What the word means

It’s a German word, it means the enjoyment of looking at someone successful failing. It’s a very lucrative idea. I first encounter the word while watching Boston legal a few years ago. There is an episode where Alan Shore (a lawyer) who successfully defend an artist who’s wrongly detained because people are not looking it in an objective way. They are using emotions and schadenfreude is the right word to reflect such emotion.

Scientifical Evidence from Wikipedia
A 2006 experiment suggests that men, but not women, enjoy seeing bad people suffer. The study was designed to measure empathy, by watching which brain centers are stimulated when subjects inside an fMRI observe someone having a painful experience. Researchers expected that the brain’s empathy center would show more stimulation when those seen as good got an electric shock than they would if the shock was given to someone the subject had reason to consider bad. This was indeed the case, but for male subjects the brain’s pleasure centers also lit up when someone else got a shock that the male thought was well-deserved.

How it applies to everyday life

Next week is the biggest game of the year, between Collingwood and St Kilda (After a draw last week). While I am not the biggest footy supporter, however, I heard rumours that Collingwood supporters are despised because they have been winning too much games. I think schandenfreude is in play in here and chances is that if you look at it in a very objective way, why choose another losing team while clearly there is a winner.

How it applies to Corporate life

Microsoft Corporation is perhaps the biggest victim of schadenfreude.

While we all know they are developing fantastic products, however, due to monopoly and the rich CEO, it became a very huge victim of  schadenfreude.

There are a few other companies that still cannot handle schadenfreude successfully. Apple is one of them. It started in a garage and then it became a multi billion dollar companies with products that everybody love. However, recently it became a victim of schedenfreude , there is a massive antenna issue that shaken the company and also the issue with Apple trying to outbreak and manoeuvre the competitions.

How to handle it

Mudita is the reverse word of schadenfreude. It means "Happiness in a another’s good fortune". Google is one of the company that handle it quite successfully. The company has a motto: "don’t be evil". They are investing in a lot fantastic products such as the Gmail, the search engine and the android mobile operating systems and all of them are fantastically free!

How to handle it (on a personal level)

On a personal side, the idea is pretty similar. brighten up your image with a more cheery outlook, donate more to charity and help more people.

Final thoughts

I wonder whether in the future there will be a footy team that would handle schadenfreude by having a motto: "Don’t be evil". As for now, I am supporting St Kilda.. not because of schadenfreude… but because I like their red color.