Reactions to others’ misfortune on social media: Effects of homophily and publicness on schadenfreude, empathy, and perceived deservingness

Abstract Social media has become a popular venue for support seeking, which often involves self-disclosure about one's misfortune. To examine how help-related emotions and cognitions as responses to such disclosure might be influenced by technological factors, we conducted a 2 (interpersonal similarity: low vs. high) x 3 (message publicness: private vs. moderate vs. public) between-participants experiment online. Findings suggest that seeing disclosure about a personal misfortune from a dissimilar other, as compared with a similar other, elicited schadenfreude and inhibited empathy via heightened perceived deservingness among message recipients. Also, such effects were more prominent when the self-disclosure messages were visible within a given network of friends as compared to when messages were made completely public to everyone or exclusively directed to the observer.