How Spiteful Are You?
Willing to lose a little, just to make sure someone else loses more
Spite is the strangest item in the catalogue of human meanness, because it costs the spiteful person something too. Researchers define it as accepting a loss to yourself in order to make someone else worse off - not simple selfishness, which only cares about your own outcome, and not ordinary anger, which fades once the moment passes. It turns out to be a stable, measurable trait, and most people have more of it than they would admit to a stranger.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about how you actually behave, not about the person you would like to be.
What it measures
The Spitefulness Scale itself, which is the first bar and the only one with a published, validated measure behind it - the willingness to accept a cost to yourself in order to make someone else worse off. The other two bars are related but separate ideas from nearby research: punishing unfairness even when it costs you and there is nothing to gain, and holding a personal wish to see someone who wronged you come out worse. This is not the Dark Triad: that test measures three broad, self-serving traits (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy) that predict spite without being the same thing as it - you can score low on all three and still, in one specific situation, want to see someone lose.
Based on: Spitefulness Scale (Marcus, Zeigler-Hill, Mercer & Norris, 2014)
Possible results
Spite
Accepting a loss to yourself to make someone else worse off.
Punishing unfairness
Willing to pay a personal cost to punish someone who broke a rule of fairness, even a stranger.
Wanting them to lose
A specific wish to see someone who wronged you personally come out worse, beyond simple anger.
Common questions
Is spite the same as revenge?
Not quite. Revenge is usually aimed at someone who knows it is happening - the point is often that they realise you got even. Spite, as measured here, does not need an audience: the defining part is accepting a cost yourself to make the other person worse off, whether or not they ever connect the two.
Is this the same as the Dark Triad?
No, though the two are related. The team that built this scale found spite correlates with narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy, along with aggression, and correlates negatively with self-esteem, guilt-proneness, agreeableness and conscientiousness - but it is measured as its own single trait, not as a facet of any of them. A specific situation can pull spite out of someone whose Dark Triad scores are otherwise unremarkable.
Why would anyone hurt themselves just to hurt someone else?
It looks irrational until you zoom out to the group level. Research on costly punishment in economic games has found that people will pay to punish free-riders even when they will never interact again and gain nothing back, apparently because enforcing the norm matters on its own. Personal spite may run on a similar wire, even when the 'norm' is only about you.
Can spite ever be useful?
The fairness-enforcing kind can be, at the group level - punishing cheats even at a cost is one of the mechanisms that keeps cooperation from collapsing when nobody is watching. The personal kind, aimed at one specific person, mostly just keeps you tethered to them. It is worth noticing which one you are actually feeling before you act on it.
Sources
- Marcus, D. K., Zeigler-Hill, V., Mercer, S. H., & Norris, A. L. (2014). The psychology of spite and the measurement of spitefulness. Psychological Assessment. doi:10.1037/a0036039
- Fehr, E., & Gächter, S. (2002). Altruistic punishment in humans. Nature. doi:10.1038/415137a
An honest note The Spite bar adapts the Spitefulness Scale; the wording is Quinthea's own, so your score is not comparable to the published norms. Only that first bar has a validated measure behind it - the other two bars measure related ideas from nearby research, not extra factors of the same scale, and nobody has validated them together as one instrument. The scale itself is not a diagnosis of anything; spite in normal, everyday amounts is common and not a personality disorder.
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