Ask 1,000 South Korean adults whether online shaming actually works, and the strongest predictor of their answer has nothing to do with whether shaming ever produced an apology, a firing, or a single changed mind. It’s how much pleasure the person answering gets from watching someone else get torn apart. That’s the finding behind Perceived Effectiveness of Online Vigilantism: The Role of Schadenfreude and Moral Grandstanding, published in Computers in Human Behavior in October 2026 by criminologists Dosun Kim and Yeon Soo Kim of Dongguk University in Seoul, and covered Nov. 2, 2026 by PsyPost and the same week by Archyde. Kim and Kim surveyed a representative sample of 1,000 South Korean adults and split them into three groups: people who’d actively joined an online shaming campaign, people who’d only watched one unfold, and people who’d done neither. Across every group, belief that digital pile-ons “work” tracked two things with remarkable consistency — schadenfreude, and a specific flavor of moral self-promotion researchers call grandstanding. It didn’t reliably track whether the shaming produced anything resembling justice. Arthur Schopenhauer named the first ingredient in 1840, in a book about the foundations of ethics, and he reached for a harsher word for it than most people would risk in a headline.

The Quick Verdict

Question	What we found
What was studied?	Whether schadenfreude and moral grandstanding predict the belief that online shaming (vigilantism) is effective
Who ran it?	Dosun Kim and Yeon Soo Kim, criminologists at Dongguk University, Seoul
Where and when?	Computers in Human Behavior, published October 2026; covered Nov. 2, 2026 by PsyPost and the same week by Archyde
Sample	A representative sample of 1,000 South Korean adults, surveyed once, sorted into non-participants, passive onlookers, and active participants in online shaming
Headline finding	Active participants scored significantly higher than the other two groups on schadenfreude, prestige-seeking grandstanding, and belief that online vigilantism is effective
Mechanism	Among active and passive participants, higher schadenfreude and higher prestige-seeking grandstanding predicted a stronger belief that shaming works; among non-participants, dominance-seeking grandstanding (not prestige-seeking) did that job instead
What Schopenhauer already argued	On the Basis of Morality (1840): schadenfreude is “the worst trait in human nature” — worse than envy, because it wants nothing for itself except another person’s suffering

The Quick Version

A new survey of 1,000 South Korean adults finds that believing online shaming “works” has less to do with whether it produces justice and more to do with how much pleasure the belief-holder gets from someone else’s downfall, and how much it flatters their own sense of moral standing. Arthur Schopenhauer wrote the mechanism down nearly two centuries before anyone surveyed it: schadenfreude asks for nothing in return. It only needs someone else to suffer, and it’s very good at wearing righteous indignation as a disguise.

What the Study Actually Found

Kim and Kim weren’t trying to settle whether online shaming is good or bad for society. They wanted something narrower and more useful: what predicts a person’s belief that it’s effective, separate from the question of whether it actually is. That’s a meaningful split. Plenty of research treats “shaming works” as a claim you could check against outcomes. This study treats it as a belief with its own psychological fingerprint, and goes looking for whose fingerprint it is.

The survey ran on a representative sample of 1,000 adults in South Korea, who answered questions about their direct experience with internet justice, their general tendency toward schadenfreude, and two strands of what researchers call moral grandstanding — using moral talk mainly to boost your own standing. The concept traces back to Tosi and Warmke’s 2016 paper in Philosophy & Public Affairs, which described grandstanding as public moral speech motivated less by the cause than by the speaker’s wish to be seen as respectable. Later work split that in two: prestige-seeking grandstanding, aimed at being admired, and dominance-seeking grandstanding, aimed at being feared. Kim and Kim sorted respondents into three groups by self-reported behavior: non-participants with no history of online shaming, passive participants who’d watched or searched out critical content without posting, and active participants who’d shared accusations, information, or posts themselves.

The numbers broke cleanly along those lines. Active participants scored significantly higher than both other groups on schadenfreude, on prestige-seeking grandstanding, and on the belief that online vigilantism actually works. Among active and passive participants alike, higher schadenfreude combined with higher prestige-seeking grandstanding predicted a stronger belief that shaming is effective. For people who hadn’t participated at all, a different trait did the same work: dominance-seeking grandstanding, not prestige-seeking, tracked their belief that digital pile-ons succeed. Passive onlookers scored lower on dominance-seeking than either other group — they liked watching, but didn’t carry the same appetite to intimidate.

Put the pieces together and the shape is this: people directly involved in shaming someone online feel more pleasure at the target’s downfall and more personal credit for their own righteousness than people who stay out of it. And even the people who never post a word still believe the mob works, as long as something in them responds to the idea of dominance over the person being shamed. The belief that internet justice succeeds isn’t evenly distributed. It clusters wherever the emotional and status payoff is highest.

What Did Schopenhauer Mean By This?

In On the Basis of Morality (1840), Schopenhauer writes that “there is no sign more infallible of an entirely bad heart, and of profound moral worthlessness, than open and candid enjoyment in seeing other people suffer.” He draws the sharper distinction a few lines on: “while [envy] is human, [schadenfreude] is diabolical” — commonly rendered as “to feel envy is human, to savor schadenfreude is devilish.”

Schopenhauer built his ethics around a single claim: compassion (Mitleid, literally “suffering-with”) is the only genuine basis of moral action, because it’s the one motive that takes another person’s pain as directly, immediately real to you — not an abstraction, not a rule you’re obeying, but something you feel as if it were partly your own. Everything that works against compassion, he called an anti-moral incentive. Egoism was the most common of these. Malice was the worst, and schadenfreude was malice in its purest, laziest form: cruelty that requires no effort, no risk, and no benefit to the person enjoying it. You don’t have to do anything to someone to feel schadenfreude. You just have to watch, and feel good about what you’re watching.

That’s why Schopenhauer ranked it below envy rather than alongside it. Envy, ugly as it is, wants something — what the other person has. It’s at least oriented toward a good, however badly pursued. Schadenfreude wants nothing except the other person’s suffering, full stop, with no further payoff attached. It’s the one vice in his account that’s pure subtraction: it makes the world worse for someone else and gives the person feeling it nothing real in exchange except the feeling itself.

Read the study’s numbers against that. The active shamers who report the most schadenfreude are the same people reporting the most prestige-seeking grandstanding — meaning the pleasure and the sense of being the good guy are showing up in the same people, at the same time, measured by the same survey. Schopenhauer would say that’s not a coincidence worth explaining away. It’s the mechanism working exactly as he described it: the enjoyment comes first, and the moral framing arrives afterward to make the enjoyment presentable. Nobody in Kim and Kim’s sample would describe their own motive as “I liked watching that person suffer.” They’d describe it as justice. Schopenhauer’s whole point is that the first description and the second one can be the same event, felt from the inside as something nobler than it is.

Why Do People Believe Online Shaming Works?

1. It feels good, and the feeling gets mistaken for a verdict. Higher schadenfreude predicted a stronger belief in effectiveness across both active and passive groups — pleasure first, conclusion second.
2. It flatters the person doing it. Prestige-seeking grandstanding rode alongside schadenfreude in the same two groups, meaning the belief that shaming works is tangled up with the belief that participating in it makes you look good.
3. Even from the sidelines, feeling dominant does the same job. Non-participants showed no link between prestige-seeking and belief in effectiveness. What predicted it instead was dominance-seeking — liking the idea of someone being forced into submission, from a safe, uninvolved distance.
4. The people who feel it most are also the most certain. Active participants outscored everyone else on schadenfreude, prestige-seeking grandstanding, and belief in effectiveness simultaneously — a loop with no outside check built into it.

Why the Study and the Philosophy Rhyme

The honest version of this comparison isn’t “a 19th-century pessimist predicted a 2026 Korean survey.” It’s narrower, and it holds up better for being narrower: Schopenhauer’s specific claim was that enjoying another’s suffering requires no benefit to the one enjoying it, and that this is exactly what makes it worse than ordinary selfishness, not better. Kim and Kim weren’t testing Schopenhauer. They were testing whether schadenfreude and two forms of status-seeking predict a belief about online justice. But the shape of what they found is Schopenhauer’s shape: a pleasure that explains the belief, dressed up afterward as a judgment about what’s effective.

It connects to the piece on Spinoza and partisan wishful thinking, which found belief about who’d win an election tracking how much a voter hated the other side rather than the evidence — the same backward inference, aimed at a prediction instead of a verdict about justice. It rhymes with the piece on Girard and the looksmaxxing pipeline, where a group resolved its own unbearable tension by finding someone to blame; online shaming is that resolution running at internet speed, with a new target every news cycle. It sits close to the piece on Russell and the habit of comparison — Russell diagnosed envy as comparative attention turned against the self, and Schopenhauer’s schadenfreude is the same comparative instinct turned outward, delighted rather than wounded by the gap. And it connects to the piece on Le Bon and the crowd: a shaming campaign needs an audience to feel like consensus, and Kim and Kim’s passive onlookers — never posting, just watching and believing it works — are exactly the crowd Le Bon described, feeling like the majority without ever having to argue for it.

The Gap Schopenhauer Didn’t See Coming

Here’s where the comparison gets more interesting than a clean match.

Schopenhauer wrote about schadenfreude as a fixed feature of a bad heart, something a person either indulged in private or mostly suppressed out of basic decency, because acting on it cost something — proximity to the sufferer, at minimum, and usually some visible loss of standing for being seen to enjoy someone’s pain. He had no way to imagine a mechanism that lets a person act on schadenfreude at scale, instantly, anonymously, with the action itself (a share, a comment, an accusation forwarded to thousands of strangers) laundered into something that looks like civic participation rather than cruelty. Kim and Kim’s “active participants” are a behavioral category that couldn’t have existed in 1840, because the behavior it names didn’t exist yet. Schopenhauer gave the emotion. The internet gave it a costless delivery system and, remarkably, a name that sounds like justice.

He also offered a way out that this study has no instrument for measuring: the possibility of actually noticing your own schadenfreude and declining to act on it, which for Schopenhauer was close to the beginning of ethical seriousness. Kim and Kim’s survey can tell you that active participants feel more pleasure and more self-regard than everyone else. It can’t tell you whether any of them, afterward, caught themselves doing it.

What This Study Doesn’t Show

Be precise about the size of this. The framing invites more confidence than the data earns in either direction.

Belief That Shaming Works Isn’t Evidence That It Works

This is the most important caveat, and it’s easy to lose in the headline. Kim and Kim measured perceived effectiveness — what respondents believe online vigilantism accomplishes — not whether targets actually changed behavior, apologized, or faced any real consequence. A strong belief that shaming works, fueled by schadenfreude, says nothing about whether it does.

Self-Reported, at a Single Point in Time

The researchers themselves note that the survey can’t establish cause and effect. It can’t rule out that people who already believe shaming is effective are simply more willing, afterward, to describe their own schadenfreude and status motives honestly, rather than the emotions causing the belief.

South Korea Only

The sample is a representative cross-section of South Korean adults. The researchers flag directly that the psychological pattern linking schadenfreude, grandstanding, and belief in online justice might look different in other cultural contexts, where norms around public shaming, status display, or collective versus individual framing of wrongdoing differ.

Three Groups, Defined by Self-Report

Whether someone counted as a “non-participant,” “passive participant,” or “active participant” came from how they described their own past behavior, not from observed posting history. People may undercount or overstate their own involvement in exactly the direction their self-image prefers.

What Actually Follows From This

1. Treat your own certainty that a shaming campaign “worked” as a signal worth examining, not a fact worth repeating. If the study and Schopenhauer are both pointing at the same mechanism, ask whether you feel satisfied before you decide whether anything was actually resolved.
2. Notice when moral language is doing double duty. The study’s grandstanding measures exist because moral talk can serve the cause it claims to serve, or it can serve the speaker’s standing, or both at once — and the person doing it is rarely in a good position to tell which.
3. Separate the pleasure from the verdict. Schopenhauer’s actual argument wasn’t that wrongdoing shouldn’t have consequences. It was that compassion, not combat, is the only real foundation for morality — and enjoying someone else’s suffering, however justified it feels in the moment, was never that.

Schopenhauer never saw a comment section, and Dosun Kim and Yeon Soo Kim weren’t out to vindicate a 186-year-old treatise on ethics. But a 2026 survey built to measure what predicts belief in online vigilantism landed on the exact feature Schopenhauer spent On the Basis of Morality warning against: a pleasure that asks for nothing except someone else’s suffering, standing in for a verdict about justice it never actually delivered.

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This post discusses a study published in Computers in Human Behavior in October 2026 (Dosun Kim and Yeon Soo Kim, Dongguk University), covered by PsyPost and Archyde in November 2026, and Arthur Schopenhauer’s On the Basis of Morality (1840). The study measures South Korean adults’ self-reported beliefs about online vigilantism’s effectiveness, not whether shaming campaigns actually produce the outcomes their participants believe they do, and its cross-sectional design can’t establish cause and effect.