We investigate in detail the mechanism of superradiance to render the instability of Kerr-de Sitter black holes in scalar-tensor gravity. Our results provide more clues to examine the scalar-tensor gravity in the astrophysical black holes in the universe with cosmological constant. We also discuss the spontaneous scalarization in the de Sitter background and find that this instability can also happen in the spherical de Sitter configuration in a special style.