Envy is painful: someone has more than you, is better at their job than you and the only relief from the agony of their success is to see them fall. But why does jealousy feel painful and schadenfreude bring selfish glee? Surprise surprise, it’s all in the strange way our brain interprets the social world.

Envy and schadenfreude

Much has been made in the media recently of Rush Limbaugh’s wish for President Obama to fail. Despite the ideological differences about the best way to fix the economy, clearly it’s not advantageous for Rush or any other citizen of the USA to see the nation collapse into a Mad Max thunderdome style economy.

A simple explanation is to brush this off as mere politics, but Rush’s attitude highlights a deeper mystery about how our brains are wired and why this seemingly negative trait exists in human nature. New work published in the journal Science this month helps shed light on why.

On the face of it, both envy and schadenfreude seem so illogical that it’s hard to know why they exist at all. Where is the evolutionary advantage in feeling painful emotions because a fellow Stone Age tribe member has a bigger club than you? Similarly, why should seeing them lose their possessions make you feel good?

Neither of these alone increases your ability to survive or in a broader sense – the survival of the tribe.

Both of these aspects of human nature aren’t new and even the ancient Greeks studied the envy despite the lack of fMRI scanners available. Essentially we can sum up our reactions in the face of envy as follows: we experience envy because we feel we deserve those possessions or positions held by others. Similarly when someone is deprived of their possessions and stature it can evoke sympathy and empathy which I’ve discussed before in relation to Facebook.

But if misfortune strikes those you don’t care for and you like it, then that’s schadenfreude. If you are happy to see Bernie Madoff go to jail then you know what I mean.

Pleasure and Pain

The neural networks regulating pleasure and pain have been known for some time now and are highlighted in the graphic below. Without getting into much science-speak we can summarize the mechanisms pretty easily.

Pleasure is mediated by the reward circuitry that runs on the neurotransmitter dopamine and the whole system is activated in response to pleasing activities. Traditionally these are things that directly relate to survival – food and sex. But it’s also a key player in the rewarding effects of drug use like heroin.

Pain is managed by a different but related set of brain regions, again with evolutionary survival advantages. It’s essential to be able to feel pain when you cut yourself and just as important to locate the source of the pain – you don’t want to keep walking on an injured leg and exacerbate the damage.

The surprising finding in the current study was that feeling envy at someone else’s success activated the same pain systems as if you had physically injured yourself. Similarly the feeling of schadenfreude at a rival’s failure activated the same neural mechanism that governs our feelings of pleasure from a lovely meal, giving to charity, or a hit of opiates.

My social life is causing me pain

Most of us already describe being shamed and humiliated as painful and doing a good deed as rewarding, but this is actually true on a neuronal level – the neuronal responses to these abstract social situations are given equal billing with physical responses. But why might this be the case?

Basic drives and emotions have been a great motivator to do things that enhance our survival since the dawn of man. Being hungry is uncomfortable so you seek out food. Being wet compels us to seek shelter. Each pain is a call to action to remedy the situation.

Extending this to the current findings implies that social discomforts played as an important role to survival as physical ones.

Thinks get a bit murkier from here, as it’s clear why we need food and shelter but why does the brain treat these pains the same as social ones like envy? One prominent theory says it’s all about maintaining connections to the social group, and hence better co-ordination amongst large numbers of people.

Distribution of duties like hunting and infant care giving amongst a group requires considerable co-ordination. To make such a system work we need to have a social system to police it.  If people are fair and charitable then the group as a whole is more likely to survive and hence the activation of the pleasure network.
Conversely, group members that are not co-operating or not acting fairly cause social pain to others and are then more likely to be ostracized and consequently their individual chances of survival go way down.

Dissecting schadenfreude and envy

We humans are unique in that we are self-aware. Unfortunately with this comes the baggage of automatically measuring our self against those around us.

Discomfort at others doing better than us can be resolved either by ceasing to care about it or improving our performance. Easier said than done naturally, so the third option becomes malice and ill will or actions to remove the advantages of those doing well to bring them down to our level.
From a more dispassionate, and economic point of view, envy is a social motivator to be productive to raise the levels of group performance and to compete with others – the same way two species might fight for limited resources in an evolutionary race.
When your competition falters and their advantages are reduced, the societal discomfort is reduced and a feeling of pleasure can take hold. Just like eating a great meal on an empty stomach it’s an evolutionary indicator that you’re doing something right that’s increased your ability to survive.

The flipside of this is that people who have higher levels of pain and conflict are more likely to have very strong feelings of pleasure when relived from this pain. I guess this means that means that when Rush Limbaugh says he wants the government to collapse it’s just his way of self-medicating. In his case, it’s just a pity for the rest of us that schadenfreude doesn’t come in pill form.

Rumor has it that subscribing to the Email or RSS updates on VeryEvolved is a great cure for envy.

March 16th, 2009