Abstract:
People higher (vs. lower) in everyday sadism tend to experience pleasure in response to others' suffering, which is presumed to be due to callousness, an appetitive motivation to harm others, and interpersonal dominance motivations; however, the present study predicts this process can also be due to the signaling of an im/moral identity. Participants (N = 604) completed indices of everyday sadism and then read about situations that involved the pain of a transgressing target and reported their experience of pleasure. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions in which they were led to believe that moral/non-sadistic people experience greater displeasure in response to someone's pain than their less moral/sadistic counterparts or that moral/non-sadistic people experience greater pleasure in response to someone's pain than their less moral/sadistic counterparts. Regardless of the signaling condition, everyday sadism related positively to pleasure, and follow-up analyses produced similar effects after accounting for effects of experimenter demand, participant gender, and agreeableness. Results therefore failed to support the signaling perspective of sadistic pleasure.
