The Joy of Pain Read Online Free Page A

to think “self-affirming” thoughts about their important values. The other half did not get this opportunity. Only this latter group showed the same pattern of reaction as in the first study. Participants in the first group, because self-affirming thoughts may have prevented the unpleasant effects of the social comparison, were less inclined to find the student’s academic misfortune pleasing.
    There is nothing like a little success to blunt the influence of low self-esteem. I noted earlier that Frank Sinatra had the kind of talent to flatten the hopes of other singers. But even Sinatra went through a rough period in his career, and his self-esteem was at a low ebb by the end of the 1940s. Then he got the role of Maggio in the 1953 film
From Here to Eternity
and won the Oscar for best supporting actor. His psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, watched on television as Sinatra received it, and said to his wife, “That’s it, then. I won’t be seeing him anymore!” And he never did. Winning the Oscar was hugely self-affirming and was the start of a lasting comeback.
    A third study by the Dutch researchers (van Dijk et al.) added yet another wrinkle. The starting point of the first two studies was existing variations in self-esteem. This time, the researchers “created” variations in self-esteem by giving false performance feedback to participants and then examined how they responded to others’ misfortune. Each participant performed a task described as highly linked with intellectual ability and was told that he or she scored among the worst 10 percent of the population (a control group received no feedback). Then the participant read a national magazine article that described a student who had tried to impress people at a party by renting an expensive car. But, after arriving and while trying to park the car, the student drove it into a nearby canal, causing severe damage to the car. Sure enough, participants receiving the negative feedback on intellectual ability found the misfortune more enjoyable than did those in the control condition who did not receive such feedback. 17 As the 17th-century writer François de la Rochefoucauld expressed in a maxim, “If we had no faults of our own, we would not take so much pleasure in noticing those of others.” 18
    Thanks to the ingenuity of these researchers, we have a store of evidence demonstrating that people who stand to gain psychologically from another person’s misfortune indeed get a boost to self-esteem from comparing themselves with someone suffering a setback. People with low self-esteem and those who have experienced threat to self-esteem seem especially likely to benefit.
Schadenfreude
provides one way of spotting this process.
THE EVOLUTIONARY ROOTS OF SOCIAL COMPARISON
    Evolutionary psychology highlights the important role of social comparisons in everyday life and also helps explain why inferiority in others should be pleasing. A simple fact crucial to understanding how evolution works is that people
differ
in ways that consistently matter in terms of survival and reproduction. Differences that provide advantages for survival contribute to natural selection. Much of life comes down to a competitive striving for superiority on culturally prized dimensions: to gain the status and many-splendored spoils following from such status. Superiority, literally, makes the difference. Attributes that underlie greater dominance or prestige compared to rivals allow us to rise in the pecking order and accrue benefits as a result. For these reasons alone, human beings should be highly attuned to variations in rank on any attributes that grant them advantages. And, given the huge adaptive implications of rank and status, inferiority
should
feel bad and superiority
should
feel good. 19
    How much we attend to social comparisons is nowhere more obvious than in the mating game. This makes sense in evolutionary terms because reproductive