race. In line with our expectations, race importance exacerbated the effects observed in Study 1. Results are discussed in light of theoretical and practical implications. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Schadenfreude Others' misfortune Sadism 1. Introduction When watching a video of a misfortune befalling another person, a lot of people have probably experienced the feeling of joy. YouTube's highly frequented ‘fail compilation’ videos are only one example of people seemingly enjoying seeing others hurt or humiliate themselves. As a German loanword, schadenfreude describes the joy derived from observing the misfortunes of others. Another's misfortune can provide observers with an opportunity to protect, maintain, or enhance their feelings of self-worth (Van Dijk, Ouwerkerk, Van Koningsbruggen, & Wesseling, 2011; Van Dijk, Ouwerkerk, Van Koningsbruggen, & Wesseling, 2012; Van Dijk, Ouwerkerk, Wesseling, & Van Koningsbruggen, 2011). Therefore, the experience of schadenfreude can be conceived of as a social comparative concern (e.g., Ben-Ze'ev, 2014). Along these lines, observing the down- fall of high achievers was found to lead to more pleasant feelings com- pared to observing the failure of an average person (Feather, 1989, 1994; Van Dijk, Ouwerkerk, Goslinga, & Nieweg, 2005). Likewise, Brigham, Kelso, Jackson, and Smith (1997) found that a setback of a su- perior student produced more schadenfreude, compared to the setback of an average student. Accordingly, witnessing someone superior fail is a situation providing an observer with the opportunity to reestablish his or her feeling of self-worth. Previous research on schadenfreude has focused on identifying con- ditions under which schadenfreude is most likely to occur. For instance, people are more likely to experience schadenfreude when they envy the target person (Smith et al., 1996). Moreover, deservingness was found to be an important predictor of schadenfreude (e.g. Feather, 1994, 1999, 2006, 2008; Feather & Sherman, 2002; Van Dijk et al., 2005). When people perceive a target person as deserving of a misfortune, they experience greater schadenfreude. For instance, participants showed higher schadenfreude when a student suffering a misfortune was described as being responsible for that misfortune compared to not responsible. Moreover, this effect was mediated by perceived deservingness of the misfortune (Van Dijk et al., 2005). Furthermore, there are also individual differences associated with the experience of schadenfreude. In general, men report more schadenfreude than women (e.g., Van Dijk et al., 2005). Moreover, schadenfreude was found to be positively related to psychopathy, narcissism, as well as Machiavellianism (James, Kavanagh, Jonason, Chonody, & Scrutton, 2014; Porter, Bhanwer, Woodworth, & Black, 2014). Together, these three personality dimensions represent the Dark Triad of personality traits (Jones & Paulhus, 2013). Recently, Buckels and colleagues suggested adding sadism to the Dark Triad, thereby constituting the Dark Tetrad (Buckels, Jones, & Paulhus, 2013). 2. The present research There is increased support for the notion that sadism - as a person- ality trait - influences everyday behaviors among normal people (Buckels, 2012). In this sense, sadism was found to be associated with the enjoyment of cruelty in mundane situations, among ordinary people in everyday life (Buckels et al., 2013). Sadism, for example, predicted cyber-trolling in Internet users (Buckels, Trapnell, & Paulhus, 2014) or Personality and Individual Differences 94 (2016) 32–37 ⁎ Corresponding author at: Department of Social Psychology, Helmut-Schmidt- University, Holstenhofweg 85, 22042 Hamburg, Germany. E-mail address: b.schumpe@gmail.com (B.M. Schumpe). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.01.005 0191-8869/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Personality and Individual Differences journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/paid