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

1 Introduction

Schadenfreude, a German term referring to the pleasure experienced in response to another person's misfortune, represents a complex and, in some respects, morally ambivalent human emotion (Heider, 1958; Smith et al., 1996; van Dijk and Ouwerkerk, 2014). Although social and moral norms typically encourage empathic concern and prosocial responses (Batson, 2011), schadenfreude nevertheless emerges with surprising frequency in everyday life. This tension between normative prescriptions for compassion and the actual experience of malicious pleasure renders schadenfreude a compelling object of psychological investigation. It challenges idealized assumptions about human prosociality and sheds light on the situational and relational conditions under which empathy may collapse, giving way to a more self-focused, competitive, or even antagonistic orientation toward others (Leach et al., 2003).

Over the past decades, research has moved beyond defining schadenfreude as a mere moral failure and has begun to disentangle its cognitive, affective, and socio-relational antecedents. Early work emphasized the role of target characteristics, such as deservingness, moral violations, or prior wrongdoing, in eliciting pleasure at another's misfortune (Feather and Sherman, 2002; van Dijk et al., 2005). However, recent theoretical advancements highlight that schadenfreude is shaped at least as strongly by characteristics of the observer and, critically, by the relational dynamics between observer and target (Cikara et al., 2011b). Rivalry, status competition, and social comparison processes constitute important triggers, with individuals often experiencing schadenfreude when the misfortune of others alleviates feelings of inferiority, envy, or threat (Smith et al., 1996; van de Ven et al., 2015).

Moreover, research in intergroup emotions has shown that schadenfreude plays a substantial role in competitive or conflict-laden intergroup contexts, where group-based identity and shared fate perceptions deeply structure emotional responses (Cikara and Fiske, 2013). In such settings, schadenfreude may function as an affective signal of group-based favoritism or antagonism, reflecting motivated responses that reinforce in-group cohesion and status maintenance. Taken together, these findings underscore that schadenfreude should not be viewed merely as an anomalous or socially undesirable reaction. Rather, it emerges as a psychologically meaningful response rooted in fundamental social-cognitive processes: comparison, identity, justice appraisal, and relational dynamics. Understanding schadenfreude thus provides unique insight into how individuals navigate social hierarchies, interpersonal tensions, and moral judgments, especially in situations where another's loss is perceived as symbolically, competitively, or emotionally relevant to the self.

1.1 Schadenfreude in an intergroup dynamics perspective

Intergroup dynamics constitute one of the most powerful determinants of schadenfreude (Tajfel and Turner, 1979; Cikara and Fiske, 2013). According to Social Identity Theory (SIT), individuals derive a substantial portion of their self-esteem from their memberships in social groups, which serve as important sources of meaning, belonging, and value (Tajfel and Turner, 1979). Consequently, the outcomes of these groups, both successes and failures, are psychologically internalized. In-group success is experienced as self-enhancing, whereas the misfortune or failure of a relevant out-group can produce a sense of relative gain. Within this framework, schadenfreude in the intergroup context reflects more than simple emotional reactivity; it is an affective manifestation of identity-based competition and motivated intergroup evaluation (Hornsey, 2008; Brewer, 1999).

Research has shown that the misfortune of an out-group becomes particularly schadenfreude-eliciting when the out-group is perceived as a competitor, status rival, or ideological threat (Cikara et al., 2011a). In such cases, out-group failure is not perceived as a neutral event but as one that enhances the in-group's relative position, reinforcing social identity and bolstering collective self-esteem (Leach et al., 2014). This dynamic helps explain why schadenfreude is especially pronounced in contexts characterized by zero-sum beliefs, resource competition, or intergroup hostility (Esses et al., 1998). The emotional gratification arising from the out-group's misfortune thus serves a symbolic function: it reaffirms in-group superiority and stabilizes the perceived intergroup hierarchy. Moreover, empirical work within the intergroup emotions' tradition demonstrates that schadenfreude can emerge automatically and even in the absence of direct personal involvement, provided that group boundaries are salient (Mackie et al., 2000). This suggests that schadenfreude is closely tied to collective identities and can operate as an emotion that strengthens in-group cohesion by reinforcing a shared sense of “us vs. them.” In this sense, the out-group's misfortune becomes not merely a negative event befalling another group, but a psychologically meaningful victory for one's own group, resonating with collective goals, values, and status motivations. Yet this same intergroup logic that fuels schadenfreude also renders it a potentially discreditable reaction: because it can readily be read as a symptom of prejudice against the out-group, its overt expression is not free-standing but is itself governed by the social and moral norms that regulate prejudice more broadly, a regulatory dynamic we turn to next.

1.2 Social norms and prejudice suppression

Norms enter the study of schadenfreude in two distinct ways, and it is important to keep them apart. A first, well-established line of work treats norms as an antecedent of the emotion: individuals who strongly endorse the norms of their group tend to respond with pleasure, rather than compassion, to the misfortunes of those who violate them, so that the target's own deviance supplies the appraisal of deservingness from which schadenfreude arises (Feather and Sherman, 2002; van Dijk et al., 2005; Kato and Izumi, 2025). Kato and Izumi (2025) also draw attention to the reflexive character of this dynamic: people who openly rejoice at another's misfortune are themselves liable to be perceived as deviating from the norm, so that norms simultaneously license and stigmatize the emotion. A second, comparatively less developed line of work—the one pursued here—treats norms not as what elicits schadenfreude but as what constrains its expression once elicited: irrespective of whether the target has transgressed, observers who take pleasure in the misfortune of a stigmatized group must reckon with prescriptive norms that condemn such pleasure. The present study is concerned with this second, regulatory role of norms.

Although group-based schadenfreude is a well-documented psychological reaction (Leach et al., 2003; Cikara and Fiske, 2013), its expression in contemporary societies is constrained by the same powerful social and moral norms that regulate the broader expression of prejudice and discrimination (Crandall and Eshleman, 2003; Crandall et al., 2002). Expressing pleasure at the misfortune of a stigmatized or disadvantaged group, such as the LGBTQIA+ community, ethnic minorities, or other historically marginalized groups, is socially unacceptable and risks eliciting strong social sanctions. Such displays directly conflict with prescriptive norms that emphasize tolerance, egalitarianism, and inclusion (Crandall et al., 2002; Leach et al., 2003). Crucially, individuals are motivated not only to avoid external sanctions but also to maintain a positive self-image as moral, egalitarian, and non-prejudiced (Plant and Devine, 1998). This creates a psychological conflict: although individuals may harbor implicit negative attitudes or affective biases toward certain out-groups, these biases cannot be openly acknowledged or expressed without threatening their moral self-concept (Monteith, 1993; Devine and Monteith, 1999).

Monteith's (1993) model of prejudice-related discrepancy indicates that when individuals recognize a divergence between their internalized egalitarian standards and their prejudiced reactions, they experience negative self-directed emotions (e.g., guilt, compunction), which in turn motivate active self-regulation and suppression of prejudiced expressions. Although Monteith's original model was developed with reference to behavioral and evaluative expressions of prejudice, we extend its logic here to affective reactions such as schadenfreude, on the assumption that an emotional response so readily read as evidence of underlying bias should be subject to the same self-regulatory pressures.

As a result, individuals are often not free to experience or express schadenfreude in an unfiltered way. Even when intergroup animosity might otherwise elicit enjoyment at an out-group's misfortune, strong social norms and internalized moral standards impose pressure to suppress, conceal, or cognitively reframe such reactions (Crandall et al., 2002). This suppression can occur both at the level of public expression, to avoid appearing prejudiced to others, and at the level of internal emotional experience, where individuals may actively inhibit or deny feelings that conflict with their egalitarian values (Devine and Monteith, 1999). Ultimately, the clash between underlying prejudice and anti-prejudice norms makes group-based schadenfreude a particularly sensitive and psychologically regulated emotion. Rather than simply emerging from intergroup comparison processes, its expression is filtered through complex layers of social desirability, moral identity maintenance, and self-regulatory effort (Crandall and Eshleman, 2003; Leach et al., 2003). This tension raises the question that the present study addresses directly: when, and why, do individuals actively suppress or disguise schadenfreude rather than express it?

1.3 The justification-suppression model

How is this conflict between underlying prejudice and strong anti-prejudice norms resolved? The Justification-Suppression Model (JSM) of prejudice (Crandall and Eshleman, 2003) provides a compelling and widely influential framework for understanding how individuals navigate this tension. According to the JSM, prejudice does not disappear simply because individuals endorse egalitarian values or live in a society that condemns overt discrimination. Rather, genuine prejudice remains latent, often operating outside conscious awareness, and persists as a potential motivator of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. What changes is individuals' willingness and ability to express these prejudices openly.

The JSM argues that the overt expression of prejudice is regulated by two opposing forces: suppression and justification. Suppression involves efforts, both conscious and automatic, to inhibit prejudiced thoughts or emotions in order to conform to social norms, maintain a positive moral identity, or avoid social sanctions (Monteith, 1993; Devine and Monteith, 1999). However, suppression alone is cognitively demanding and inherently unstable, making it unlikely that prejudiced impulses will remain permanently inaccessible (Richeson and Shelton, 2003). Instead, individuals often rely on justifications to release these impulses safely. Justification refers to any external, ostensibly non-prejudicial factor that can legitimate negative reactions toward a target. These justifications provide a form of moral cover or psychological license, allowing individuals to express negative emotions or behaviors, including schadenfreude, without appearing biased (Tetlock et al., 2000).

For example, if a member of a stigmatized group engages in a moral transgression, violates social norms, or is perceived as deserving of negative outcomes, observers can attribute their schadenfreude to the transgression rather than to the group identity. In this sense, justification does not cause schadenfreude; rather, it enables the expression of schadenfreude that pre-existing prejudice already inclines. Without a justification, individuals are constrained by anti-prejudice norms and may suppress or deny their emotional reactions. With a justification, they can release their schadenfreude while maintaining an image of themselves as fair, moral, and unbiased. This mechanism helps explain why schadenfreude is often more intense or more readily expressed when the out-group target can be construed as morally blameworthy, threatening, or norm-violating (Gollwitzer and Denzler, 2009).

Ultimately, the JSM illuminates how intergroup emotions, such as schadenfreude, are shaped not only by the underlying level of prejudice but also by the availability of contextual cues that legitimize negative expressions. In doing so, it highlights the dynamic interaction between individual motives, moral identity concerns, and situational affordances that together determine when prejudice remains suppressed and when it finds an opportunity to surface.

Despite its theoretical richness, the JSM was originally formulated with reference to behavioral expressions of prejudice (Crandall and Eshleman, 2003). Subsequent work has extended suppression-based frameworks to affective and emotional responses, such as anger and guilt (Solak et al., 2021), but schadenfreude specifically remains understudied within a justification-suppression framework. No study to date has directly tested whether justification availability moderates schadenfreude as a function of pre-existing prejudice. The present study addresses this gap.

1.4 The present study

The present study applies the Justification-Suppression Model (JSM) to the domain of schadenfreude directed toward an LGBTQIA+ organization. The LGBTQIA+ community was selected as the target group for several converging reasons. First, it remains one of the most frequent targets of ideological hostility in contemporary European societies: according to the EU Fundamental Rights Agency (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2024), 54% of LGBTIQ people in Italy report that prejudice and intolerance toward their community has increased in the 5 years prior to the survey, and only 4% believe the Italian government effectively combats this discrimination. Second, and crucially for the JSM framework, the LGBTQIA+ community simultaneously elicits strong normative protection: open expressions of homonegativity are socially sanctioned and publicly condemned. This combination, widespread hostility coexisting with strong anti-prejudice norms, makes this group theoretically ideal for testing a suppression-and-justification dynamic. Finally, the Italian context offers particular relevance, given the documented resistance to LGBTQIA+ inclusion at both political and institutional levels (Garbagnoli, 2016; Feo, 2022; Salvati et al., 2023, 2024; Panerati et al., 2026).

Building on these premises, the present study sought to examine whether schadenfreude toward an LGBTQIA+ organization emerges selectively among individuals harboring pre-existing animosity. To operationalize this animosity, we relied on the Gender Ideology Belief Scale (GIBS; Cammarata et al., 2026), a multidimensional measure assessing negative attitudes toward gender ideology. The GIBS captures a second-order ideological construct organized around three dimensions: conspiratorial beliefs, resistance to inclusive education, and adherence to traditional family values. Importantly, GIBS scores correlated strongly with modern and overt homonegativity in its validation sample, supporting its use as an explicit-belief correlate of anti-LGBTQIA+ animosity; unlike schadenfreude, GIBS is not conceived here as a measure of latent or suppressed prejudice, but as an openly endorsed ideological stance whose behavioral and affective consequences may nonetheless be regulated by anti-prejudice norms.

It should be noted that the term gender ideology, as operationalized here, does not refer to gender studies as an academic field, but to an anti-gender ideological stance that frames gender diversity as a threat to cultural and family values (Corredor, 2019; Kuhar and Paternotte, 2017), that is, the form of structured, openly endorsed ideological opposition whose expression the JSM would expect to be regulated by anti-prejudice norms.

To this end, participants were randomly assigned to one of two experimental conditions manipulating the availability of a situational justification for an LGBTQIA+ association's misfortune; the full experimental procedure and materials are detailed in Section 2.3.

The acronym “LGBTQIA+” functions as an overarching umbrella term encompassing a diverse spectrum of sexual orientations, gender identities, gender expressions, and sex characteristics. These are associated with specific manifestations of stigma; notably, homonegativity, binegativity, transnegativity, cisnormativity, monosexism, and prejudice against intersex individuals constitute interrelated yet fundamentally distinct constructs (Bochicchio et al., 2024; Monaco, 2021; Rosati et al., 2025).

The current investigation explores responses to a vignette portraying an LGBTQIA+ organization. Importantly, this study does not disaggregate participant reactions toward specific constituent subgroups, primarily because the GIBS was predominantly validated against indices of homonegativity. Consequently, we confine our theoretical claims to generalized anti-LGBTQIA+ ideological animosity, as measured by the GIBS. We deliberately refrain from extrapolating our findings to subgroup-specific phenomena, which our methodological design was not structured to assess. The dependent measure likewise refers to a single named association rather than to the LGBTQIA+ community, and we confine our conclusions accordingly.

Italy offers a context in which institutional resistance to LGBTQIA+ inclusion coexists with widely endorsed, but unevenly distributed, anti-prejudice norms. At the legal and institutional level, 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 2021 failure of the Ddl Zan bill against homo-transphobia is a widely cited example of this institutional resistance (Feo, 2022). At the political level, the past decade has seen organized anti-gender mobilization opposing inclusive education, gender studies, and family-law reform, mirroring broader Southern European trends (Garbagnoli, 2016; Corredor, 2019). At the level of social attitudes and everyday experience, survey and qualitative evidence documents persistent homonegativity and heterosexist attitudes (Callahan and Loscocco, 2023; Bochicchio et al., 2024; Scandurra et al., 2021), together with population-specific experiences of stigma: bisexual individuals report distinct patterns of invisibility and psychological strain (Monaco, 2021; Fantacci et al., 2023), transgender people—including transgender refugees—report compounded, intersectional forms of marginalization (Rosati et al., 2021), and non-binary people report minority stress tied to the gendering of everyday public space (Rosati et al., 2025). Gay parents likewise report distinctive institutional and logistical obstacles to family formation in the Italian context (Monaco and Nothdurfter, 2021), and visibility and access to LGBT-friendly urban space vary considerably across Italian and European cities (Monaco and Corbisiero, 2022). Recent work also documents perceived stigma and its relation to civic engagement among sexual and gender minority communities in the current Italian political climate (Rosati et al., 2026). Taken together, these three levels indicate that institutional resistance and normative constraints on overt prejudice can coexist in the same national context without one implying the strength of the other; we therefore treat the anti-prejudice suppression norm invoked by the JSM as a working assumption to be tested, rather than as an established fact of the Italian context.

Grounded in the core principles of the JSM, we formulated two central hypotheses concerning the interaction between experimental condition and pre-existing attitudes:

H1. Consistent with the JSM, we predict a significant GIBS × Condition interaction on schadenfreude, such that the positive association between GIBS scores and schadenfreude will be significantly stronger in the deservingness condition, where a situational justification is available, than in the undeservingness condition, where it is not.

H2. The simple slope of GIBS on schadenfreude is expected to be attenuated in the undeservingness condition. In the absence of a justification, anti-prejudice norms are predicted to suppress the expression of prejudice-based schadenfreude even among individuals high in GIBS, consistent with the suppression mechanism proposed by the JSM.

Together, these predictions specify the pattern of results the JSM implies for intergroup emotional reactions; the design tests that pattern rather than the process the model invokes to explain it.

2 Method

2.1 Participants and design

Sample size was previously calculated, estimating a sample of 262 participants as adequate for a design with 80% power and alpha = 0.05 to detect a small effect size between the variables (f 2 = 0.03). The study was preregistered on OSF (https://osf.io/rqb5a) prior to data collection, and ethical approval was obtained from the Bioethics Committee of University of Palermo (Protocol No. 22775-2026).

Participants were 353 (243 females, 107 males, 3 other). Age ranged from 20 to 74 years (M = 34.16, SD = 12.87).

There were two experimental groups to which participants were randomly assigned: deservingness condition (n = 167, 113 females, 52 males, 2 other, age M = 35.53, SD = 13.67) and undeservingness condition (n = 186, 130 females, 55 males, 1 other, age M = 32.94, SD = 12.00). The two groups are equivalent for both gender [χ²(2, N = 353) = 0.59, p = 0.746] and age [Welch t(332.38) = −1.88, p = 0.061]. Because only three participants selected the “Other” gender option, some expected cell frequencies were below five and the chi-square approximation should be interpreted with caution.

Sexual orientation was assessed with a single item ranging from 1 (exclusively heterosexual) to 5 (exclusively homosexual), with an additional free-text option. Of the 353 participants, 241 (68.3%) identified as exclusively heterosexual and 112 (31.7%) reported some degree of same-sex attraction or identification (codes 2–5 or free-text response). See Table 1.

Table 1. Participant characteristics by experimental condition.

M, mean, SD, standard deviation, Mdn, median. ^*The “sexual minority” category aggregates participants who did not identify as heterosexual.

Gender was assessed with a single item offering the response options “Female,” “Male,” and “Other” (with an optional free-text field). Because only 3 participants selected “Other,” this subgroup was too small to be treated as a separate category in analyses requiring a dichotomous gender code and was excluded from those analyses (analytic N = 350). Accordingly, the correlations reported in Table 2 and the regression models reported in Tables 3, 4 are based on N = 350, whereas these participants remain included in the full descriptive sample (N = 353) on which the participant characteristics reported in Table 1 and the means and standard deviations reported in Table 2 are based. We acknowledge that a binary/ternary forced-choice item is a limited way to measure gender identity and recommend that future studies use a more inclusive, multi-category or open item.

Table 2. Descriptive statistics and correlations.

Means and standard deviations are based on the full sample (N = 353); correlations are based on the analytic sample (N = 350), which excludes the three participants who selected “other” for gender. Values are Pearson's r, except for correlations involving gender, which are point-biserial correlations. Gender was coded 0 = men and 1 = women. The p-values for the correlations among GIBS, schadenfreude and age are Holm-corrected for multiple testing; those involving gender are uncorrected. M = mean; SD = standard deviation. ^*p < 0.05. ^**p < 0.01. ^***p < 0.001.

Table 3. Moderated regression analysis predicting schadenfreude.

N = 350. B = unstandardized coefficient; β = standardized coefficient. GIBS was mean-centered and age was entered uncentered. Gender was coded as −1 = men and 1 = women. Experimental condition was entered as a factor with treatment contrasts (undeservingness = reference category, deservingness = 1); the GIBS coefficient therefore corresponds to the simple slope of GIBS in the undeservingness condition and the GIBS × condition coefficient to the difference between the two simple slopes. R² = 0.33, F_{(5, 344)} = 33.85, p < 0.001. Standardized coefficients were obtained by refitting the model on standardized variables, including the dummy and product terms; for those terms β and its associated test are not equivalent to the corresponding unstandardized test and should be interpreted with caution.

Table 4. Three-way moderated regression analysis predicting schadenfreude.

N = 350. B = unstandardized coefficient; β = standardized coefficient. Gender was coded as −1 = men and 1 = women. Experimental condition was entered as a factor with treatment contrasts (undeservingness = reference category, deservingness = 1). Sexual orientation was dummy coded with heterosexual as the reference group (1 = Sexual minority). Lower-order terms are therefore conditional on the reference categories. R² = 0.35, F_{(9, 340)} = 20.73, p < 0.001. Standardized coefficients were obtained by refitting the model on standardized variables, including the dummy and product terms; for those terms β may differ in sign from B and its associated test is not equivalent to the corresponding unstandardized test, so β should be interpreted with caution.

The study was conducted in accordance with the ethical principles outlined in the Declaration of Helsinki.

2.2 Procedure

Data were collected between November and December 2025 via an online survey link. Recruitment used snowball sampling: the survey was initially shared through the authors' personal and academic networks and through social media, and participants were invited to share it further with acquaintances, with the aim of reaching the general Italian adult population rather than a specific community. The only inclusion criterion was being 18 years of age or older; no incentives were offered and no recruitment quotas were set a priori. According to the platform's access statistics the survey link was opened 575 times, and 569 records were generated in the survey database; of these, 353 respondents completed the questionnaire in full and constitute the analyzed sample, giving an attrition rate of 38.0% (216/569) between the generation of a record and completion. Informed consent was presented before any study content and was obtained from every participant included in the analyzed sample. The anonymous, single-session online format did not allow attrition to be further decomposed by the specific point of abandonment. No attention-check items were included in the survey, so no exclusions on this basis apply. After completing the GIBS questionnaire, participants were randomly assigned to one of the experimental conditions. Participants reading a text containing the experimental manipulation. Following the text, we administered an item to ensure the effectiveness of the experimental manipulation. The assessment of schadenfreude followed. Finally, we collected socio-demographic information. Then participants were thanked and debriefed. All the materials were provided in Italian.

2.3 Materials

2.3.1 Gender ideology belief scale

GIBS was measured using 14 items of the GIBS scale by Cammarata et al. (2026) (for example “I consider marriage between a man and a woman to be an important value for our society.”). Items were answered on five-point scales ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). Cronbach's α for the total scale was.85. Reliability was also acceptable to good for each of the three subscales: conspiratorial beliefs (5 items; e.g., “There is a global movement aiming to eliminate the natural distinctions between men and women”; α = 0.75), traditional family values (4 items; e.g., “I consider marriage between a man and a woman to be an important value for our society”; α = 0.81), and resistance to inclusive education (5 items; e.g., “Discussing gender-related issues at school risks causing confusion among children”; α = 0.85).

2.3.2 Experimental manipulation

The experimental manipulation was implemented through two versions of a vignette, each describing the vandalization of the LGBTQIA+ association “Arcobaleno Libero.” Participants were instructed to read the story carefully and imagine the situation as vividly as possible.

Deservingness group. In the experimental condition the vignette portrayed the association in a negative light. It described alleged financial misconduct, the misuse of public and private funds, the disappearance of accounting documents, and provocative behavior by some members. In this version, the vandalism was implicitly framed as a reaction to the association's own conduct. The vignette, presented in the form of a news report, read as follows:

*“Arcobaleno Libero” in Chaos: Headquarters Vandalized Following Financial* Scandal and Provocative Behavior**

MILAN – The headquarters of the LGBTQIA+ association “Arcobaleno Libero” was heavily vandalized during the night between Saturday and Sunday: doors torn off, materials destroyed, and offensive graffiti forced an immediate halt to all activities.

The incident follows a scandal that erupted in the preceding days: internal investigations and reports from members had revealed that public funds and private donations had been misappropriated by members of the board. Missing accounting documents and unjustified expenses had already attracted the attention of local authorities and the media.

In the days that followed, the association published social media posts downplaying the facts, with phrases such as: “Everyone is overreacting – the criticism is just a misunderstanding.” During a public meeting, some members interrupted citizens and council members, calling them “backward” and “enemies of civil rights.”

Some residents commented: “After everything they did, it was no surprise that someone would react this way.” Authorities are investigating the vandalism, but many observers point out that the group's arrogant conduct contributed to creating the climate that preceded the act.

Undeservingness group. The same event was described as an unjustified act of vandalism against an association presented as transparent, socially useful, and never involved in financial irregularities. The attack was explicitly condemned, and no blame was assigned to the organization. The vignette read as follows:

*“Arcobaleno Libero” Headquarters Vandalized: Outrage Over Unjustified* Attack**

MILAN – A serious act of vandalism has struck the headquarters of the LGBTQIA+ association “Arcobaleno Libero”: doors torn off, documents destroyed, and offensive graffiti have forced an immediate halt to all activities.

The association, active for over ten years, promotes educational initiatives and support services for young people and families, always operating with transparency and integrity. No investigation or report has ever found any misappropriation of funds or financial mismanagement: the accounts have been audited multiple times and have consistently been found to be in order.

During the night, unknown individuals devastated the premises, leaving offensive graffiti and destroyed materials. Volunteers and citizens expressed shock and disbelief at the act, which local authorities also described as “cowardly and unjustifiable.”

The mayor stated: “Those who work with dedication and respect do not deserve acts of vandalism like these.” Law enforcement is investigating to identify those responsible, while the local community is rallying to support the volunteers and repair the damage.

Both vignettes were administered in Italian and are reproduced above in English translation; the Italian originals, together with all other experimental materials, are available at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/EZQS3.

2.3.3 Manipulation check

Perceived deservingness. One item was used to assess whether the vignette was perceived as deserved: “I believe that the association got what it deserved” (1 = completely disagree, 5 = completely agree). We conducted an independent-samples t-test to verify whether the vignette in the deservingness condition was perceived as more deserved than the vignette in the undeservingness condition. The results showed a significant difference between the two groups: participants in the deservingness condition perceived the association's misfortune as more deserved (M = 2.14, SD = 1.43) than participants in the undeservingness condition (M = 1.16, SD = 0.52) [t(204.38) = −8.39, p < 0.001, d = 0.93].

2.3.4 Schadenfreude

To measure schadenfreude, we used four items adapted from Travaglino et al. (2026). Participants indicated the extent to which they experienced pleasure at the misfortune described in the vignette on seven-point scales ranging from −3 (strongly disagree) to 3 (strongly agree), (for example, “When I think about what happened to the association: I can't help but laugh” or “When I think about what happened to the association: I'm pleased”). For the analyses, responses were coded from 1 (−3) to 7 (+3); the descriptive statistics reported in Table 2 and the coefficients reported in Tables 3, 4 refer to this coding. Cronbach's α was 0.94. The referent of every item is the target association described in the vignette, not the LGBTQIA+ community in general.

3 Results

The present study examined whether schadenfreude toward the target LGBTQIA+ organization was associated with pre-existing anti-LGBTQIA+ attitudes and whether this association was moderated by the availability of a justificatory context. Descriptive statistics and correlations among GIBS, schadenfreude, age, and gender are reported in Table 2. GIBS was positively associated with schadenfreude, suggesting that stronger endorsement of anti-LGBTQIA+ ideological beliefs was accompanied by greater pleasure in response to the organization's misfortune. Both GIBS and schadenfreude exhibited a modest positive correlation with age. Finally, the associations with gender, evaluated as point-biserial correlations, indicated higher GIBS scores and higher schadenfreude among men than among women.

To examine whether the association between GIBS and schadenfreude varied as a function of experimental condition, a moderated multiple regression analysis was conducted following the procedure outlined by Aiken and West (1991).

In the first moderated regression analysis, schadenfreude was entered as the dependent variable. GIBS was modeled as a centered predictor, while experimental condition was entered as a factor with treatment contrasts (undeservingness = reference category, deservingness = 1). Under this parameterization the coefficient for GIBS represents the simple slope of GIBS within the undeservingness condition, the coefficient for condition represents the mean difference in schadenfreude between the two conditions, and the interaction coefficient represents the difference between the two simple slopes. In addition, age and gender were included as covariates to control for potential demographic differences. Gender was effect-coded (−1 = men, +1 = women), so that its coefficient represents half of the estimated difference between men and women; the point-biserial correlations reported in Table 2 instead use dummy coding (0 = men, 1 = women).

As shown in Table 3, GIBS significantly predicted schadenfreude [B = 0.39, SE = 0.13, t(344) = 3.00, p = 0.003], indicating that, within the undeservingness condition, stronger anti-gender beliefs were associated with greater schadenfreude. The effect of experimental condition was also significant [B = 0.89, SE = 0.13, t(344) = 7.04, p < 0.001], as participants in the deservingness condition reported higher levels of schadenfreude than those in the undeservingness condition. The interaction between GIBS and experimental condition was significant [B = 0.75, SE = 0.18, t(344) = 4.16, p < 0.001], indicating that the association between anti-gender beliefs and schadenfreude was stronger when a justificatory context was available. Among the covariates, gender was significant, with women reporting lower schadenfreude than men [B = −0.21, SE = 0.07, t(344) = −2.95, p = 0.003], whereas age was not significant [B = 0.004, SE = 0.005, t(344) = 0.81, p = 0.420]. The model accounted for a substantial proportion of variance in schadenfreude, R² = 0.33, F_{(5, 344)} = 33.85, p < 0.001.

Figure 1 illustrates that the association between GIBS and schadenfreude was stronger in the deservingness condition than in the undeservingness condition. Simple slope analyses confirmed this pattern: GIBS significantly predicted schadenfreude in both experimental conditions, but the association was stronger in the deservingness condition [simple slope = 1.13, SE = 0.13, t(344) = 8.87, p < 0.001] than in the undeservingness condition [simple slope = 0.39, SE = 0.13, t(344) = 3.00, p = 0.003].

To ensure the robustness of the core justification-suppression pattern and to address potential confounding effects related to in-group/out-group dynamics, a sensitivity analysis was conducted incorporating participants' sexual orientation.

First, within the analytic sample (N = 350), independent samples t-tests revealed that heterosexual (n = 240) and sexual-minority (n = 110) participants differed significantly on both focal variables. Heterosexual participants reported higher GIBS scores (M = 2.08) than sexual-minority participants (M = 1.82), Welch t(289.85) = 3.62, p < 0.001. Similarly, heterosexual participants reported significantly higher levels of schadenfreude (M = 1.91) compared to their sexual-minority counterparts (M = 1.47), Welch t(309.27) = 3.14, p = 0.002.

Given these baseline differences we re-estimated the focal regression model exclusively within the heterosexual subsample (n = 240). This approach provided the theoretically cleanest test of the out-group-based emotional response. Within this subsample, the GIBS × Condition interaction remained highly significant and conceptually robust (B = 0.89, SE = 0.22, t(234) = 4.10, p < 0.001).

Finally, to explicitly test whether participant sexual orientation moderated the observed dynamic, a three-way moderated multiple regression analysis (GIBS × Condition × Sexual Orientation) was conducted on the full analytic sample (N = 350). As detailed in Table 4, the three-way interaction was significant [B = −1.34, SE = 0.49, t(340) = −2.75, p = 0.006]. This indicates that the moderating effect of the experimental condition on the GIBS-schadenfreude relationship differs reliably based on sexual orientation. Specifically, the justification-suppression pattern (the GIBS × Condition interaction) was significantly stronger among heterosexual participants than among sexual-minority participants. The main effect of Condition also varied between the two groups (B = −0.69, SE = 0.29, t(340) = −2.41, p = 0.017).

To further probe the robustness of the focal justification-suppression pattern, religiosity and political orientation (1–9, centered) were added as covariates to the original moderated regression model reported in Table 3. Including these covariates did not significantly improve model fit, F_{(4, 340)} = 1.36, p = 0.249, and none of the added covariates reached significance (Catholic vs. Atheist: B = 0.20, SE = 0.16, p = 0.215; Christian-other vs. Atheist: B = 0.06, SE = 0.17, p = 0.707; Other religion vs. Atheist: B = −0.23, SE = 0.37, p = 0.536; political orientation: B = 0.06, SE = 0.05, p = 0.196). The focal GIBS × Condition interaction remained essentially unchanged in size and significance after including these covariates [B = 0.73, SE = 0.18, t(340) = 4.08, p < 0.001], indicating that the reported justification-suppression effect is not confounded by religiosity or political orientation.

4 Discussion

The present study sought to test the applicability of the Justification-Suppression Model (JSM; Crandall and Eshleman, 2003) to intergroup schadenfreude directed toward an LGBTQIA+ organization. To our knowledge, this represents one of the first experimental attempts to apply the JSM framework to a discrete affective intergroup response, extending a theoretical tradition that has predominantly focused on behavioral expressions of prejudice. By combining an experimental justification manipulation with a continuous measure of ideological animosity, the present design allowed an experimental test of the pattern the JSM predicts: that situational justifications moderate the expression of prejudice-based emotions as a function of pre-existing attitudinal dispositions.

Results revealed a significant interaction between experimental condition and GIBS scores on schadenfreude. Participants high in anti-LGBTQIA+ ideological attitudes reported significantly greater schadenfreude in the deservingness condition, where the target association's prior wrongdoing provided a normatively acceptable attribution, compared to the undeservingness condition, where no such information was available. This pattern is what the JSM predicts: on that account justification does not create prejudice but unlocks its affective expression by providing moral cover that neutralizes the inhibitory pressure of anti-prejudice norms. The interaction is therefore consistent with an extension of the JSM to schadenfreude as an intergroup emotion, though it does not by itself establish the mechanism the model proposes.

The simple slope of GIBS on schadenfreude, while attenuated, remained statistically significant in the undeservingness condition. This finding requires careful interpretation. It does not necessarily disconfirm the JSM; rather, within the terms of the model, it speaks to the inherent limits and instability of prejudice suppression as a self-regulatory process. As Richeson and Shelton (2003) demonstrated, the active inhibition of prejudiced responses is cognitively costly and cannot be sustained indefinitely, particularly under conditions of high attitudinal strength. For individuals with particularly strong and internalized anti-LGBTQIA+ convictions, opposition to gender diversity may not be subjectively experienced as a morally problematic stance requiring active inhibition. When prejudice is not recognized as such, or when it is experienced as a legitimate ideological position rather than a social bias, the motivational foundation for suppression is undermined, allowing affective responses to surface even in the absence of explicit justification (Monteith, 1993; Plant and Devine, 1998). This interpretation is consistent with research on aversive racism (Dovidio and Gaertner, 2004), which similarly documents that prejudice can manifest in subtle or indirect ways when individuals lack the self-awareness or motivation to suppress it.

An alternative, methodological explanation for the residual slope in the undeservingness condition should also be considered. The vandalism scenario employed in the present study, while designed to convey a neutral misfortune, may have inadvertently carried implicit justificatory connotations. The act of vandalism targeting an association could, for some participants, signal broader social conflict or opposition to the group's activities, thereby partially functioning as an informal justification even in the absence of explicit wrongdoing information. This interpretation suggests that the distinction between conditions may have been partially attenuated by the scenario's inherent features, reducing the experimental contrast between deservingness and undeservingness conditions. Future research should address this limitation through more carefully controlled vignette designs, in which the target group's misfortune is entirely unambiguous, unrelated to any form of social conflict, and devoid of any potentially legitimizing connotation, for instance, a natural disaster or an administrative error affecting the association.

Two features of the design bound what can be concluded from the interaction. First, the two vignettes differ in more than the availability of a justification: the deservingness version also portrays the association less favorably overall and frames the vandalism differently through the reactions of residents and local authorities, so the moderation cannot be attributed to the justification component alone. Second, suppression was never observed: the design measured reported schadenfreude and not the distance between what participants felt and what they were willing to report, and a purely appraisal-theoretic account (Feather and Sherman, 2002; van Dijk et al., 2005) predicts the same interaction. The present findings are therefore consistent with the Justification-Suppression Model rather than a demonstration of the mechanism it proposes. What the experiment does establish is not in question: random assignment guarantees that the difference between the two simple slopes was produced by the manipulation and not by pre-existing differences between the groups, and a slope roughly three times steeper when a justification is available (1.13 against 0.39) is a fact any competing account has to accommodate.

The present findings contribute to the intergroup emotions' literature in several important ways. First, they extend the empirical reach of the JSM beyond behavioral expressions of prejudice to the domain of discrete affective responses. Schadenfreude occupies a theoretically unique position in this regard: it is an emotion that is both highly socially sensitive, its expression risks violating prescriptive norms of empathy and compassion, and inherently contingent on the relational and contextual meaning of another's misfortune. The present results are consistent with this emotion following the suppression-and-justification dynamic originally proposed for overt discriminatory behavior, which would suggest that the JSM captures a general mechanism of prejudice regulation that operates across behavioral and affective modalities. Furthermore, the results of our sensitivity analysis regarding participants' sexual orientation provide crucial insight into the deeply relational nature of this phenomenon. By demonstrating that the justification-suppression dynamic is significantly more pronounced among heterosexual individuals compared to sexual-minority participants, our findings align seamlessly with the tenets of Social Identity Theory (Tajfel and Turner, 1979). This three-way interaction suggests that the effect is not merely a generalized psychological reaction to wrongdoing, but a motivated intergroup process. The moral “cover” provided by a justificatory context appears to be uniquely effective, and perhaps most necessary, for out-group members (i.e., heterosexual individuals) who seek a safe avenue to express pre-existing animosity toward a marginalized target without violating overarching egalitarian norms. Ultimately, this nuance enriches the Justification-Suppression Model by anchoring the affective regulation of prejudice explicitly within the boundaries of social identity and intergroup competition.

Second, by operationalizing pre-existing animosity through the Gender Ideology Belief Scale (GIBS; Cammarata et al., 2026), the study introduces a theoretically grounded and psychometrically validated measure into this line of research. The GIBS captures not merely attitudinal negativity toward LGBTQIA+ individuals, but a structured ideological worldview organized around conspiratorial beliefs, resistance to gender-inclusive education, and adherence to traditional family values. This multidimensional characterization of explicit ideological animosity is theoretically significant: it suggests that the individuals most susceptible to JSM-consistent schadenfreude are not simply those who hold negative affective associations with the out-group, but those who have integrated their hostility into a coherent, openly endorsed belief system that actively delegitimizes gender and sexual diversity. Future research should explore whether this ideological coherence moderates not only the expression but also the subjective experience and moral rationalization of schadenfreude.

Third, the present study contributes to a growing body of research on emotional responses in the context of the so-called “anti-gender” movement in Southern Europe (Garbagnoli, 2016; Corredor, 2019). Italy represents a particularly relevant context for this line of inquiry, characterized by high levels of persistent homonegativity (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2024), documented institutional resistance to LGBTQ+ inclusion, and a recent resurgence of organized anti-gender political mobilization. Understanding how ideological opposition to gender diversity translates into affective intergroup responses in this context has both theoretical and applied significance.

5 Limitations and future directions

Several limitations of the present study warrant acknowledgment. First, the sample was recruited via snowball sampling, which, while effective for reaching a diverse population in exploratory research, introduces self-selection biases and limits generalizability to the broader Italian population. Future studies should employ probability sampling or recruit from more representative panels to strengthen external validity. Relatedly, although the two experimental conditions did not differ in gender composition, the overall sample was markedly skewed toward women (243 women vs. 107 men). Given consistent evidence that heterosexual men report more hostile attitudes toward LGBTQIA+ individuals, and toward gay men specifically, than heterosexual women do (Kite et al., 2021; Ratcliff et al., 2006), this imbalance may have constrained the range of anti-LGBTQIA+ animosity captured in the present sample and should be addressed through gender-balanced recruitment in future replications.

Second, schadenfreude was assessed exclusively via self-report, which may systematically underestimate its true prevalence and intensity, given the social desirability pressures extensively documented throughout this article. Participants aware of the study's focus on LGBTQIA+ attitudes may have engaged in additional impression management, suppressing their reported emotional reactions. Future research could complement self-report measures with implicit indicators, such as reaction time-based affect measures, facial electromyography, or physiological arousal indices, to capture the full range of emotional responding, including reactions that occur outside of conscious awareness or deliberate control.

Third, the present design does not allow for causal inferences about the longitudinal dynamics of prejudice suppression and justification-seeking in naturalistic settings. In everyday life, individuals actively seek out justifications for their emotional reactions, rather than passively receiving them. Future research employing experience-sampling or diary methods could examine how justification-seeking unfolds over time and how it interacts with media consumption, social context, and fluctuating normative pressures. A further limitation concerns the experimental procedure itself: at no point were participants explicitly reminded of the social and legal norms surrounding acceptable public discourse about LGBTQIA+ people, even though the JSM framework treats the anti-prejudice norm as the very force that justification is presumed to neutralize. This omission may be particularly consequential in the Italian context, where, unlike in countries such as France, no comprehensive national legislation currently sanctions homophobic hate speech or discrimination, following the 2021 rejection of the Ddl Zan bill by the Italian Senate (Feo, 2022). A comparatively permissive normative climate of this kind could have reduced the salience of the very constraint the study sought to test; future research should experimentally manipulate or otherwise render salient the relevant social and legal norms to more directly test their suppressive role. Relatedly, the deservingness manipulation relied on a domain-general moral transgression (alleged financial misconduct), rather than on a transgression tied to the specific content of anti-LGBTQIA+ prejudice, which centers more on perceptions of the community's lifestyle and sexual practices than on matters of financial probity (Salvati et al., 2023, 2024; Sears and Osten, 2003). This choice was deliberate, intended to test a generalized deservingness effect without confounding the manipulation with identity-specific stereotype content; however, it also means the vignette's transgression may have been experienced as only loosely relevant to participants' underlying anti-LGBTQIA+ attitudes. Future studies should compare domain-general and domain-matched transgressions to establish whether the justification-suppression dynamic documented here depends on this alignment.

Because participants responded to the misfortune of a single named association, extending the finding to schadenfreude toward LGBTQIA+ people, or toward the community as a whole, is an inferential step the present design does not license. Relatedly, the design treated the LGBTQIA+ association as a single stimulus and did not assess whether reactions differed depending on which subgroups of the association's constituency participants had in mind. Future research should examine whether the JSM dynamic documented here generalizes uniformly across sexual-orientation- and gender-identity-based subgroups, given that homonegativity, binegativity, transnegativity and prejudice against intersex or non-binary people are empirically distinct phenomena with different social and legal correlates in Italy (Fantacci et al., 2023; Rosati et al., 2025, 2026). Relatedly, gender identity beyond the Female/Male/Other item was not separately assessed, as no distinct cisgender/transgender item was included; this remains a limitation independent of the sexual-orientation sensitivity analyses reported above, and future studies should assess gender identity with a dedicated, more granular measure. Relatedly, several socio-demographic variables that would have allowed a more fine-grained test of the suppression norm—employment status, geographical area, nationality, relationship status, and membership of or proximity to LGBTQIA+ communities—were not collected, nor were the specific channels through which the survey link circulated systematically recorded. The absence of geographical information is particularly consequential, since normative protection against the expression of anti-LGBTQIA+ hostility plausibly varies across Italian regions; future research should collect this information and test whether the justification-suppression dynamic differs accordingly.

Finally, the present study focused exclusively on schadenfreude as the dependent variable. Future research might profitably examine whether the JSM dynamic generalizes to other prejudice-based emotional responses, such as contempt, anger, or moral indignation, and whether the justification manipulation differentially affects these emotions depending on their specific functional role in intergroup relations.

6 Conclusions

Taken together, the present findings underscore the psychological complexity of intergroup schadenfreude and highlight the critical role of situational affordances in translating ideological animosity into overt emotional expression. When a justification is available, individuals harboring strong anti-LGBTQIA+ ideological convictions appear to grant themselves permission to experience pleasure at the organization's misfortune, a response that anti-prejudice norms would otherwise inhibit. This is the pattern the Justification-Suppression Model predicts; whether it arises through the mechanism the model proposes remains to be established. Understanding when and why this emotional release occurs carries important theoretical and applied implications. Interventions aimed at reducing prejudice-based affect cannot rely solely on the reinforcement of egalitarian norms; they must also address the availability of justificatory narratives that allow hostility to surface while preserving the individual's self-image as moral and unbiased.

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Footnotes

Edited by: Alfonso Pezzella, Middlesex University, United Kingdom

Reviewed by: Gustave Adolphe Messanga, University of Dschang, Cameroon

Salvatore Monaco, University of Foggia, Italy