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Aleks Krotoski explores whether our digital habits and increased polarisation have ushered in a new age of schadenfreude and, if so, whether it's always a bad thing.

What’s going on when we scroll through our social feeds finding momentary happiness in the mishaps of celebrities or politicians whose views we dislike? Or delight in the stupidity of everyday people on 'epic fail' sites? Aleks Krotoski explores whether our digital habits, alongside increasingly polarised attitudes, have ushered in a new age of schadenfreude... and asks if this is always a bad thing?

Aleks hears from author Tiffany Watt Smith who suggests that, whilst schadenfreude is not a new emotion, online platorms may create the perfect conditions for it to flourish; Dr Lea Boecker suggests schadenfreude may have an important role in boosting self-esteem and encouraging group cohesion; fail video aficionado Olly Browning confesses the particular frisson of schadenfreude he feels when justice is served; whilst researcher Emily Cross shares the results of her recent experiments measuring levels of schadenfreude felt towards robots; and Dr Sa-Kiera Hudson invites us to consider whether schadenfreude is always a passive emotion or whether its addictive qualities might sometimes lead to harmful behaviours towards marginalised groups.

Producer: Lynsey Moyes
Researcher: Juliet Conway

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29 minutes

Last on

Mon 14 Nov 2022 16:30
±«Óătv Radio 4

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Contributor Biographies

Dr. Tiffany Watt Smith is a cultural historian and author of SCHADENFREUDE: The Joy of Another's Misfortune and The Book of Human Emotions. In 2014, she was named a ±«Óătv New Generation Thinker, and her TED talk The History of Emotions has over 1.5 million views. She is currently a Wellcome Trust research fellow at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London.


Lea Boeker is Assistant Professor at the Leuphana University Luneberg, Germany. Her research papers include: “” and “”


Olly Browning is a freelance writer and designer based in London (and ‘fail video’ aficionado).


Dr Sa-kiera “Kiera” Hudson is an Assistant Professor at University of California Berkeley Haas School of Business in the Management of Organizations group. As part of her work, Kiera studies social dominance orientation —a measure of the extent to which individuals prefer group based inequality—as a relevant antecedent to empathy, schadenfreude, and intergroup conflict more broadly.


Emily Cross is a cognitive neuroscientist and dancer based jointly at the University of Glasgow in Scotland and Macquarie University in Australia, where I direct the Social Brain in Action Laboratory (). Her recent work examined empathy and schadenfreude in human-robot teams.

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  • Mon 14 Nov 2022 16:30
    ±«Óătv Radio 4

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