TL;DR
People take measurably more pleasure in a high achiever’s fall than in an average person’s, and the effect is strongest among those with low self-esteem and low perceived competence.1 Envy comes in two forms — one that motivates climbing and one that motivates pulling down — and only the second produces demolition.2 Then the public phase adds its own engine: in a crowd, moral criticism becomes a status contest where participants “ramp up” to outdo each other, so the standard the target must meet keeps rising after they’ve already been convicted.3 The arc isn’t hypocrisy. It’s three mechanisms firing in order.
Eden Gardens, Kolkata. The same crowd does the building up and the tearing down, usually inside one season. Photo: Partha Bhaumik, CC BY-SA 2.0.4
The Arc Everyone Recognises
Someone arrives from outside the usual channels — a politician from a background that was supposed to disqualify them, a self-taught artist, a founder with no pedigree. The public response is warm, often disproportionately so. Then, somewhere after they’ve actually arrived, the tone flips. Old statements surface. Imperfections that would be unremarkable in an established figure become disqualifying. The same audience that manufactured the ascent now works the demolition with real appetite, and the person often ends up more diminished than if they’d never risen at all.
The easy reading is that crowds are fickle. The more useful reading is that the rise and the fall are driven by different mechanisms, and the second one only switches on once the first one has succeeded.
Height Is the Trigger, Not the Behaviour
The core finding here is old and robust. In 1989 the Australian psychologist Norman Feather built a “Tall Poppy Scale” to measure attitudes toward high achievers, and the results were unambiguous: people reported feeling more pleased about a high achiever’s fall than about an average achiever’s fall, and were more punitive toward high achievers who transgressed than toward average achievers who did the same thing.1
Read that second clause carefully, because it’s the part that matters. The identical transgression draws a harsher response purely as a function of the transgressor’s altitude. So the moment someone stops being an underdog and becomes a high achiever, the cost of their ordinary flaws silently reprices upward — not because they changed, but because their position did.
Feather also found a revealing detail about where the fall gets aimed: people were most pleased when a high achiever fell to the average position rather than all the way to the bottom.1 The impulse isn’t destruction for its own sake. It’s levelling. Get them back in line.
And the predictors are uncomfortable. Favouring the fall was more common among people with low global self-esteem and low perceived self-competence.1 A more recent cross-cultural study using the same scale found the same shape: participants with lower confidence in their own decision-making showed a stronger preference for high achievers to fail, while better decision-makers preferred to reward them.1
Two Envies, One Word
This is where the mechanism becomes specific rather than moralistic. Work by Niels van de Ven, Marcel Zeelenberg and Rik Pieters established that envy is not one emotion but two, distinguished by what they motivate. Both are unpleasant and both arise from the same upward social comparison. But benign envy produces a moving-up motivation aimed at improving your own position, while malicious envy produces a pulling-down motivation aimed at damaging the other person’s.2
Their evidence design is elegant: they began in Dutch, which has separate words for the two, then confirmed the same two distinct experiential patterns in English and Spanish samples where a single word covers both.2 The distinction isn’t a linguistic artefact; it’s in the experience.
Which means the sentence “people were envious of them” explains nothing on its own. The question is which envy the situation recruited — and the evidence suggests that hinges partly on whether the observer believes the gap is closeable. If the ascent looks replicable, you get inspiration. If it looks like it has locked you out, you get demolition.
The Deservingness Switch
There’s a third variable that determines whether the fall feels satisfying or sad, and it’s the one people actually argue about without naming: deservingness. Judgements about whether someone is responsible for their own outcome are the central mechanism explaining when a high achiever’s failure produces schadenfreude rather than sympathy.1
This is why the discovery phase of a teardown is so vicious, and so focused on hypocrisy specifically. A revelation that the risen figure is a fraud, or held their position unfairly, does something more than provide information — it retroactively converts their success from earned to undeserved, which unlocks the pleasure of their fall. The hunt for the disqualifying detail isn’t incidental to the takedown. It’s the permission slip.
Why the Crowd Version Escalates Past the Individual Version
Individual envy explains why one person enjoys a fall. It doesn’t explain why public teardowns spiral — why the accusations keep getting more extreme after the case is already made, and why the standard rises to a level no one could satisfy.
The philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke supply the missing piece with the idea of moral grandstanding: using moral talk for self-promotion, driven by a “recognition desire” to have others admire one’s moral purity, motivated substantially by status and dominance rather than by the stated concern.3 Their taxonomy of the resulting behaviours maps the phenomenon almost exactly. “Piling on” — contributing mainly to register that you’re on the correct side. “Ramping up” — escalating to more extreme claims in order to outdo previous speakers. “Trumping up” — manufacturing a moral problem where none genuinely exists.3
Ramping up is the engine of the arc. In a crowd where moral criticism confers status, mild criticism is worth nothing, so each participant has an incentive to be harsher than the last. The target’s actual conduct becomes almost irrelevant to how far the condemnation travels, because the condemnation is now competing against other condemnations rather than against the facts. This is precisely how a figure ends up destroyed for failing a purity standard that didn’t exist when the process started — and why they can’t clear it, since it moves upward faster than they can respond.
Where This Argument Should Not Be Taken
Two limits, and they’re real ones.
First, criticism of powerful people is not a psychological symptom. Scrutiny intensifying as someone gains power is correct — a person with influence over others’ lives should face a higher standard than a person with none, and the tall-poppy research doesn’t distinguish accountability from levelling. “You’re just being envious” is a rhetorical move for dismissing legitimate criticism, and the existence of these mechanisms doesn’t validate it. Some falls are earned, and the deservingness judgement that triggers schadenfreude is often simply accurate.
Second, the cultural picture is more variable than a universal story would suggest. The cross-cultural work found genuinely different patterns: a New Zealand European sample showed schadenfreude — dwelling on information about others’ failures — while a Chinese sample showed gluckschmerz, discomfort at others’ good fortune, spending markedly less time on success information.1 The underlying comparison instinct looks general, but how it expresses itself is shaped by whether a culture treats individual distinction as admirable or as a threat to group harmony.
The narrower conclusion is the defensible one. When a public turns on someone it recently elevated, at least three things are usually happening at once that have nothing to do with the person’s conduct: their new altitude has repriced their ordinary flaws, the observers most invested in the takedown are often those least able to imagine matching them, and the crowd is running a status competition in which the winner is whoever condemns hardest. Any of those can coexist with the criticism being fair. All of them can operate while everyone involved sincerely believes they’re just holding someone to account.
