Currently social media is used daily by a lot of people it is important to know what influences people’s social media behavior. This study investigates which variables influence people’s sharing...Show moreCurrently social media is used daily by a lot of people it is important to know what influences people’s social media behavior. This study investigates which variables influence people’s sharing behavior of videos of someone’s misfortune. The hypotheses are based on the stereotype content model which categorizes people on warmth vs cold and competent vs incompetent. The hypothesis are researched by showing 4 videos to 150 participants. There were four different conditions, each unique for the quadrants of the stereotype content model. The results show that schadenfreude is positively related with sharing videos. Schadenfreude arises when people feel envious about the person in the video and when the misfortune is felt as deserved. Besides this, there is also more schadenfreude felt in the condition in which the persons are perceived as cold and competent rather than warm and competent. In the discussion implications and further research are discussed.Show less
Videos of someone who has an accident are frequently shared on social media, but why do people share these? We expected schadenfreude and video sharing to be related, based on the need to share and...Show moreVideos of someone who has an accident are frequently shared on social media, but why do people share these? We expected schadenfreude and video sharing to be related, based on the need to share and talk about it. In addition, we expected envy, deservedness, and expectancy to correlate with schadenfreude. We looked at the interaction of warmth and competence, to see in which quadrant of the Stereotype Content Model (Fiske et al., 2002) the most schadenfreude is experienced. We manipulated the conditions using the SCM, resulting in a two (warm, cold) by two (incompetent, competent) model. The results showed that schadenfreude is related to video sharing, envy, and deservedness, but not to expectancy. Besides this, an interaction of warmth and competence has been found on the variable schadenfreude, which shows that the warm incompetent group (e.g. elderly) and the cold competent group (e.g. wealthy people) evoke more schadenfreude.Show less
