People smile and feel reward when misfortunes strike envied high-status groups.
Evidence
Various biobehavioral data converge for the envy quadrant (rich people and business people). Perceivers’ smile muscles (zygomaticus major) typically respond to other people’s good events over bad ones, but this is not so for the envy quadrant: Negative events happening to envied groups elicit smiles of schadenfreude, reward-center activation, self-reported glee, and admitted aggression (Cikara, Botvinick, & Fiske, 2011; Cikara & Fiske, 2011). — Susan T. Fiske, Stereotype Content, 38
Categorization
- CANDY: A punchy, elevator-conversation finding: our facial muscles literally smile at rich people’s bad news.
- XREF: Resonates with outgroup schadenfreude research and with the reader’s interest in prestige hierarchies. — connects to: Envy inherently acknowledges the envied group’s good qualities as a source of distress. — Susan T. Fiske et al., A Model of (Often Mixed) Stereotype…, 277