Intergroup Schadenfreude: motivating participation in collective violence

• People feel pleasure when they witness competitive out-group members’ pain.
• This pleasure is associated with engagement of neural systems that support learning.
• This pleasure-pain association may motivate people to participate in collective violence.
• And generalize to targets who have done nothing to provoke harm.

People who identify strongly with their social groups frequently experience pleasure when they observe threatening out-group members’ misfortunes: a phenomenon termed intergroup Schadenfreude. Though people are generally averse to harming others, they may learn to overcome this aversion via the consistent pairing of subjective pleasure with out-group pain, thereby lowering the barrier to participating in collective violence. In neuroimaging studies, intergroup Schadenfreude is associated with engagement of ventral striatum (VS), a brain region involved in reinforcement-learning. In these experiments, VS activity predicts increased harm and decreased help toward competitive out-group members. Experiencing this pleasure-pain association in intergroup contexts is particularly pernicious because it can generalize to people who are merely affiliated with a threatening out-group, but have done nothing to provoke harm.