The most widely recognized word for someone who takes pleasure in another person’s suffering is a German loanword: a person experiencing Schadenfreude. But psychology offers more specific labels depending on the flavor of that pleasure. Someone who actively enjoys making others the butt of jokes is called a katagelasticist. Someone whose enjoyment of others’ pain runs deeper and more persistent falls under the umbrella of everyday sadism. These terms describe overlapping but distinct psychological profiles, and the line between a normal emotional flicker and a troubling personality trait is more interesting than the labels alone suggest.
Schadenfreude, Katagelasticism, and Everyday Sadism
Schadenfreude literally translates to “harm-joy” and describes the pleasure you feel when something bad happens to someone else. It does not require that you caused the harm. You might feel a twinge of satisfaction when a rude colleague gets publicly corrected, or when a rival sports team loses in heartbreaking fashion. The emotion is passive: it is about witnessing misfortune, not inflicting it. Research using brain imaging has shown that schadenfreude activates the ventral striatum, one of the brain’s reward-processing regions, and that this activation is stronger when the misfortune happens to someone you previously envied.1PubMed. When your gain is my pain and your pain is my gain: neural correlates of envy and schadenfreude
Katagelasticism is a narrower concept from humor research. A katagelasticist is someone who enjoys laughing at others at those people’s expense. They actively seek out opportunities to make someone the target of a joke, play pranks, or embarrass people for their own amusement. They do not feel bad while doing so and tend to assume that if the target does not like it, the target will simply fight back.2Personality and Individual Differences. Self-conscious emotions and ridicule: Shameful gelotophobes and guilt free katagelasticists This is not just finding slapstick funny. The katagelasticist derives pleasure specifically from the social dynamic of someone being made to look foolish, and they are motivated to create that dynamic.
Everyday sadism sits at the darker end of the spectrum. Where schadenfreude is reactive and katagelasticism is socially playful (if unkind), everyday sadism involves a genuine appetite for others’ suffering. Personality researchers have argued that sadism belongs alongside narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy as a core “dark” personality trait, forming what is sometimes called the Dark Tetrad.3PubMed Central. The Dark Tetrad: analysis of profiles and relationship with the Big Five personality factors Recent modeling work has tried to clarify the boundary between sadism and schadenfreude as personality traits and found that the relationship is complex. One analysis found that sadism could be modeled as a sub-facet of schadenfreude, but an alternative analysis suggested they split into separate higher-order domains, each with their own facets, including a “malicious” component of schadenfreude that sits closest to sadism.4Personality Science. Disentangling sadism from schadenfreude as traits using latent construct modeling In other words, even researchers are still sorting out where one ends and the other begins.
Why Everyone Feels Schadenfreude Sometimes
If you have ever chuckled when a smug contestant on a game show answers confidently and gets it wrong, that is schadenfreude at work, and you are in very normal company. The emotion appears to be rooted in how our brains process social comparison. When you find out that someone who had an advantage over you has lost that advantage, your brain’s reward circuitry responds in a way that resembles an actual personal gain. One imaging study found that even when a participant lost money, just learning that another person had lost more was enough to push ventral striatum activation up to levels similar to those seen after a genuine personal win.5PubMed Central. The envious brain: the neural basis of social comparison
This is not a glitch. It reflects something about how humans evolved to track fairness and social standing. The link between envy and schadenfreude is direct: the more you envied someone beforehand, the more rewarding their downfall feels neurologically. That connection has been confirmed across multiple studies. Brain regions involved in processing social pain during envy (like the anterior cingulate cortex) predict how strongly the reward system fires when you later learn that the envied person has suffered a setback.1PubMed. When your gain is my pain and your pain is my gain: neural correlates of envy and schadenfreude The emotional logic goes: their advantage bothered me, so their loss relieves me.
Schadenfreude also has a distinct neural signature that separates it from its awkward cousin, Fremdschämen (secondhand embarrassment). Imaging research found that the nucleus accumbens, a key reward hub, tracks uniquely with the intensity of schadenfreude but not with the intensity of secondhand embarrassment, even though both emotions can be triggered by watching someone else’s misfortune.6PubMed. Laugh or cringe? Common and distinct processes of reward-based schadenfreude and empathy-based fremdscham Schadenfreude is genuinely pleasurable at a neural level. Cringing at someone else’s humiliation is not.
When Does It Start?
Schadenfreude is not learned from mean-spirited adults. It shows up remarkably early. A study of toddlers found signs of the emotion in children as young as 24 months. When an unequal situation was disrupted, meaning a child who had been getting less suddenly saw the playing field leveled by the other child losing their advantage, the toddlers displayed more positive expressions than they did when an already-equal situation was disrupted by the same amount.7PubMed Central. There is no joy like malicious joy: schadenfreude in young children The researchers interpret this as evidence that schadenfreude evolved in part as a response to perceived unfairness, and that this sensitivity to inequity appears earlier than many developmental psychologists had assumed.
By age four, children start calibrating their schadenfreude along moral lines. In a study where children aged four to eight heard stories about another child experiencing a misfortune, their emotional reaction depended on whether the other child had been pursuing a morally good or morally bad goal. A child chasing a morally negative goal who then fell into a muddy puddle drew less sympathy and more schadenfreude, and this pattern shaped whether the children were willing to help the victim afterward.8PubMed. Daniel has fallen into a muddy puddle–schadenfreude or sympathy? Older children showed these moral judgments more strongly than younger ones, suggesting that the capacity to feel schadenfreude gets increasingly refined by moral reasoning as children develop.
That said, full-blown schadenfreude, actual pleasure at another’s pain, seems to take longer to develop than reduced empathy does. A separate study found that four- to eight-year-olds reported less unhappiness when witnessing the pain of an antisocial puppet compared to a prosocial one, but they did not report actual happiness at the antisocial puppet’s suffering.9PubMed. Schadenfreude or empathy? Children’s emotional responses to the physical pain and pleasure of prosocial and antisocial others The difference matters: young children seem to reach a stage where they withhold empathy from people they see as “bad” before they reach a stage where they take active pleasure in bad people’s pain. The cruelty, or the fun, comes later.
The Role of Fairness, Rivalry, and Group Identity
You are far more likely to enjoy someone’s misfortune when you view their situation as deserved or when they belong to an outgroup. A study that examined schadenfreude across three dimensions, deservingness, legality, and morality, found that healthy people show the strongest emotional reactions when legal and moral violations are in play.10PubMed Central. A lesion model of envy and Schadenfreude: legal, deservingness and moral dimensions as revealed by neurodegeneration When someone has done something wrong, the pleasure at their downfall feels justified. It becomes less like cruelty and more like a sense of cosmic correction.
Group identity amplifies the effect. Research on sports rivalries has examined how intergroup dynamics feed schadenfreude, finding that fans experience detectable pleasure when misfortune strikes a rival team and its supporters. The neural signatures of this intergroup schadenfreude overlap with those seen in individual envy-based schadenfreude, and the strength of these brain responses correlates with self-reported willingness to actually harm rival fans.11PubMed Central. Their pain, our pleasure: stereotype content and schadenfreude That finding is unsettling because it suggests a direct line from the “harmless” pleasure of watching your rival lose to something potentially more aggressive. The emotion does not always stay passive.
Humor theory adds another layer. The “benign violation” theory proposes that something is funny when it feels both threatening and safe at the same time. A longitudinal study tracking humor about Hurricane Sandy found that comedic responses to the disaster rose over time, peaked, and then fell. Too soon after the event, the tragedy was genuinely threatening and not funny. Too long after, it was no longer a meaningful violation and also not funny. The sweet spot existed at a psychological distance large enough to feel safe but close enough that the event still felt like a real transgression.12Social Psychological and Personality Science. The Rise and Fall of Humor This helps explain why people can laugh at someone else’s pain and genuinely not be sadistic: the laughter comes from the violation-but-it’s-okay structure, not from the pain itself.
Dark Personality Traits and the People Who Go Further
Most people’s schadenfreude is fleeting and context-dependent. But for a smaller group, the enjoyment of others’ suffering is more persistent, less dependent on fairness cues, and sometimes actively pursued. This is where personality research on everyday sadism comes in.
Sadism was added to the Dark Triad (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy) to form the Dark Tetrad because of its close relationship with other dark traits and its unique ability to predict certain behaviors that the original three do not fully account for.13Personality and Individual Differences. Everyday sadism, the Dark Triad, personality, and disgust sensitivity Everyday sadism does not mean someone is a violent criminal. The “everyday” label is deliberate: these are people who might enjoy aggressive video games, harsh humor, or the suffering depicted in horror films to a degree that sets them apart statistically from most people, and who, in lab settings, show patterns consistent with genuine pleasure from others’ discomfort.
Brain imaging of individuals with clinically significant sadistic traits has found that they show greater amygdala activation when viewing images of other people in pain, compared to non-sadistic individuals.14PubMed Central. Increased frontotemporal activation during pain observation in sexual sadism: preliminary findings The amygdala processes emotional salience, including both threat and reward. In sadistic individuals, someone else’s pain appears to register as more emotionally significant, which is consistent with the idea that the pain is, in some sense, more engaging or rewarding for them. This stands in contrast to the pattern in psychopathy, where another trait in the Dark Tetrad has its own distinctive empathy profile. People high in psychopathic boldness tend to show enhanced ability to read what others are thinking (cognitive empathy) alongside reduced ability to feel what others are feeling (affective empathy).15PubMed Central. Dissociating cognitive and affective empathy across psychopathy dimensions: The role of interoception and alexithymia They can tell you are in pain. They just do not feel moved by it.
When Neurological Conditions Change the Equation
Some neurological conditions alter the emotional circuitry involved in empathy and schadenfreude in ways that are clinically meaningful. Behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia, a condition that erodes the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain, is one of the most striking examples. Patients with this condition show exaggerated schadenfreude and envy compared to healthy people and to patients with other types of dementia.10PubMed Central. A lesion model of envy and Schadenfreude: legal, deservingness and moral dimensions as revealed by neurodegeneration They also show broad impairments in recognizing emotions, with particular difficulty identifying anger and disgust, which may explain why they struggle to detect social violations and respond appropriately to others’ suffering.16PubMed. Social reasoning, emotion and empathy in frontotemporal dementia
This matters because it shows that the brake on schadenfreude, the system that keeps it from becoming disproportionate or indiscriminate, lives in specific brain regions that degeneration can damage. When those regions break down, the social calibration that most people rely on (is this person deserving of my satisfaction? was this outcome fair?) degrades alongside it. Families of people with frontotemporal dementia sometimes notice that their loved one has become callous or seems to take inappropriate pleasure in others’ difficulties. This is not a personality flaw; it is a symptom of neural damage.
Alexithymia and Trouble Reading Your Own Emotions
There is another, less intuitive condition that changes how people respond to others’ pain. Alexithymia, difficulty identifying and describing your own emotional states, affects roughly one in ten people to some degree. It turns out that being disconnected from your own emotions makes it harder to empathize with other people’s emotions, including their pain.
Brain imaging studies have found that people with alexithymia show reduced activation in several regions within the brain’s pain-processing network when viewing images of others in painful situations, including the anterior cingulate cortex and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. They also rate the pain they observe as less severe and score lower on measures of mature empathy.17Cerebral Cortex. Empathy and Judging Other’s Pain: An fMRI Study of Alexithymia A complementary study found that the higher a person scores on alexithymia measures, the lower their empathy-related brain activity in the anterior insula when their partner receives a painful stimulus, and this relationship held regardless of whether the person was on the autism spectrum.18Brain. Empathic brain responses in insula are modulated by levels of alexithymia but not autism
This is worth mentioning because someone who appears unmoved by, or even amused by, another person’s pain is not necessarily sadistic. They may simply have difficulty registering the emotional significance of what they are seeing. Research in autism spectrum conditions has found that apparent differences in empathic brain responses often disappear once alexithymia and anxiety are statistically accounted for, suggesting that it may be alexithymia driving the reduced empathy rather than autism itself.19PubMed. Influence of anxiety and alexithymia on brain activations associated with the perception of others’ pain in autism The visible behavior, someone not reacting to your pain, can look similar whether the cause is sadistic enjoyment, emotional numbness, or a neurological condition. The psychology underneath is completely different.
Internet Trolling as a Modern Expression
The internet gave people who enjoy others’ distress a low-cost, low-risk way to pursue that pleasure at scale. Internet trolling, deliberately provoking people online for personal amusement, has been studied as a potential window into everyday sadism. The findings are fairly clear: across multiple studies, sadism was the most consistent personality predictor of trolling behavior. The relationship was specific; sadism did not predict enjoyment of other online activities like chatting or debating, only trolling.20Personality and Individual Differences. Trolls just want to have fun
Further research confirmed that trolling and sadism produce overlapping patterns in how people process harm. People higher in sadistic tendencies and people who troll more frequently both showed similar patterns of pleasure and of minimizing the perceived harm of their actions.21PubMed. Internet trolling and everyday sadism: Parallel effects on pain perception and moral judgment In other words, trolls do not just behave like sadists online. They think about harm the same way sadists do: they enjoy it more and they downplay its severity. Within the broader Dark Tetrad framework, sadism and psychopathy both become more relevant at higher levels of trolling motivation, while narcissism and Machiavellianism show weaker or no effects.22PLoS ONE. Troll story: The dark tetrad and online trolling revisited with a glance at humor
This does not mean everyone who posts a sarcastic comment online is a sadist. Trolling spans a range from mildly provocative humor to genuinely cruel harassment. But the research consistently finds that the personality trait most associated with the deliberate infliction of online distress is not attention-seeking or manipulation. It is the simple enjoyment of seeing others upset.
Measuring These Traits and Why It Is Tricky
If you are wondering whether you or someone you know scores high on these traits, there are validated self-report scales for both everyday sadism and schadenfreude. Researchers use instruments like the Comprehensive Assessment of Sadistic Tendencies, the Short Sadistic Impulse Scale, and the Perceived Schadenfreude Scale.23Anuario de Psicología Jurídica. Callous Unemotional Traits, Schadenfreude, and Sadism: Moderating Role of Revenge Tendencies But these scales have real limitations. A large analysis testing whether everyday sadism measures work equally well across genders found that several widely used scales do not fully meet the statistical requirements for fair comparison between men and women. Some scales showed good measurement equivalence, but others, including the everyday sadism subscale from the popular Short Dark Tetrad questionnaire, did not even achieve the baseline level of structural consistency needed for cross-gender comparisons.24European Journal of Psychological Assessment. Gendered Sadism – Examining Measurement Invariance of Everyday Sadism Scales Across Genders
The practical upshot is that self-report questionnaires you encounter online, especially short ones, should be taken with a large grain of salt. They can flag tendencies worth thinking about, but the science behind measuring dark traits is still being refined. A score on an internet quiz does not make anyone a sadist, and differences between groups (men versus women, younger versus older) may partly reflect measurement problems rather than real psychological differences. Researchers are aware of these gaps and are actively working on better instruments, but for now, self-diagnosis via pop-psychology assessments is unreliable at best.