When Prejudice Finds Permission: How Justification Unlocks Pleasure at an LGBTQIA+ Group’s Misfortune

Schadenfreude, the German term for the pleasure people feel at another person’s misfortune, is one of psychology’s most morally ambivalent emotions. Most societies prescribe compassion in the face of suffering, yet malicious delight emerges with surprising frequency in everyday life. A new experimental study from the University of Palermo, published in Frontiers in Social Psychology, examines a subtle and unsettling question: what happens when people who harbor hostility toward the LGBTQIA+ community are handed a socially acceptable excuse to enjoy an LGBTQIA+ organization’s downfall? The answer, the researchers report, is that hostility that was otherwise held in check flows freely once a justification becomes available.

The study draws on the Justification-Suppression Model of prejudice, a framework first proposed by psychologist Christian Crandall and colleague Amy Eshleman. The model’s core insight is that genuine prejudice does not simply vanish in societies that condemn discrimination. Instead, it remains latent, regulated by two opposing forces. Suppression, both conscious and automatic, inhibits prejudiced thoughts and feelings so people can conform to social norms, maintain a positive moral self-image, and avoid sanctions. But suppression is cognitively demanding and inherently unstable. What releases the pressure is justification: any ostensibly non-prejudicial factor, such as a target’s own misdeeds, that provides moral cover for negative reactions. Justification, in this account, does not create prejudice; it unlocks the expression of prejudice that already existed, allowing people to express hostility while still seeing themselves as fair and unbiased.

The Palermo team, led by Ivan Giuseppe Cammarata together with Costanza Scaffidi Abbate, Martina Macrillò, and Stefano Boca, extended this framework, originally formulated for discriminatory behavior, to a discrete emotional response. They chose schadenfreude deliberately: expressing pleasure at the misfortune of a stigmatized group such as the LGBTQIA+ community directly violates prescriptive norms of tolerance and empathy, so the emotion should be precisely the kind of reaction that anti-prejudice norms suppress and justifications release. The Italian context was theoretically ideal, the authors argue, because widespread anti-LGBTQIA+ hostility coexists with strong public condemnation of overt homonegativity. A 2024 European Union Fundamental Rights Agency survey found that 54 percent of LGBTIQ people in Italy believe prejudice against their community has increased over the previous five years, while Italy remains one of the few Western European countries without full marriage equality or comprehensive anti-discrimination legislation covering sexual orientation and gender identity.

The experiment, preregistered before data collection, recruited 353 Italian adults through snowball sampling, with 243 women, 107 men, and three participants reporting another gender. Ages ranged from 20 to 74. Each participant first completed the Gender Ideology Belief Scale, or GIBS, a validated 14-item questionnaire measuring anti-gender ideological beliefs across three dimensions: conspiratorial beliefs, such as agreement that a global movement seeks to erase distinctions between men and women; resistance to inclusive education, including the view that discussing gender issues at school confuses children; and adherence to traditional family values, such as endorsing marriage exclusively between a man and a woman. The researchers stress that GIBS captures an openly endorsed ideological stance rather than latent prejudice, and that the term gender ideology here refers to that anti-gender belief system, not to gender studies as an academic field.

Participants were then randomly assigned to read one of two fabricated news reports about the vandalization of a fictional LGBTQIA+ association called Arcobaleno Libero. In the deservingness condition, the report alleged financial misconduct: misappropriation of public funds and private donations, missing accounting documents, and provocative behavior by association members, with residents suggesting the vandalism was no surprise after everything the group had done. In the undeservingness condition, the identical act of vandalism was described as cowardly and unjustifiable, committed against a transparent, socially useful organization whose accounts had repeatedly passed audit. A manipulation check confirmed the contrast worked: participants in the deservingness condition rated the association’s misfortune as significantly more deserved, with a large effect size. Schadenfreude was then measured with four items, including how much participants felt pleased and how much they could not help but laugh when thinking about what happened, showing very high internal consistency.

The results supported the researchers’ predictions. In a moderated regression controlling for age and gender, anti-gender ideology scores significantly predicted schadenfreude, the experimental condition itself mattered, and, critically, the interaction between the two was significant. The link between anti-gender beliefs and pleasure at the organization’s misfortune was substantially stronger when a justification was available. Simple slope analyses quantified the pattern: the slope of ideology on schadenfreude was roughly three times steeper in the deservingness condition, 1.13 versus 0.39. The full model accounted for a substantial 33 percent of the variance in reported schadenfreude. Women reported lower schadenfreude than men, and men scored higher on both the ideological scale and the emotional outcome. Adding religiosity and political orientation as covariates left the focal interaction essentially unchanged, ruling out those factors as confounds.

A sensitivity analysis sharpened the intergroup character of the effect. Heterosexual participants reported both higher anti-gender ideology and higher schadenfreude than sexual-minority participants, so the researchers re-ran the core analysis within the heterosexual subsample alone, where the justification interaction remained highly significant. A three-way regression then showed that the moderating effect of justification was itself significantly stronger among heterosexual participants than among sexual-minority participants. The authors interpret this through Social Identity Theory: the moral cover provided by a justificatory context appears most necessary, and most effective, for out-group members seeking a safe avenue to express pre-existing animosity toward a marginalized target without violating egalitarian norms. The effect, in other words, is not a generalized reaction to wrongdoing but a motivated, identity-based process.

The researchers are careful about what the experiment does and does not prove. Because the two vignettes differ in more than justification availability, the deservingness version also portrays the association less favorably overall, the moderation cannot be attributed to the justification component alone. And because suppression was never directly measured, the findings are consistent with the Justification-Suppression Model rather than a demonstration of the mechanism it proposes; a purely appraisal-based account of schadenfreude, in which deserved misfortune simply elicits pleasure, predicts the same interaction. The residual ideology-schadenfreude link in the undeservingness condition also warrants caution. It may reflect the instability of suppression among people whose convictions are so strong that they do not experience them as prejudice requiring restraint, or it may reflect an experimental artifact: vandalism targeting an advocacy group can itself carry implicit justificatory connotations, blurring the contrast between conditions. The authors suggest that future designs use misfortunes entirely unrelated to social conflict, such as a natural disaster or administrative error.

Several further limitations temper the conclusions. The snowball sample skewed heavily toward women and cannot be generalized to the broader Italian population; schadenfreude was assessed only by self-report, which social desirability pressures may have driven downward, and participants were never explicitly reminded of the norms surrounding public discourse about LGBTQIA+ people, the very constraint the model treats as suppressive. The study also measured reactions to a single named association, so extending the findings to schadenfreude toward LGBTQIA+ people as a whole would be an inferential step the design does not license. Still, the theoretical contribution is clear: the justification-suppression dynamic, long studied for overt discriminatory behavior, appears to extend to discrete affective intergroup responses, and the people most susceptible are those who have integrated hostility into a coherent, openly endorsed ideological worldview. The practical implication is sobering. Prejudice-reduction efforts, the authors conclude, cannot rely solely on reinforcing egalitarian norms; they must also address the justificatory narratives that allow hostility to surface while preserving the individual’s self-image as moral and unbiased.

Subject of Research: Situational justification and the expression of schadenfreude toward an LGBTQIA+ organization as a function of anti-gender ideological beliefs

Article Title: “They got what they deserved”: situational justification and schadenfreude toward an LGBTQIA+ organization

Article References: Cammarata, I. G., Scaffidi Abbate, C., Macrillò, M., & Boca, S. (2026). “They got what they deserved”: situational justification and schadenfreude toward an LGBTQIA+ organization. Frontiers in Social Psychology, 4, Article 1927271. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsps.2026.1927271

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frsps.2026.1927271

Keywords: schadenfreude, prejudice, Justification-Suppression Model, anti-gender ideology, LGBTQIA+, intergroup emotions, Social Identity Theory, deservingness, social norms, Italy, experimental psychology, Gender Ideology Belief Scale