Is There a Link Between Students’ Feelings of Schadenfreude and Discipline in School?
Schadenfreude is defined as the malicious joy that someone feels at the expense of another person’s failure. This German word is used to describe an odd trait or feeling in many people, with schaden meaning harmful, and freude meaning joy. This feeling can be explained by many different factors, one being how someone who typically has success but embarrassingly fails at something, can induce malicious joy in people as described by Lange and Boecker (2019), “Others can react to such dominance with malicious envy- an emotion aimed at pulling dominant competitors down, maybe by expressing schadenfreude” (1). It is already prevalent online, as there is a massive amount of “epic fail” videos on YouTube and quite a large market for watching others fail to get some sort of a sick kick out of it. The link of Schadenfreudian feelings and students’ likelihood of getting in trouble in school has not been examined much yet, but there may be a link between these feelings of malicious joy and getting into trouble. It is not necessarily a bad thing if someone experiences it at something light-hearted or funny, but some situations in which it is experienced can be seen as morally wrong. Seeing anyone mess up or fail at something can induce feelings of Schadenfreude in some people, and these feelings may stem from toxic character traits and values a person has. Taking a look at those students who test high for Schadenfreude and their history of discipline in school may give insight as to who is more prone to behavioral issues than others. This is something that should be studied more thoroughly.
In a study about Schadenfreude conducted by van Dijk from 2005, “Results showed that responsibility for the misfortune increased Schadenfreude and this effect was mediated by the perceived deservingness of the misfortune” (van Dijk et al., 2005). Essentially, people were more inclined to feel Schadenfreude if they felt the person deserved to fail. This phenomenon has been studied a decent amount, but there is no existing research in how it can be related to behavior of high school students, or even any students. It seems to be a powerful feeling and may reveal a lot about a person/student’s tendencies and behavioral patterns. It can be used as a tool for predicting which students may need more attention or are prone to misbehaving. The feeling can be analyzed in multiple ways but in a study by Crysel & Webster (2018), they were studying the implications of Schadenfreude in politics and the likelihood that someone would share an embarrassing news article about a politician. They observed two factors, benign Schadenfreude, which is more harmless, or malicious Schadenfreude, which more likely indicates that their Schadenfreude is a personality trait. This shows the difference in degrees that Schadenfreude is felt.
It appears that most people feel it at one point in their life, but the motives and situation change the meaning behind that feeling. Finding early on in life if someone feels malicious joy at the failure of another person more strongly in some situations, may mean they are prone to negative behaviors as well. These findings, if significant, may provide school systems a tool to use when dealing with troublesome students, or to get an idea of the possible behavioral pattern a student may exhibit. Additionally, if it is recognized that an adolescent exhibits this extreme joy when seeing a classmate fail, they may need to be educated on why that is morally wrong and how to change these beliefs to become more positive. I presume that those who test high on the Schadenfreude scale will have a higher amount of Detentions/Suspensions/Discipline from teachers than students who do not test high, and this will be a predictor of future discipline in school. This may be an interesting area of research that has not been tapped into yet.
References
Crysel, L. C., & Webster, G. D. (2018, September 5). Schadenfreude and the spread of political misfortune. PLOS ONE. Retrieved April 19, 2022, from https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0201754
Lange, J., & Boecker, L. (2019). Schadenfreude as social-functional dominance regulator. Emotion, 19(3), 489–502.
https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000454.supp (Supplemental)
van Dijk, W. W., Ouwerkerk, J. W., Goslinga, S., & Nieweg, M. (2005). Deservingness and Schadenfreude. Cognition and Emotion, 19(6), 933–939
