In 2023, an African gray parrot named Jack went viral for mimicking the coughs and wheezes of her owner’s father, who often struggled to breathe from severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
But it wasn’t just the imitation that made Jack famous; it was also that she seemed to relish the suffering of a man she purportedly hated. In the video, Jack’s owner even claimed that she had a favorite cough.
The parrot appeared to be experiencing a complex emotion that in humans is known as schadenfreude, or pleasure at seeing another’s pain. Literally translated from German as “harm joy,” it’s a feeling that might emerge when a rival coworker gets fired, or when a rude neighbor has their package stolen.
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When a cat seems a little too happy watching a human stub their toe, or a horse seems to grin at a person stepping in poop, their owners might also interpret their behavior as schadenfreude.
But can any animals really experience such a complicated emotion? Or is this a classic case of anthropomorphization?
A complex emotion
Animals probably do not experience schadenfreude, according to researchers who study animal behavior and intelligence. However, the question hasn’t received much attention in formal research. That’s partly due to limitations of animal behavior methodology, but also because the question is bound up with how we define and communicate emotion in the first place.
“The study of complex emotions is incredibly difficult when you’re talking about an animal that cannot communicate their emotions linguistically,” Zachary Silver, an assistant professor of psychology who leads the canine intelligence lab at Occidental College in Los Angeles, told Live Science. “We don’t have the ability to be as precise as we like to be in the scientific community.”
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Silver explained that researchers can look at behavior, neurological signals or hormonal activity to make an educated guess about what an animal might be feeling. A dog that has its ears back and tail tucked, for instance, is probably experiencing a negative emotion, while one wagging its tail is feeling a positive one.
But “aside from positive and negative, without words to describe the emotion, it becomes very difficult to disentangle,” Silver said. The dog could be happy, but it could also just be interested in something new. “It’s just so hard for us to say with any definitive nature that we really can know exactly what emotion is going on there,” Silver said.
Animal behavior researchers try to avoid anthropomorphizing animals (attributing human qualities to them) without evidence. When a cat or dog comforts a grieving human, for example, it could just be that the behavior was previously reinforced by rewarding the animal with treats or pets, rather than a genuine outpouring of sympathy. Similarly, Jack the parrot could have been mimicking coughs just for attention.
When cats make trouble for their owners, they may not be experiencing schadenfreude but rather just want attention.
(Image credit: Zhenny-zhenny via Shutterstock)
To truly experience a complicated emotion like schadenfreude, an animal needs to understand the emotional states of both itself and others — a concept called theory of mind.
“Dogs may have some ability to attribute mental states like emotions, thoughts, beliefs, intentions to other individuals, but this really only occurs in very select contexts and in really kind of a rudimentary way,” Silver said. Because of this, “it’s exceedingly unlikely that dogs would be able to experience schadenfreude in the way that we as humans do.”
David Stahlman, an animal behavior researcher at the University of Mary Washington, agreed that such emotional capacity in animals is unlikely. He said that animals do not seem to have the ability to recognize their own emotional states, though he noted that not all animal behavior researchers agree.
“There’s a difference between the affect, the emotional behavior, and then the recognition of the emotional behavior in oneself,” Stahlman said. If nonhuman animals were to have this capability, he suspected it would probably be found in highly social great apes, like chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus). Schadenfreude, in particular, would require animals to live in close social groups, since it requires knowledge of the individual experiencing the harm and whether it’s deserved.
In hierarchical groups, it’s possible that the suffering of one animal might benefit another and lead to something resembling happiness, Stahlman said, but he doubts this would ever qualify as true schadenfreude.
“The kind of Machiavellian stuff is a very human thing,” he said.
Nevertheless, “there is a lot of data pointing in the direction that animals do have really deep capacities for emotional intelligence,” said Kaeli Swift, an animal behavior researcher at the University of Washington and author of the Corvid Research blog.
Swift noted that studies of some corvid species have found evidence of emotional recognition, fairness and “some of the strongest evidence across the animal world” for theory of mind. However, when it comes to studying an emotion as complex and subjective as schadenfreude, she said that researchers “haven’t quite crossed that threshold.”
In the study of animal emotions, she said “we have barely started to scratch the surface.”
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