When Cruelty Becomes Culture
There is a reason so much of what passes for entertainment today feels uneasy once the laughter dies down. A contestant on a reality show is edited into a caricature so that millions can revel in their humiliation. A celebrity’s mental health crisis is replayed in memes until it becomes a punchline. Strangers are filmed in grocery stores or on public transport and mocked online without their consent. These moments are not accidents, they are features of a system where ridicule has become one of the most reliable currencies of attention.
My paper, The Culture of Cruelty: The Psychopathology of Ridicule in Modern Entertainment, argues that ridicule is not just a style of humor. It is a cultural practice that functions like a pathology. By repeatedly transforming human vulnerability into spectacle, ridicule erodes empathy, licenses prejudice, and conditions audiences to equate someone’s pain with their own amusement.
Why Ridicule Matters
Humor has always puzzled philosophers and psychologists. Plato and Hobbes described laughter as an expression of superiority over others’ weakness. Freud saw it as a release of pent-up aggression. Kant and Schopenhauer located humor in incongruity, the mismatch between what we expect and what we see. Modern psychology adds that ridicule fits into the category of “aggressive humor”: jokes meant not to bond people together, but to diminish a target’s status.
Aggressive humor might seem trivial in small doses, but the data suggest otherwise. Experimental research shows that disparagement humor does not create prejudice out of thin air, but it does release it where it already exists. A sexist or racist joke signals that bias is socially acceptable, reducing the normal inhibitions people have about expressing it. The laugh becomes a license. In entertainment settings—where millions are watching—the signal does not just circulate among individuals, it becomes a cultural script.
The Neuroscience of Humiliation
Ridicule also carries a hidden cost for those on the receiving end. Neuroscience shows that social exclusion and humiliation activate the same regions of the brain involved in physical pain, particularly the anterior cingulate cortex. Being mocked is not metaphorically painful—it registers in the body as injury. More recent studies demonstrate that repeated experiences of ridicule and exclusion not only hurt in the moment, but also reduce brain activity in areas linked to perspective-taking and empathy. That means the harm is twofold: the target suffers, and audiences become less likely to care.
This should reframe how we think about humor based on cruelty. It is not just entertainment. It is a psychological exchange where one person’s pain is converted into another’s pleasure, often under the banner of “just joking.”
Why Cruelty Spreads
If ridicule has always been with us, why does it feel so dominant now? The answer lies in the structure of today’s media. Three forces converge to make ridicule especially profitable:
Parasocial relationships. When audiences feel one-sided intimacy with celebrities or influencers, their struggles feel personal. The fall of a beloved figure, or the exposure of a flaw, becomes charged with feelings of betrayal and insider knowledge. Laughter is sharpened by that false intimacy.
Online disinhibition. Social media strips away the accountability cues present in face-to-face interactions. Anonymity and distance make harsh comments easier. What someone would never say in person becomes normal in a comment section.
Algorithmic amplification. Platforms privilege content that provokes strong moral-emotional reactions. Ridicule often encodes contempt, anger, or moral judgment, which makes it highly shareable. A mocking clip will often travel farther than a neutral one, not because it is better, but because the system is designed to reward outrage.
Unlike earlier forms of ridicule, which faded when the crowd dispersed, digital ridicule never disappears. It is preserved, searchable, and endlessly recirculated. What once would have been a fleeting embarrassment is now a permanent digital record of humiliation.
The Culture of Public Shaming
The logic of ridicule also connects to older traditions. In early modern Europe, stocks and pillories were used to publicly humiliate offenders. Communities gathered to mock and jeer as punishment was enacted. Today’s viral pile-ons replicate that ritual at scale. The technology has changed, but the psychology remains.
Examples abound. A poorly phrased tweet, a celebrity’s breakdown, or a stranger’s awkward stumble can become instant fodder for global entertainment. The case of Justine Sacco—whose ill-timed joke on Twitter in 2013 ignited worldwide ridicule before her plane landed—shows how fast humiliation spreads. Monica Lewinsky’s own description of living through digital shaming illustrates the enduring human toll when ridicule is amplified.
And the terrain has expanded. TikTok accounts dedicated to mocking random people in public settings gain millions of views. Ordinary individuals, without the protections of fame or resources, can become the objects of ridicule overnight. What was once localized cruelty is now democratized, viral, and profitable.
Empathy in Decline
The cultural costs are visible. Research shows that empathic concern among young adults has declined significantly over the past few decades. While many factors contribute, the saturation of media with ridicule and cynicism cannot be ignored. Exposure to ridicule conditions audiences to interpret vulnerability as entertainment rather than as a cue for compassion.
Desensitization research suggests that repeated exposure dulls emotional responses. Just as violent media can reduce sensitivity to real violence, ridicule-based media may reduce sensitivity to humiliation. Compassion fade compounds the problem: when ridicule becomes constant, each instance feels less worthy of care. The meme cycle that recycles failure after failure doesn’t just entertain; it trains us to laugh at suffering until the very capacity for empathy begins to erode.
An Ethical Question
The implications are not limited to psychology—they are ethical. Professional codes in journalism, psychology, and even technology ethics emphasize the obligation to minimize harm and to respect human dignity. Yet entertainment often treats those principles as irrelevant.
Editing reality shows to produce humiliating caricatures, amplifying cruel memes through algorithms, or rewarding audiences for laughing at distress all violate the spirit of those ethical commitments. The question, then, is not simply whether ridicule is funny. The question is whether it is responsible to keep designing systems that profit from cruelty.
A Model of Ridicule
The paper proposes a synthesized model of how ridicule works. At the input stage, platform incentives, parasocial bonds, and social identity anxieties make ridicule available and attractive. At the process stage, mechanisms like norm licensing, dehumanization, and online disinhibition convert those inputs into action. At the outcome stage, the results include empathy erosion, reputational damage, and health harms for targets. Those outcomes then feed back into the system, since viral engagement makes ridicule even more valuable to producers and platforms.
Ridicule, in this sense, is not just tolerated—it is structurally advantaged.
Where Do We Go from Here?
This might sound bleak, but the point of the research is not simply to diagnose a cultural illness. It is to identify places where intervention is possible.
Producers can draw clearer boundaries around humor that humiliates the vulnerable. They can implement duty-of-care standards, provide support for participants, and avoid editing practices that turn people into caricatures.
Platforms can re-weight algorithms that currently give cruel content an advantage. They can diversify recommendations to prioritize more than outrage and contempt.
Audiences can recognize their complicity. Every click, share, or laugh is a data point that rewards cruelty. Choosing not to engage is not trivial—it is a form of cultural resistance.
Educators can build media literacy that helps people recognize ridicule’s mechanisms and resist the temptation to consume it.
Ridicule will not disappear, nor should all forms of satire or critique. But when cruelty becomes the default script of entertainment, it demands examination. Laughter is not neutral. To laugh at another’s pain is to join in a cultural rehearsal of callousness.
Closing
The culture of ridicule is not just about jokes. It is about how societies decide whose suffering counts, and whose suffering is entertaining. My paper argues that ridicule has become a pathology at the cultural level because it consistently trades human dignity for amusement and profit.
The real question is whether we are content to keep rehearsing cruelty, or whether we are willing to reimagine humor in ways that build connection rather than erode empathy. To laugh with others is an act of resilience. To laugh at them is a symptom of dysfunction. Recognizing the difference is not just a matter of taste—it is a matter of cultural health.
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