The other dark traits use your pain or ignore it. This one wants it, because the suffering itself is the reward. It is the newest addition to the map of dark personality, the darkest point on it, and the one hiding in plain sight in the comment section.
Of the four dark traits, this is the one people least want to believe is real, and the one that turns out to be hiding in the most ordinary places. The narcissist uses your admiration. The Machiavellian uses your trust. The psychopath is simply cold to your pain, indifferent. Sadism is different from all three, and worse, because it is not indifferent to your suffering and does not merely tolerate it as a cost of getting something else. It wants it. For the sadist, another person's pain is not a means or a side effect. It is the reward. And the unsettling discovery of the last decade of research is that this is not confined to torturers and serial killers. It comes in an everyday size, and it lives closer to home than any of us would like.
For years, psychology worked with the Dark Triad: narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy. Then, in 2013, Erin Buckels, Daniel Jones and Delroy Paulhus argued that something was missing, and ran a study that has become famous for how simply and how disturbingly it made the point. They gave people a choice of unpleasant tasks. One option was to kill bugs in what appeared to be a grinding machine. And they found that a subset of ordinary participants chose the bug-killing and reported genuinely enjoying it, the more bugs the better. Those people did not score especially high on the other three dark traits. They scored high on sadism, a distinct thing: the taking of pleasure in cruelty. The finding was clear enough that the triad became a tetrad, and the fourth point was the darkest.
What makes sadism its own trait is exactly this reward structure. Every other dark trait treats harm as instrumental or incidental. Sadism treats harm as the goal. That is why it sits at the bottom of the map. You can, in principle, negotiate with self-interest, appeal to a manipulator's long-term advantage, or at least predict a psychopath's cold calculus. But you cannot reason your way out of being someone's entertainment, because your discomfort is not a bug in their plan. It is the plan.
The most important follow-up work found the everyday sadist in the place they now most reliably gather. In a 2014 study with the deadpan title Trolls Just Want to Have Fun, Buckels and colleagues surveyed people about their online behaviour and personalities, and found that the strongest personality predictor of enjoying internet trolling was, by a wide margin, everyday sadism. Not disagreement, not passion, not even ordinary rudeness. The people who trolled for pleasure were the people who, on the questionnaires, endorsed enjoying the suffering of others, and who said, in effect, that hurting people online was fun.
This matters because it drags the trait out of the dungeon and into daily life. The internet did not create sadism, but it built the perfect environment for the everyday version to express itself: an audience, anonymity, distance from the victim's face, and no cost. Given those conditions, a meaningful slice of otherwise unremarkable people discover that they enjoy inflicting pain, and do it for entertainment. The stranger tearing apart a grieving person's post, the pile-on that keeps going long after any point has been made, the relish in a cruel reply, that is not an excess of moral passion. Often it is simply someone having fun in the way this trait has fun.
As with every trait on this map, sadism is a dimension, not a box, and the low end of it has a familiar name most of us would rather not claim: schadenfreude, the small pleasure in someone else's misfortune. The flash of satisfaction when a rival stumbles, when someone smug gets embarrassed, when a person you resent gets what you feel they had coming. That flicker is the seed of the same thing, the mild, common, human version of taking pleasure in pain. Most people feel it occasionally and are a little ashamed of it, and that shame is the brake that keeps it small.
The everyday sadist is the person in whom that flicker is turned up and the brake is off, who seeks the feeling out rather than wincing at it, who arranges their life and their evenings to get more of it. Recognising the near end of the spectrum in yourself is not a confession of monstrousness. It is the honest starting point for understanding the far end, and for taking it seriously instead of pretending it belongs only to fictional villains. The distance from a private flash of schadenfreude to a life organised around cruelty is large, but it is a distance along one continuous line, and the line runs through everyone.
If you are close to someone genuinely high in this trait, the practical picture is stark, and understanding it is what stops you from wasting years on the wrong strategy. The usual tools do not work. With most difficult people you can appeal to their interests, their reputation, their affection, their guilt. With a sadist, the ordinary lever fails, because your pain is not a price they are reluctantly paying. It is the thing they are there for. Trying to be more accommodating, more understanding, more loving, often makes it worse, because it produces more of the vulnerability and distress that the trait feeds on.
So the decision this trait forces is the clearest of all, and understanding is what makes it possible to act on. Once you actually see that a person is enjoying your suffering, that the cruelty is not a misfire of frustration but a source of pleasure, the exhausting hope collapses: there is no version of you good enough to make someone stop wanting your pain, because wanting it was never about you. Understanding is not the same as acceptance, and here it is the difference between staying to be fed on and getting out. Seeing it clearly is not cruelty toward them. It is the plain recognition that lets you protect yourself and leave, and finally close a door you kept holding open in the belief that kindness would eventually be answered.
The tell, if you need one, is simple and worth trusting: watch for the moment your pain produces not discomfort in them, not indifference, but something closer to satisfaction. A small brightening. A returning to it. People show you what feeds them. The comfortable lie is that cruelty always comes from wounds and can always be healed with enough love. Sometimes it comes from appetite. Naming that honestly is not despair. It is the beginning of getting yourself out of reach.
- Buckels, E. E., Jones, D. N., & Paulhus, D. L. (2013). Behavioral Confirmation of Everyday Sadism. Psychological Science, 24(11), 2201-2209.
- Buckels, E. E., Trapnell, P. D., & Paulhus, D. L. (2014). Trolls Just Want to Have Fun. Personality and Individual Differences.
- Paulhus, D. L., & Williams, K. M. (2002). The Dark Triad of personality. Journal of Research in Personality, 36, 556-563.
What is everyday sadism?
Everyday sadism is the personality trait of taking genuine pleasure in the suffering of others, expressed in ordinary life rather than in extreme violence. It was established as the fourth member of the dark tetrad by Buckels, Jones and Paulhus in 2013, alongside narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Its defining feature is that harm is not a means to another goal but a reward in itself.
How is sadism different from psychopathy?
A psychopath is largely indifferent to your pain; it does not register as it would for most people, and harming you is incidental to whatever they want. A sadist is not indifferent at all: they actively enjoy your suffering, and the suffering itself is the point. That is why sadism is considered the darkest of the four traits, and why appealing to someone's better nature fails so completely when the pain is the reward.
Are internet trolls actually sadists?
Research points strongly that way. A 2014 study found that everyday sadism was the strongest personality predictor of enjoying online trolling, more than any other dark trait. The internet provides an ideal environment for everyday sadism: an audience, anonymity, distance from the victim, and no cost. That combination lets a meaningful number of otherwise ordinary people express a trait they might never act on face to face.
Is schadenfreude the same as sadism?
Schadenfreude, the small pleasure in another's misfortune, is the mild, common, low end of the same spectrum. Most people feel it occasionally and are slightly ashamed of it, and that shame keeps it small. Everyday sadism is what it looks like when that flicker is turned up and the shame-brake is off, so the person seeks the feeling out rather than wincing at it. It is a difference of degree along one continuous line.
How do you deal with a sadistic person?
Recognise that the usual tools fail, because your pain is not a price they are reluctant to pay but the thing they want. Being more accommodating or loving often makes it worse by supplying more distress to feed on. The protective move is to see it clearly, stop hoping to earn their mercy, and get out of reach. The tell to trust is when your suffering produces something like satisfaction in them rather than discomfort.