Essays on schadenfreude: evidence from natural experiments

The object of this Thesis is Schadenfreude, or “the pleasure for the misfortunes of others”. I characterise some of the conditions that may trigger Schadenfreude and leverage three natural experiments, applying causal inference techniques on data from large social surveys. In Chapter 1, I find that, during the European debt crisis, exposure to news concerning Greece - a stigmatised group, described as a financial burden to other nations -, was associated to increased levels of self-reported well-being in a sample of European respondents. In Chapter 2, I observe an instantaneous increase in self-reported happiness in a sample of respondents from ten countries, excluding the United States, after the killing of Osama bin Laden, in May 2011. In Chapter 3, I draw on intuitions by Goffman to study how Italian citizens reacted to a highly publicised criminal court verdict against former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. I find that Italian respondents reported higher happiness after the verdict, and that social cohesion appear to have increased for respondents politically distant from Mr. Berlusconi. These effects are generally fleeting and small in size. Overall, the Thesis posits that Schadenfreude can emerge as a result of perceived threats to group integrity; it thus represents an emotional device that binds outward moral derogation and inward solidarity. I conclude proposing that Schadenfreude should be integrated in the sociology of intergroup relations