A few years ago, I received some news I’d been longing to hear: The first book I’d ever written received an offer from a publisher. My childhood dream of becoming an author looked set to become a reality.
It was six o’clock in the evening—the ideal time for a celebratory drink with my colleagues. But I didn’t tell anyone the news. I thought my excitement would be seen as bragging. So I kept my mouth shut.
If only I’d known about the concept of Mitfreude: a German term for the vicarious joy people can feel at another’s happiness. According to recent research, we are needlessly cautious about sharing good news, because we fear it will provoke boredom, irritation, or envy in others.
Yet Mitfreude is surprisingly common—and sharing our happier moments can improve our mood, strengthen our relationships with our colleagues, and boost our reputation within our professional network.
‘Joying’ with someone
Mitfreude (which literally translates as “joying with”) comes from philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, a man not typically known for a cheery worldview. And yet he once wrote: “To imagine the joy of others and to rejoice at it is the highest privilege of the highest animals.” You could see Mitfreude as the opposite of Schadenfreude, our joy at others’ misfortune.
Studies confirm that there are many benefits to “joying with” another person. In the psychological literature, Mitfreude is often known by the more technical term capitalization: the idea that we can amplify our happiness from a positive event by sharing it with people we like.
We can see this in studies tracking day-to-day changes in people’s emotions. After a conversation in which one person recounts a success or good fortune, the speaker gets to relive the positive experience while the other person enjoys a vicarious mood boost. Crucially, the warm feelings that arise also strengthen social bonds.
“In close relationships, it fosters trust and intimacy,” explains Trevor Watkins, an assistant professor of management at the University of Oklahoma who has examined capitalization in the workplace. Sharing our successes can also enhance our reputation with our peers: “Among coworkers, it offers the opportunity to foster inspiration,” he says. The result is an amplification of our initial happiness: “We derive even more benefit from the positive events than if we had let them passively come and go,” says Watkins. “That’s why it’s called capitalization.”
Unfortunately, many of us do not recognize these benefits. So we tend to keep our happiness to ourselves.
How concealing positivity can backfire
In a survey by Annabelle Roberts, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Texas at Austin, her research team found that 80% of participants reported having concealed a success from people around them, like a promotion at work. Participants wanted to avoid provoking jealousy or creating awkwardness in a conversation. They thought they were being sensitive. In reality, it is the act of hiding a success—and blocking opportunities for Mitfreude—that is most likely to elicit bad outcomes.
Roberts and her colleagues asked participants to consider the hypothetical story of two work friends who are both looking for a new job: One gets asked to give a presentation to a potential employer, but neglects to tell his friend, despite them having discussed their job hunts. There could be multiple explanations for his behavior (including sheer forgetfulness), but the participants saw it as an act that erodes trust. As a result, the participants responded that they would be far less likely to share personal information about themselves with such a colleague—or to collaborate with him in the future.
“Sharing positive things about ourselves does a lot for connection,” says Todd Chan, who conducted research into the benefits of perceived “bragging” for his PhD at the University of Michigan. “It’s not that people forget that friends might be happy for them. It’s more that they’re disproportionately focused on the risk of things like envy. In reality, close friends mostly do feel joy for us.”
How to share joy (without bragging)
Mitfreude can have caveats: Watkins has found that sharing good news is far less likely to bring vicarious joy in competitive workplaces, where it can breed envy and resentment. Fortunately, the research offers some tips to increase the chances that you will meet Mitfreude rather than envy in any situation.
The first is the law of reciprocity. Lukasz Kaczmarek, who heads the Social Psychology Centre at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, has shown that people often keep note of the ways that you have responded to their good news. This then shapes how they’ll react to good news of your own. “Conveying that enthusiasm will return to you as a boomerang,” Kaczmarek says. “Every time you show that your behavior has changed, it produces a change in your partner.”
Where possible, you might also attempt to build up others alongside yourself—a strategy known as “dual promotion.” You might compliment someone’s organizational skills while describing your creative contributions to a project, for example. “The fact you’ve said something good about someone else shows that you must be a warm person,” says Eric VanEpps, an associate professor of marketing at Vanderbilt University who conducted this research.
Finally, you might try to talk about some of the challenges you’ve faced. In a study of entrepreneurs’ presentations, people who described past obstacles or mistakes were considered to be less conceited, and more inspiring, than those who spoke only of their triumphs.
With time, greater awareness of Mitfreude and its benefits may help us all to create a more positive culture.
“Shying away from sharing good news creates like a void that then just is cluttered with bad news,” says VanEpps. “It’s nice to hear good things happen to good people.”