Why Do We Enjoy Seeing Successful People Fail? [Bit#180]

Someone you know gets promoted, builds a successful business, or suddenly becomes popular. You may congratulate them sincerely. Yet if that same person later makes a serious mistake or loses their success, you might experience an unexpected feeling of satisfaction.

It is not necessarily a feeling you would openly admit. You might even feel guilty about it.

Psychologists call this emotion schadenfreude, a German word describing pleasure at another person’s misfortune. It is related to envy, but the two emotions are not identical.

Why can another person’s failure feel like a small personal victory? The answer may lie in how we compare ourselves with others, how we protect our sense of self-worth, and how we respond when someone else’s success makes us feel left behind.

When Someone Else’s Success Becomes a Personal Comparison

People rarely evaluate their achievements entirely on their own. We often judge how well we are doing by comparing ourselves with friends, colleagues, competitors, or even strangers online.

A colleague’s promotion might inspire us to work harder. But if we have been competing for the same position, that promotion might also make us feel less successful.

Psychologists call this process social comparison. It helps people evaluate their abilities, achievements, and social standing relative to others, particularly when there is no clear objective standard for measuring success.

The emotional impact depends partly on how relevant the comparison is to our lives. Someone else’s musical talent may not threaten our self-esteem if music is unimportant to us. But another person’s professional success can feel much more personal when we share similar ambitions.

When someone achieves something we deeply want, their success can become an uncomfortable reminder of the gap between where we are and where we hoped to be.

This does not mean we automatically resent successful people. We may admire them, feel motivated by them, or experience several emotions at once. The problem begins when their achievements become a measure of our own worth.

If we repeatedly interpret another person’s success as evidence that we are falling behind, admiration can gradually mix with frustration. That discomfort may help explain why the same person’s later failure can produce an unexpectedly positive reaction.

Why Their Failure Can Feel Like Relief

Imagine two colleagues with similar qualifications. One receives a promotion while the other remains in the same position.

The colleague who was passed over might begin to feel less capable or less valued by comparison. If the promoted colleague later loses the position, that uncomfortable difference may seem smaller.

Nothing about the disappointed colleague’s abilities has necessarily improved. Their salary, skills, and responsibilities may remain exactly the same. Yet the comparison that made them feel inadequate has changed.

This offers one explanation for schadenfreude: another person’s misfortune can temporarily relieve the discomfort associated with an unfavorable comparison.

Experiments in psychology have found that threats to people’s self-evaluation can intensify pleasure at another person’s misfortune. This effect has been observed even when researchers account for factors such as envy, dislike of the other person, and whether the misfortune seems deserved.

One possible explanation is that the other person’s setback helps protect a threatened sense of self-worth. If their advantage disappears, our own position may no longer feel quite so unfavorable.

The relief is psychological rather than practical. We have not necessarily gained a promotion, improved our abilities, or become more successful. We may simply feel better about ourselves because the comparison has changed.

This reaction does not require a conscious plan. People do not necessarily think, “If that person fails, I will feel better about myself.” The emotional response can happen before they have fully considered why they feel that way.

Envy Does Not Always Lead to Malice

Envy is often described as a negative emotion that makes people resent those who have more than they do. Research suggests a more complicated picture.

Envy can involve the painful feeling that someone else possesses an advantage we want. But that discomfort can lead to different responses.

One person might see a successful colleague and think, “I want to improve and achieve something similar.”

Another might think, “I wish that person would lose what they have.”

Both reactions can begin with an unfavorable comparison. The difference lies in what the person does with the feeling.

Psychologists often distinguish between benign envy, which can motivate self-improvement, and malicious envy, which is more closely associated with hostility toward the person who has the advantage.

A large body of research examined in a 2018 meta-analysis found that envy was more strongly associated with schadenfreude when it was measured in terms of malicious feelings than when it was measured as painful envy or a more constructive response.

This distinction matters because feeling envy does not automatically make someone cruel. A person can feel disappointed by another’s success and use that discomfort as motivation to improve their own circumstances.

The reaction becomes more destructive when attention shifts away from personal growth and toward reducing the other person’s advantage.

In other words, the same uncomfortable emotion can lead toward self-improvement or resentment. The feeling alone does not determine the outcome.

Why Someone Else’s Success Can Feel Like a Personal Failure

The same achievement can produce very different emotional reactions in different people.

Consider a musician who becomes internationally famous. Someone who has never wanted a career in music may simply admire the achievement. An aspiring musician, however, might see the same news as a reminder of the distance between their current position and their ambitions.

The achievement itself has not changed. Its personal significance has.

This helps explain why people sometimes feel threatened by individuals who are not direct competitors. Social media can make these comparisons especially visible, exposing people to a constant stream of professional achievements, financial milestones, relationships, and carefully selected highlights from other people’s lives.

A comparison becomes more emotionally powerful when it touches an important part of our identity. If career success is central to how we judge ourselves, another person’s promotion may feel more threatening than an achievement in an area we do not value as highly.

Research on emotional responses to other people’s fortunes and misfortunes also indicates that relative standing helps shape whether people feel happy for someone, sympathetic toward them, envious of them, or pleased by their setback.

We do not simply react to another person’s success or failure. We also react to what that event appears to say about where we stand.

This does not mean that social media inevitably makes people envious, or that every successful person becomes a target of resentment. It means that comparisons can influence our emotions when they concern goals and identities that matter to us.

Is It Always About Jealousy?

No. Envy is one possible explanation for enjoying another person’s failure, but it is not the only one.

Someone might feel satisfied when a powerful individual faces consequences for dishonest behavior. Another person might resent a public figure because they believe that figure has treated others unfairly.

In these situations, judgments about justice and deservingness may matter alongside social comparison.

For example, seeing a dishonest executive held accountable may produce satisfaction because the outcome seems fair. Feeling pleased when a rival loses an achievement simply because their success made us feel inferior is a different psychological situation.

These reactions can overlap, but they should not be treated as identical.

Nor can we conclude that everyone who enjoys another person’s failure has low self-esteem or a malicious personality. A single emotional response is not enough to establish someone’s underlying motives or character.

The more accurate conclusion is that schadenfreude can arise through several psychological routes, including threatened self-worth, envy, and judgments about whether someone deserves their misfortune. Which explanation matters most depends on the person and the situation.

What This Reveals About Human Psychology

The pleasure some people feel when a successful person fails may have less to do with the failure itself than with what that failure changes in their own minds.

When another person’s achievements become a standard against which we measure our worth, their success can make us feel inadequate. Their setback may then provide temporary relief, even if it brings us no direct benefit.

Recognizing this process offers a useful way to examine our own reactions. When someone else’s success makes us uncomfortable, we can ask whether their achievement actually harms us or whether we are using their position to judge our own.

The same question applies when we find ourselves enjoying another person’s downfall.

Feeling that moment of satisfaction does not define who we are. But understanding where it comes from can reveal which comparisons matter to us, what we feel we lack, and how strongly another person’s fortunes influence our view of ourselves.

Scientific Sources

1. Lange, J., Weidman, A. C., & Crusius, J. (2018). The painful duality of envy: Evidence for an integrative theory and a meta-analysis on the relation of envy and schadenfreude. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 114(4), 572–598. PMID: 29376662. DOI: 10.1037/pspi0000118. Read the study on PubMed
2. van Dijk, W. W., Ouwerkerk, J. W., Wesseling, Y. M., & van Koningsbruggen, G. M. (2011). Towards understanding pleasure at the misfortunes of others: The impact of self-evaluation threat on schadenfreude. Cognition and Emotion, 25(2), 360–368. PMID: 21432678. DOI: 10.1080/02699931.2010.487365. Read the study on PubMed
3. Boecker, L., Loschelder, D. D., & Topolinski, S. (2022). How individuals react emotionally to others’ (mis)fortunes: A social comparison framework. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 123(1), 55–83. PMID: 35025600. DOI: 10.1037/pspa0000299. Read the study on PubMed