Your Brain Enjoys Watching Your Enemies Suffer

Researchers from USC have taken a look at how the human brain processes the pain of others and discovered a strange phenomena: the section of our brain associated with empathy—known as the pain matrix—reacts more strongly when we watch the suffering of people we hate than it does when we witness the suffering of people we like.

Nineteen white Jewish men were enrolled in the study, published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. In the first stage of the experiment, they were familiarized with the stories of eight “protagonists” portrayed by actors. Half of the protagonists were depicted as affable people while the other half were neo-Nazis.

This sounds a little cringe-worthy, but there was an underlying rationale: the researchers wanted to curtail the dampening of results by minimizing the social stigma associated with hating another group of people. Basically, Jewish people are allowed to hate neo-Nazis, which is good for the study since participants will be honest about their distaste.

After learning about the protagonists, the men watched as both the neo-Nazis and the more likeable folk received a painful injection to the palm of their hand. Simultaneously, the participants underwent an fMRI brain scan to monitor the goings-on in their brain.

In an area of the brain known as the striatum, there was an increase in neurological activity in response to watching the neo-Nazis experience pain. The striatum is associated with, among other things, reward. Of the result, the researchers wrote that this and similar findings “are usually interpreted in terms of the rewarding nature of viewing someone earning his comeuppance.” So it appears we have a neuroscientific basis for schadenfreude.

However, it was the other result that stunned the researchers, the one in which the empathic pain matrix was more active for the suffering of neo-Nazis than that of the likeable people. But surely these results don’t mean that the participants involved in the USC study felt compassionate towards the neo-Nazis. So how can we account for the unexpected neurological activity?

In the paper, the researchers seem unable to settle on any one particular justification for the brain’s behavior in this scenario, but one possible interpretation is that “processing the pain of one’s enemy may be more important than processing the pain of another person with less relevance to the self.” In other words, the Jewish men involved in the study had a predefined relationship to the hateful characters, by virtue of them being neo-Nazis. The likeable characters were certainly more pleasant, but had no obvious connection to the participants. According to this theory, the brain is responding to the salience of the neo-Nazis above all else.

There could be other alternative explanations for why our brains react this way. Still, whatever the truth is, it’s nice to know that there might be a neurological reason why you hate-stalk your ex on Facebook. As the researchers write, “viewing threatening, hateful people in pain elicits elevated attention to the person in pain in addition to an element of pleasure, which keeps your friend’s pain close, but your enemy’s closer.”

@heyiamlex