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What does schadenfreude mean?
Schadenfreude is pleasure at another individual’s misfortune. It is different from noticing that someone else received a better reward, feeling disappointed about one’s own outcome, or reacting to a competitor’s defeat. A human-focused analysis distinguishes passively observing another’s adversity from gloating, which involves actively causing or securing adversity through competition (2015 analysis of schadenfreude and gloating).
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That distinction matters in animal research: an observable reaction to a partner’s reward is not, by itself, evidence of pleasure in the partner’s suffering.
What animal studies have actually tested
Inequity-aversion experiments
Many relevant experiments test whether an animal responds negatively when it receives less or a lower-quality reward than a partner. These are tests of responses to unequal outcomes, not direct tests of schadenfreude.
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A 2024 meta-analysis by Ritov and Völter examined 23 studies, comprising 60,430 observations across 18 species, that used accept-or-reject tasks. The authors found no evidence of inequity aversion in those paradigms; they report that the result held across species in their dataset and in preregistered subsets, including primates, chimpanzees and capuchins (Ritov and Völter’s 2024 meta-analysis). This finding is specific to those tasks. It does not test whether animals enjoy another’s misfortune.
Dog reward studies
A 2018 review summarizes three tasks and seven peer-reviewed publications involving more than 140 dogs. It reports that dogs respond negatively when they are unrewarded while a partner is rewarded, but do not show the same response to reward-quality inequity reported in some primate studies (2018 review of inequity aversion in dogs).
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These experiments concern reward delivery and the dog’s own outcome. They do not establish that a dog feels pleasure when another dog suffers.
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Comparing emotion across species is difficult because a behavior can have several explanations. A comparative review highlights gaps between theoretical accounts of empathy and the empirical evidence, including ambiguity in behavioral indicators and challenges in drawing cross-species conclusions (Adriaense and colleagues’ 2020 review). Another review describes mixed findings and some responses interpreted as resembling inequity aversion, but those interpretations do not amount to evidence of schadenfreude (2020 comparative review of emotion).
Why a reaction is not enough to identify the feeling
Refusing a reward, showing arousal, or changing behavior when a partner receives food may reflect disappointment, frustration, attention to reward differences, social comparison or another response. To infer schadenfreude, a study would need to establish more than a reaction: the partner must experience adversity, and the subject’s response must support an inference of pleasure at that adversity rather than at some other feature of the situation.
When assessing a claim about an animal’s emotion, ask:
- What was measured: refusal, reward acceptance, helping, arousal or something else?
- Did the subject’s own reward or treatment change?
- Did the partner experience actual misfortune, or merely receive a better reward?
- Did the design separate social comparison from disappointment or contrast between rewards?
- How directly can the measure support a claim about subjective pleasure?
Without those distinctions, assigning a human emotional label to an animal’s behavior goes beyond what the experiment shows.
What can be concluded—and what cannot
The available evidence discussed here does not demonstrate animal schadenfreude, and the commonly cited inequity studies address a different question. The 2024 meta-analysis found no evidence of inequity aversion in the accept-or-reject paradigms it analyzed; the dog studies describe responses to reward outcomes. Neither result settles whether an animal can feel pleasure at another’s misfortune.
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Nor does the absence of a direct demonstration prove that the experience is impossible. A direct experimental study designed to distinguish pleasure at another’s adversity from disappointment, reward contrast and other explanations could change what can be concluded.
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