Someone who takes pleasure in another person’s pain or misfortune is most commonly described as a sadist. The feeling itself, enjoying someone else’s suffering without necessarily causing it, has a well-known German name: schadenfreude. These two concepts overlap but aren’t identical, and the distinction matters depending on what kind of behavior you’re trying to describe.
Schadenfreude vs. Sadism
Schadenfreude is a passive emotion. It’s the quiet satisfaction you might feel when a pompous coworker trips in front of everyone, or when a rival sports team loses a big game. The word comes from German and literally translates to “harm-joy.” English actually has its own rare equivalent, epicaricacy, borrowed from the Ancient Greek word for “joy upon evil,” but almost nobody uses it.
Sadism is different. Where schadenfreude is about observing misfortune, sadism involves actively seeking out or causing suffering and finding it pleasurable. A sadist doesn’t just notice someone else’s pain. They’re drawn to it, sometimes willing to put in effort to create it. Research from the University of British Columbia demonstrated this in an unusual experiment: participants were offered several unpleasant tasks, one of which involved grinding up live bugs in a machine. People who scored high on sadism volunteered for the bug-killing task at significantly higher rates, and some were even willing to expend extra time and energy to harm an innocent person in a follow-up task when there was nothing to gain from doing so.
Researchers have proposed that sadism is actually a subcategory of schadenfreude. The core disposition is the same (pleasure from suffering), but sadism represents the version where that disposition translates into aggressive action.
Why the Brain Rewards This Feeling
When people experience schadenfreude, brain imaging studies consistently show increased activity in the ventral striatum, a region tied to reward processing. This is the same area that lights up when you eat something delicious or win a bet. Participants who reported more pleasure while watching someone else’s misfortune showed correspondingly stronger activity in this reward center. In one study, fans watching a despised rival team lose showed a spike in ventral striatum activity identical to what you’d see during a personal win.
More striking: when this reward response was strongest in reaction to another group’s pain, participants were less likely to behave prosocially afterward. In other words, the more your brain treats someone else’s suffering as a reward, the less motivated you are to help them.
Three Reasons People Enjoy Others’ Misfortune
Schadenfreude isn’t one-dimensional. A widely cited model identifies three distinct forms, each rooted in a different social motivation.
- Justice schadenfreude: Pleasure when someone “gets what they deserve.” This is the most socially accepted form. When a corrupt politician faces consequences, the satisfaction most people feel is schadenfreude rooted in fairness.
- Rivalry schadenfreude: Pleasure tied to social comparison. If someone you compete with fails, their loss feels like your gain. This form is driven by self-evaluation and status concerns.
- Aggression schadenfreude: Pleasure from an out-group’s suffering, tied to group identity. Sports rivalries are a mild example. At its extreme, this form involves dehumanizing the other person or group, which makes their pain feel not just acceptable but satisfying.
These three forms develop at different ages in childhood, with aggression schadenfreude emerging earliest, rooted in the infant’s early sense of “us vs. them.” Rivalry schadenfreude appears later, once children develop the ability to compare themselves to peers.
Everyday Sadism Is More Common Than You Think
When psychologists talk about sadism, they’re not only referring to extreme criminal behavior. “Everyday sadism” describes a subclinical personality trait found in ordinary people. These individuals find cruelty pleasurable or exciting but may express it in socially tolerated ways: enjoying violent video games with realistic gore, laughing at humiliating prank videos, or deliberately provoking people online.
Online trolling is one of the clearest behavioral markers. A meta-analysis of personality research found that among the four “dark” personality traits (sadism, psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism), sadism had the strongest correlation with trolling behavior, with a moderate-to-strong association of r = .49. Trolls don’t just lack empathy. They actively enjoy the emotional reactions they provoke, and the internet’s anonymity gives them a consequence-free environment to do it in.
The Empathy Gap Behind It
People who score high in sadistic traits consistently show lower levels of affective empathy, the gut-level ability to feel what someone else is feeling. In a study of 576 people, all four dark personality traits were negatively associated with affective empathy, but sadism stood out in one specific way: sadistic individuals were significantly worse at recognizing emotions in others, even after accounting for the overlap with psychopathy.
There’s an interesting contradiction here, though. Some researchers argue that sadists must have at least some intact cognitive empathy, the intellectual ability to understand what someone is feeling, because you can’t effectively hurt someone if you can’t read their emotional state. The evidence is mixed. Some studies find sadism has no significant link to cognitive empathy deficits, suggesting these individuals understand your pain perfectly well. They just don’t share it. That combination, understanding without feeling, is part of what makes the trait so effective at producing cruelty.
When It Crosses Into a Clinical Concern
Laughing at someone slipping on ice is normal. Seeking out opportunities to watch people suffer, or going out of your way to cause pain, is not. Persistent indifference to others’ suffering, combined with a disregard for their rights, is a core feature of antisocial personality disorder. The diagnostic criteria specifically include not feeling remorse, shown by indifference to or rationalization of hurting others, along with contempt for the feelings, rights, and suffering of people around you.
The line between normal schadenfreude and something more concerning comes down to frequency, intensity, and whether the person actively creates suffering rather than just observing it. Occasional schadenfreude is a universal human experience. Consistently finding pleasure in pain, especially pain you cause, places someone further along a spectrum that most people never reach.