From ostracized to pleased: How fair and unfair social exclusion activates schadenfreude

People sometimes derive pleasure from the misfortune of others. Here, we investigate social ostracism as a multifaceted trigger of this complex emotion: schadenfreude. Building on the theories of fairness perception, ostracism, and justice-based schadenfreude, we propose that both experiencing and merely observing ostracism can elicit schadenfreude toward an ostracizer. This response is primarily driven by two factors: (1) the (un)fairness of the ostracism itself and (2) the perceived deservingness of an ostracizer to face negative consequences. Four preregistered experiments support these predictions. People who are ostracized (Study 1; N = 338) experience schadenfreude specifically toward their excluders but not toward uninvolved individuals, indicating that this response is directed rather than generalized. Not just targets but also third-party observers (Study 2; N = 82) report schadenfreude toward the ostracizer. Supporting the justice-based account, among both targets and observers (Study 3; N = 624), ostracism-induced schadenfreude is statistically accounted for by the perceived deservingness of the ostracizer to experience negative outcomes. Finally, providing direct causal evidence, ostracism elicited schadenfreude, but only when experimentally manipulated to be unfair (Study 4; N = 479): excluders who unfairly ostracized well-behaved individuals elicited greater schadenfreude than those who fairly ostracized provocative norm-violators. This indicates the fairness of exclusion influences perceptions of how much an ostracizer deserves misfortune, and thus the subsequent schadenfreude. Together, findings document a previously unexplored consequence of ostracism: the emergence of schadenfreude as a moral emotion in response to unfair exclusion.