Abstract
People sometimes enjoy being passive spectators to others’ pain (i.e., schadenfreude). Yet, sadistic individuals actively inflict such pain themselves for the pleasure it brings. What differentiates those who passively versus actively enjoy others’ suffering? In individuals predisposed to enjoying others’ suffering, diminishing hedonic returns from schadenfreude may motivate sadistic pursuits to better satisfy hedonic goals. To test this, 297 undergraduates from a Minority Serving Institution reported their sadistic tendencies and then repeatedly watched and reported their enjoyment of two blocks of videos that either depicted people being moderately harmed or non-harmful pleasant scenes. Sadism was positively correlated with schadenfreude (i.e., participants with more sadistic tendencies reported greater enjoyment of the harm videos than those lower in sadism). Yet, sadism was also linked to a greater habituation to schadenfreude, in which more sadistic individuals showed steeper drops in their enjoyment of harm videos over subsequent videos than others, even when we adjusted for corresponding declines in their enjoyment of non-harm videos in the control condition. Indeed, the extent to which sadism was linked to greater enjoyment of harm videos more than halved over the course of the task.