Why karma feels good after being unfairly excluded

Call it karma, schadenfreude or any number of other terms, but nearly everyone has taken joy at someone else’s misfortune, especially if the victim had snubbed others.

“When we get excluded and ignored by someone or by groups, it’s a really painful experience for all human beings,” said Sarah Mohammadi, a University of Mississippi doctoral student in the Department of Psychology. “Interestingly, it activates the brain regions related to physical pain, which is why it feels so painful. And it’s also a very common, everyday experience.”

Mohammadi and Andy Hales, an Ole Miss assistant professor of psychology, examined how ostracism and schadenfreude, or taking pleasure and satisfaction in someone else’s misfortune, interacted. The research aimed to understand the subjective nature of schadenfreude and its implications.

For their study, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, they used the Cyberball game with added conversation to simulate being snubbed. Cyberball is the most commonly used paradigm for studying brain activity and social exclusion, according to Psychology Today.

The researchers tested their ideas across four experiments. In the first, they examined whether people who were left out felt schadenfreude specifically toward their ostracizers, rather than toward uninvolved individuals.

The second experiment explored whether simply observing ostracism could produce the same reaction. The third trial combined both perspectives, testing whether perceptions of deservingness explained the link between social exclusion and schadenfreude.

Finally, the fourth test manipulated fairness directly by comparing fair versus unfair isolation, confirming that schadenfreude emerges primarily when exclusion is perceived as unjust.

Researchers found exclusion was unfair when a player made a neutral comment like, “This game is good,” but was left out for the rest of the game, and fair when a player made a rude comment such as, “You guys are throwing the ball like a girl,” and was excluded in response.

Participants felt schadenfreude when the ostracizer later faced misfortunes, but not when the excluder’s actions were seen as justified, such as excluding the rude player.

“In the last study, we asked participants to observe one of these conversations during the game; they were not themselves included in the game and they were just watching this interaction between three players, and then they reported their satisfaction with what happened to the ostracizer,” Mohammadi said.

The study also found that snubbed individuals felt less satisfaction when the ostracizer experienced positive events, a phenomenon termed “glückschmerz.”

“We didn’t expect to discover glückschmerz, but we did,” Hales said. “When one of the ostracizers had a good weekend, people actually felt worse; they thought this bad person should have had a bad weekend, and that was enough to put them in a bad mood.”

The findings highlight how perceptions of fairness shape our emotional responses to others’ outcomes, he said.

“A really cool future direction for this research is to start looking at why some people are more empathic while others take joy in the suffering of somebody,” Hales said.