Schadenfreude, or “the pleasure derived from the misfortune of others” is not necessarily a thing we should strive for as a society, but a new study shows -- in a weird way -- when we assume others' lives are always happy and stress-free, it makes us more likely to feel depressed and lonely.
Previously, “no one had shown that people systematically
underestimate how often others feel sad or upset,” says
Benoît Monin, associate professor of organizational behavior
and of psychology at Stanford University.
This misconception is linked to loneliness and unhappiness.
The grass is greener
“When you think everyone else is having fun, you think
your life is not that great,” Monin says. “Perceptions
-- even erroneous ones -- matter a great deal.”
Monin says the tendency to think we’re alone in our problems
stems from the fact that most people keep their worries, fears, or
anger hidden in social situations. Even if all our friends around
us are suffering from personal, financial or workplace woes, they
may not bring it up at parties or happy hour.
The result is that “people look at their friends’
smiles in social situations and think they’re always
happy,” says Alex Jordan, the study’s first author and
a recent psychology doctoral graduate who is now a postdoctoral
fellow at Dartmouth College.
Down in the dumps
To confirm the difficulty of knowing when friends are feeling
down, researchers surveyed college students about their emotional
experiences and how often they put feelings like laughing or crying
on public display. They also asked how often emotional feelings
were shared with friends.
Negative emotions were nearly twice as likely to occur in private
compared to positive emotions and were three times more likely to
be intentionally hidden from others.
In another study, participants were asked how often they had
negative and positive emotional experiences, like arguing with a
friend or having fun at a party. They were also asked to estimate
how often their peers experienced the same types of emotions.
Most participants underestimated the prevalence of their
peers’ negative emotional experiences and overestimated the
prevalence of the positive ones. Misperceptions occurred even among
close friends.
Participants in their first semester of college recorded their
emotional experiences in private online diaries for 10 weeks. The
participants also had three friends judge and describe how happy or
sad they seemed.
Repeatedly, friends thought the participants were happier than they
truly were.
All alone
In another study, the researchers looked for a correlation
between participants’ perceptions of how often their peers
experienced certain emotions and the participants’ own
emotional well-being.
Participants who sensed less sadness in their peers said they were
lonelier and spent more time brooding over their own problems. And
those who thought their peers had lots of positive experiences
reported being less satisfied with their own lives.
“Thinking you’re alone in your emotional challenges is,
understandably, not much fun,” Jordan says.
He first considered the idea that people might view others’
lives as happier than they really are after noticing some of his
friends were upset after reading others’ posts on
Facebook.
“They felt disappointed with their lives when they logged
onto Facebook and browsed the apparently ‘perfect’
lives presented by their peers,” Jordan explains. “I
wondered whether people might harbor a more general illusion that
others’ lives are cheerier than they actually
are.”
“Paradoxically,” Monin says, “if we told others
how unhappy we are, we would probably all be happier in the long
run.”
Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and Elmira College
contributed to the study, which is published in the journal
Personality
and Social Psychology Bulletin.
