From America's Funniest Home Videos in the 1990s to modern internet communities like "There Was an Attempt" and viral TikTok compilations, fail content has proven to be one of the most enduring forms of entertainment. These videos showing people slipping, stumbling, and spectacularly messing up simple tasks generate billions of views across platforms, but the reason for their popularity goes far deeper than simple humor. The psychology behind our love of watching others fail reveals uncomfortable truths about human nature and the way we maintain our sense of self worth.
The primary psychological mechanism at work is schadenfreude, a German term that translates literally to "harm joy." This universal human emotion describes the pleasure people feel when witnessing the misfortunes of others. While the term originated in German, similar concepts exist across cultures, demonstrating that this is not merely a Western phenomenon but rather something fundamental to human psychology.
Social comparison theory, developed by Leon Festinger in the 1950s, explains that people constantly compare themselves with others, and watching someone else fail can make us feel relatively better about our own competence and status. Research suggests a connection between schadenfreude and self esteem.
Studies demonstrate that self esteem has a negative relationship with schadenfreude, meaning individuals with lower self esteem tend to experience this emotion more frequently and intensely. When people with fragile self images see others fail, especially those who appear more successful, they experience stronger self threat when confronted with high achievers, and witnessing these people's misfortunes increases their schadenfreude. This suggests that fail videos serve as a form of psychological self medication, temporarily boosting the mood of viewers who may feel inadequate in other areas of their lives.
The popularity of fail content might also have evolutionary roots. Psychologist Richard Smith suggests that our delight in others' suffering may stem from knowledge that we are getting a competitive advantage, as Darwin proposed that all life is in constant competition for resources and mates. In this framework, watching someone else struggle represents a relative gain in social standing, even if only psychologically.
Fail videos also serve as a welcome counterpoint to the carefully curated perfection displayed on social media platforms. While social media sites like Facebook tend to feature content showing people in their best light, which has been shown to cause envy and low self esteem in heavy users, fail videos show vulnerable people who do not have it together.
The editor in chief of Fail Blog, one of the internet's largest repositories of such content, explicitly acknowledges this function with their motto of helping people feel better about themselves every day. However, there are important limits to what counts as entertaining failure.
