Report: Schadenfreude Makes Workouts 20% More Enjoyable
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Runners who begin a workout soon after hearing of a bad thing happening to a bad person enjoy that workout 20% more than usual, according to a new study with broad implications in the fields of exercise science and karmic retribution.
“We expected to find some effect, but wow,” said George Alan O'Dowd, Ph.D., lead author of the study and director of research at the Chameleon Karma Institute in London. “A 20% increase is really something.”
The research is believed to be the first ever to examine the role of schadenfreude, a German word meaning “enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others,” in athletics. To conduct the study, O'Dowd and his team randomly assigned 54 healthy, experienced runners to one of three groups—red, gold, and green. The red group performed a 45-minute treadmill run while technicians recorded their heart rate, pace, and “time spent grinning,” or T.S.G. The gold group went through the same routine, with one twist: Moments before stepping on the treadmill, they were told that a relentlessly obnoxious public figure had just gotten what was coming to him, in a spectacularly fitting way. Finally, the green group got the same treatment as the gold group, except that they heard the schadenfreude-inducing news halfway through their run.
The gold group enjoyed their runs significantly more than the red group; the green group saw their enjoyment spike only in the second half of their workout.
O'Dowd acknowledged that reveling in the misfortune of others may appear unseemly, but said that he and his team were merely reporting their findings, not endorsing them.
“It is what it is,” he said.
The results of the study appear in this week’s issue of the New England Journal of Comeuppance.
