Study Shows When Inflicting Pain on Others Pays Off for Charity

Oh, the joy of inflicting pain upon others. The Germans have a word for it: schadenfreude, meaning “malicious pleasure.” And tapping into its sentiment properly can, ironically, do a lot of good by raising money for charity.

In a paper published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, UC Riverside School of Business marketing professor and associate dean Thomas Kramer and co-authors articulate and quantify the appeal of schadenfreude (pronounced Sha-den-froid-e) through the lens of marketing psychology.

Through a series of behavioral scenario studies, their paper provides insights for the highly competitive charitable fundraising industry, which gathers some $485 billion in the United States annually.

Firstly, those organizing fundraisers appealing to schadenfreude shouldn’t get too carried away. Schadenfreude is about inflicting mild misfortune that falls comfortably short of sadism on those seen as deserving of the misfortune. We’re talking about pies thrown into faces and plunges into water tanks – not anything too painful or damaging.

In fact, when participants of Kramer’s studies imagined celebrities they disliked getting shocked with a taser gun, the fundraising potential wasn’t as strong as seeing the same celebrities receive the milder misfortune of getting drenched with a bucket of ice water.

“If a disliked person gets more than their just desserts, and they’re severely punished, you no longer feel happy about that punishment, and donations go down,” explained Kramer, who applies his expertise in behavioral psychology to marketing science.

Kramer’s other key findings include:

• To maximize donations, the donor can inflict or observe the mild misfortune, and those who inflict donate roughly the same as those who watch.
• The donors also must have disdain for the person receiving the misfortune, which elicits pleasure when they see that person get their punishment.

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Source: UC Riverside

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