Worse than Schadenfreude

By now, the world is familiar with the German word ‘Schadenfreude’, the joy at the misfortune of others. But apparently, a surprisingly large number of people enjoy the misfortune of others so much that they just want to see the world burn.

Imagine you play a so-called ‘vendetta game’, where you are paired with another player. The other player robs you of your winnings in a previous task and now you are given the chance to retaliate. Would you hurt the other player and if so, how much? A metastudy of these kinds of games found that in the many ways this game was reported in the literature, on average 60% of people would take revenge and reduce the other players wealth by about half.

Now, imagine you are in a tournament with a prize win for the best performer. You get the chance to report another player’s results in a task that counts towards the tournament. Would you underreport the other player’s results and by how much? According to the above-mentioned metastudy, about half the players in these tournaments would underreport the results of their competitors and do so by about 15%.

Now take the famous dictator game, where one player can decide to split a pot of money between themselves and another player. The other player can reject an offer that she considers too low, in which case both players go home without any money. In these games, the person offered the money by the dictator rejects the offer as too low in some 25% of all cases, which reduces their winnings by about 20% of the total pot available to begin with.

All these games have a moral component, and they show that people assess financial gains not just in pure rational/monetary terms. They are willing to punish other people, sometimes even if it means they lose money as well if they consider the other person’s action as unfair or in order to gain an unfair advantage themselves.

But look at so-called ‘Joy of Destruction games’. These games work like this. You and another player get the same amount of money. Then you can decide to take money away from the other player. The other player loses that money, but you don’t get any benefit from doing that. Not more money, but also no punishment for you. In fact, the other player doesn’t even know you took the money away from her. There is no information exchanged, so you have no reputational hit either. Would you take money away from the other player and if so, how much?

The answer is on average one in three people would take money away from the other player and when they do, they take away about 30% or close to a third. As I said, some people just want to see the world burn.

Punishment in a variety of destruction games