Research to date has mostly focused on the mechanisms underpinning how group members share the same emotions (i.e. emotional convergence), shaping the emotional landscape of a group, an organisation, a society, or even a nation (De Rivera et al., 2014; Goldenberg et al. 2014). However, emotional divergence, defined as group members differentiate their emotional responses from the group’s emotional norm, is common in intractable conflicts.

To date, there is limited empirical research on when emotional divergence happens. One of the few exceptions is the research by Goldenberg and colleagues (2014; 2019) who found that group members were motivated to change their emotional responses when in-group members expressed inappropriately extreme emotions.

Schadenfreude is an interesting case. On the one hand, society tends to view expressing happiness towards someone's misfortune as immoral. On the other hand, as noted above, schadenfreude may strengthen group members' bonding by means of sharing the same humour or demonstrating the same disregard towards an outgroup. This project aims to examine how group members negotiate between these two conflicting social outcomes as a function of the perceived morality of expressing schadenfreude, resulting in either emotional convergence or emotional divergence.

In two experimental studies, we exposed England football fans to tweets expressing schadenfreude towards another team (Study 1) and Chinese citizens to information about Chinese's emotional norms in sports(Study 2). Findings showed that schadenfreude by in-group members increased their own experience of schadenfreude and willingness to humiliate the targeted outgroups (Study 1) but these effects disappeared when participants viewed the expression of schadenfreude as inappropriate (Study 2).

Lead researcher:

Paton Yam (De Montfort University) [Contact]