Envy: When people want what others have

 Money – only one reason to be envious

Envy doesn’t enjoy a good reputation. For this reason, few people admit when they are envious or resentful. However, recent research also ascribes some positive aspects to the emotion. Psychologists differentiate between benign and malicious envy.

In a ranking of one hundred desirable personality traits envious ranked... 97th. Only petty, malicious, and cruel ranked worse. Even though this (German) survey dates from the 1970s, I suppose that the unpopularity of envy has hardly changed since then. Envy enjoys a bad reputation. In many cultures it’s considered a sin. In the Catholic Church it is even among the Seven Deadly Sins. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house or wife, one of the Ten Commandments reminds us.

“People are usually taught to rejoice in other people’s successes,” explains the social psychologist Richard Smith. “Envy violates social conventions that usually require supportive rather than competitive, begrudging reactions to another person’s success.” To leer at the fortune, possessions or talents of your fellows is considered to be beyond the pale. Although almost everyone is familiar with the nagging feeling, nobody likes to admit being envious. 

Scientists who study envy face some particularly hard challenges: How to investigate a feeling that no one likes to talk about? Yet, researchers brought to light a pile of things about envy – and even put it in a slightly better light. 

What makes people envious?

Following the definition most researchers agree with envy goes like this: someone compares himself with another person. The comparison is unfavorable for him. He suffers because his self-esteem is questioned. The less likely he is to overcome his inferiority, the more hostile his thoughts and the more he desires to harm the better-off person. The social comparison is crucial: Envy is not primarily about possessing something or being particularly good at something. It’s about having more and being better than others. 

We envy what others own or what they are: their prosperity, their abilities, their attractiveness. Most envy experiences that people report fall into one of these three major areas. What is enviable, however, differs from person to person and can change within the span of life. Nicole Henniger and Christine Harris have conducted surveys with more than 1700 (mostly American) women and men between the ages of eighteen and eighty: It turned out that attractiveness was a greater envy factor in young age groups – especially among women under thirty. Men more often grudged others for their professional success – peaking when they were about forty years old. It seems that envy doesn’t stop at classical gender roles. 

Envy reveals what is important to the individual, what constitutes the self-image. The promising internship of a fellow student, the luxury home of a colleague, the adventurous holiday of a good friend – the better the desired object fits the self-definition the more likely envy is to occur. “We only truly care about our performance in a limited number of life domains” explains Peter Salovey, who conducted several studies on envy at Yale University. “When others surpass us in these domains, self-evaluation is threatened as the comparison process is invoked.” He claims that people have a natural need to maximize or at least maintain their self-worth. This assumption is consistent with Abraham Tesser’s self-evaluation maintenance model, the psychological theory on which Salovey based his experiments. 

It is also possible, however, that spontaneous comparison with others makes something desirable - an effect that advertising plays on. Jan Crusius and Thomas Mussweiler of the University of Cologne examined this more impulsive side of envy. In a field experiment, the two psychologists pretended to perform a taste test and approached some more or less inebriated revelers at the Cologne Carnival. The researchers feigned drawing lots to determine whether the subjects should receive some chewy candies or a box of chocolate sweets. In reality, the lots had been faked and everybody received the chewy candies. (Previous tests had shown that the chocolate sweets are usually preferred.) Half of the participants carried out the test alone. For the other half, someone from the psychologist’s team posed as a second passer-by, who received the chocolate sweets "randomly". 

After the taste test, the participants were asked how happy they were with the candies, how much they would have enjoyed the confection of chocolate and how much they envy the other passers-by. The hypothesis of the scientists was confirmed: an envious reaction arose spontaneously when someone else received the better product – and only then. The persons were not annoyed that they were deprived of the chocolate confect, but that someone else received it. The lower their self-control-level (the more inebriated they were), the more sensitive they reacted to the disadvantage. 

“This finding supports the view that envy is a basic and spontaneous response to superior others that results even if the reason for their superiority is of limited self-relevance” conclude Crusius and Mussweiler. In subsequent laboratory experiments, they were able to show that people in comparisons of such kind would pay significantly more to acquire a product. Keeping up with others can be costly.   

Benign and malicious envy

“The envious man thinks that if his neighbor breaks a leg, he will be able to walk better himself “, Helmut Schoeck is scoffing in his analysis Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior. Malicious enviers act in bad faith to be better off themselves. In order to restore their wounded ego, they hold begrudging and hostile thoughts against those who are superior to themselves. Sometimes vile or even criminal acts follow.  

An example of this form of envy is the mischievous stepmother who is out to kill Snow White, because she cannot stand her stepdaughter’s beauty: "From that hour, whenever she looked at Snow White, her heart heaved in her breast, she hated the girl so much. And envy and pride grew higher and higher in her heart like a weed, so that she had no peace day or night." 

For a long time, psychologists have been engaged in malicious or destructive envy and some emotion researchers argue that ill will is part of envy by definition: The envious person typically wants to regain equality by weakening others and not by improving oneself, claim the Italian social psychologist Maria Miceli and her colleague Cristiano Castelfranchi. They believe that “painful feelings of helplessness and hopelessness” which come along with inferiority are at the heart of envy. It is easier to long for the harm of the privileged than work on one’s own shortcomings. 

But the comparison with others can also spur somebody to improve himself. In that case psychologists talk about benign or constructive envy. Niels van de Ven of the University of Tilburg is convinced that there are two fundamentally different forms of envy. Together with his colleagues Zeelenberg and Pieters he analyzed more than two hundred envy reports. In fact, they found characteristic differences: Benign enviers admire the performance of those with whom they measure, pay them sincere compliments, and would even like to be their friends. They feel inferior and even (a little bit) frustrated, but they spring into action to achieve more for themselves. Benign envy motivates people to get what others already have. 

Sounds a lot more likeable. Why isn't that always the case? Evidence suggests that ill will is more pronounced if someone sees no possibility to change his situation and to close the gap on the envied person. Secondly, people seem to be more envious when the envied one doesn’t deserve his lead. When a colleague in the call center gets a bonus even though he hasn’t concluded more customer contracts, vicious thoughts are nourished. In this sense, malicious envy is the emotional answer to unfair conditions. 

Benign or malicious envy – both have their own purposes to improve one’s standing within a social hierarchy. Only the means aren’t socially acceptable in both cases. Furthermore, it isn’t always obvious what form of envy you deal with, given that ill will sometimes hides behind good intentions. It is clear, however, that envy never feels good. As the German humorist Wilhelm Busch observed: Envy is never to be envied.       

References

Crusius, J., & Mussweiler, T. (2012). When people want what others have: The impulsive side of envious desire. Emotion, 12(1), 142-153. doi:10.1037/a0023523 

Henniger, N. E., & Harris, C. R. (2015). Envy Across Adulthood: The What and the Who. Basic & Applied Social Psychology, 37(6), 303-318. 

Miceli, M., & Castelfranchi, C. (2007). The envious mind. Cognition & Emotion, 21(3), 449-479. 

Parrott, W. G. (2009): Envy. In D. Sander & K. R. Scherer (Eds.) The Oxford companion to emotion and the affective sciences. New York, NY, US: Oxford University Press. 

Salovey, P. (1991). The psychology of jealousy and envy. New York, NY, US: Guilford Press. Schoeck, H. (1974). Der Neid und die Gesellschaft. Freiburg i. Br. : Herder 

Schönbach, P. (1972). Likableness ratings of 100 German personality-trait words corresponding to a subset of Anderson’s 555 trait words. European Journal Of Social Psychology, 2(3), 327-333. 

Smith, R. H., & Kim, S. H. (2007). Comprehending envy. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1), 46-64. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.133.1.46 

van de Ven, N., Zeelenberg, M., & Pieters, R. (2009). Leveling up and down: The experiences of benign and malicious envy. Emotion, 9(3), 419-429. doi:10.1037/a0015669 

van de Ven, N., Zeelenberg, M., & Pieters, R. (2012). Appraisal patterns of envy and related emotions. Motivation And Emotion, 36(2), 195-204. doi:10.1007/s11031-011-9235-8