Sometimes, it’s good to be bad! It may help others
Can making people feel bad really help them? Yes, according to a recent study.
The findings suggested that people may try to make someone else feel negative emotions if they think experiencing those emotions will be beneficial in the long run.
“We have shown that people can be ‘cruel to be kind,’ that is, they may decide to make someone feel worse if this emotion is beneficial for that other person, even if this does not entail any personal benefit for them,” explained researcher Belén López-Pérez from the University of Plymouth.
“These results expand our knowledge of the motivations underlying emotion regulation between people.”
“We identified several everyday examples where this might be the case, for instance, inducing fear of failure in a loved one who is procrastinating instead of studying for an exam,” López-Pérez noted.
The researchers hypothesised that prompting participants to take another person’s perspective might make them more likely to choose a negative experience for that person if they thought the experience would help the individual reach a specific goal.
To test their hypothesis, they recruited 140 adults to participate in a lab-based study that involved playing a computer game with an anonymous partner, known as Player A. In reality, the participants were always assigned the role of Player B and there was no actual Player A.
After receiving a note supposedly written by Player A, some participants were asked to imagine how Player A felt, while others were told to remain detached. The note described Player A’s recent breakup and how upset and helpless Player A felt about it.
After playing the assigned game, the participants listened to some music clips and read short game descriptions that varied in their emotional content. They also rated the extent to which they wanted their partner to feel angry, fearful, or neutral and how useful these emotions would be in playing the game. The study suggests that empathy led people to choose particular negative emotional experiences that they believed would ultimately help their partner be successful in the context of the game.