Is "sadistic pleasure" a contrived process of signaling one's antagonism?

Sadistic pleasure presumably incorporates processes that support an authentic enjoyment of others' pain. However, antagonism confirmation theory, grounded in social-psychological theorizing on identity maintenance and the notion of ego-syntonicity, suggests that individuals higher in sadism report greater pleasure in response to others' pain because such reports are immoral responses that confirm their self-views. This alternative conception has yet to be tested.

In two preregistered experiments (total N = 968), participants completed measures of sadism, read about situations involving others' pain, and rated their pleasure. We manipulated the extent to which pleasure from others' pain could be used to signal morality or antagonism.

We found that relatively sadistic people indicated greater pleasure across the studies but, like relatively non-sadistic people, they altered their pleasure ratings to signal greater morality or less antagonism.

The findings fail to support antagonism confirmation theory, but they support recent perspectives on sadism that suggest that sadistic people may occasionally care about seeming moral (or not seeming antagonistic) and that sadism may be somewhat ego-dystonic in this respect.