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Down To Earth (DTE) speaks to scientists and authors to take stock of what we know so far about the emotions of pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth; the historical debates around them and the critical gaps in our understanding.
In the eighth part, DTE speaks to Jens Lange, an assistant professor at the University of Hamburg, Germany. Lange's work focuses on emotions and their links with personalities. Lange also studies envy and its two important forms—benign and malicious.
Q. Is envy more psychological than social?
A. Being envious is frowned upon. It is considered a deadly sin. It is probably a very common experience, but most people deny experiencing it and insult those who do. And this is a very interesting dynamic.
It makes sense to investigate envy because it stems from a social comparison with another person. It speaks to people’s desire for a higher social rank. Both these processes are fundamental psychological processes in humans. There is evidence showing that people automatically compare themselves to others. If you want to say that you are smart or nice, you do that by comparing yourself to other people in a community, group, culture or other reference group.
Q. Given that envy is a common experience, have humans benefited from it?
A. Typically, most people would describe envy as evil, especially in the Christian tradition, where it is part of the deadly sins. This kind of thinking is deeply ingrained in people, that they should not experience envy. But from a psychological perspective, we tend not to judge. We look at emotions as something functional to help people deal with situations.
For envy, there is evidence that it is elicited when people are lower ranked compared to another person ranked higher. Envy gives people a fundamental desire for a higher social rank. Consequently, people activate certain reactions that help them level that difference. From that functional perspective, envy has a certain value.
So, if envy has value, then it is not bad, right? But philosophers have a different view. They ask if it is good for society. When people are envious, certain things that they do to deal with a situation of being lower ranked could hurt others in a society. For instance, envy may motivate you to do things that are bad for society in general or even, maybe, bad for yourself. In that sense, envy may not be valuable. This means that to a certain extent, envy is reasonable. People should not avoid experiencing it because it helps them deal with situations of high relevance. But then envy can lead to certain reactions that are, at least from a moral standpoint, not valuable.
There is already some evidence that when people compare themselves with others over certain physical characteristics that they want to strive for, then envy may motivate people to consume diet pills or go on certain nutritional diets, which can be bad for a person.
However, none of the emotions is guaranteed to always make society better off. For instance, in psychology, often the reasoning is that people had to deal with certain situations in the past, which are relevant to their personal needs and desires. There is a large body of evidence supporting the conclusion that people have a fundamental desire for social rank. It also makes perfect sense because being high up in a hierarchy has various benefits. You have access to valuable resources, like material advantages and social support. It comes with better health conditions, longevity and so on.
This is a very plausible mechanism that would help you transmit your genes. But, then, these evolutionary explanations are always difficult to make. I mean, it is a very reasonable story, but I cannot travel back in time and test whether this works. We only have evidence that signals of higher social rank intensify envious reactions to gain a social rank.
Q. One reason behind the success of the human race was cooperation. How does envy, which encourages competition, interact with it?
A. I think, envy primarily is relevant in competitive situations and there is no way to avoid competition. Certain resources are limited. In an evolutionary sense, not everyone can have all the things they want.
We study how people deal with the situation of being lower ranked. Namely, we often compare what is called benign envy and malicious envy. If you are compared to someone higher ranked than you, then you can either try to become as highly ranked as the other person, for instance, by investing more effort, which is called benign envy, or you can try to harm the superior person’s position, which is called malicious envy.
Evidence indicates that benign envy occurs especially in situations in which social rank is distributed according to prestige strategy. So, people try to achieve a certain social rank to be respected. They might also gain influence partly by sharing their skills and knowledge with others. So, some people are highly ranked and are willing to tell you how to become equally successful to improve society’s overall value. In that sense, it could be interpreted as a form of cooperation, right?
But then there are exceptions. Certain groups may cooperate and foster envious reactions for goals that may not necessarily be reasonable. An example that my philosopher friend uses is, if you are benignly envious of a very successful torturer, and the torturers operate such that everyone becomes very good at torturing others, that is not necessarily morally valuable.
Q. When did this distinction between the two forms of envy—benign and malicious—emerge? What triggers benign envy or malicious envy, and can one individual experience both?
A. It has been discussed in various forms since the 1990s. There is one particular paper published in 2009 from the Netherlands, where they introduced these terms. Since then, it has been heavily investigated in various other papers.
As for when people experience a particular form of envy over the other, most research on emotions argues that they result from people’s evaluations of situations, which are called appraisals or automatic evaluations. You can imagine that people are constantly asking questions about situations, and depending on how they answer them, they will experience different emotions. There is evidence indicating that benign envy results mostly from people experiencing a high desire to change their situation for the better, whereas malicious envy occurs mostly when people evaluate the other’s higher social rank as subjectively undeserved.
So, for instance, when this person shows a higher rank, because they were the teacher’s favourite in school, or have rich parents, or just have better genes, I consider the rank of my competitor to be subjectively undeserved. If people tend to make these kinds of appraisals and evaluations of a situation more frequently, then they are also more likely to experience either of these two forms of envy.
For example, certain people with high levels of narcissism are more likely to experience malicious envy. They think others do not appreciate their brilliance, and so they have to aggressively put them down. They are more likely to evaluate others’ advantages as undeserved and then experience more malicious envy.
To answer the second part of your question, in each situation, I can experience either of these or both at the same time, or none of these. Very likely, it happens within the same person, but not necessarily in the same situation. But each person can experience both; depending on their personality, one of them may be more frequent than the other.
But this is in the land of speculation. So, there is no evidence to support this claim, but I personally always find it plausible that this can also evolve as a sequence. So, initially it makes perfect sense if you try to improve your own situation of being lower ranked. If that does not work, one might switch to malicious envy.
Q. What are some of the gaps in our understanding of envy?
A. Two gaps come to my mind. On a general level, we know how envy interactions unfold. We know that if there is a comparison in terms of social rank, then people may invest more effort into actual behaviour, or invest in harming behaviour. But does this translate into some benefits to the person experiencing envy? There is not so much evidence on this.
Second, there is a very limited understanding of cross-cultural differences. It is very reasonable to predict that between different cultures, different things will elicit envy. An interesting pattern is that some languages have different words that refer to benign and malicious envy. In other cultures, they do not. Does that make a difference, for instance? What about different religious backgrounds?
There is a long tradition in Christianity to discard envious feelings, but probably in other religions, it is not so much. And is this kind of cultural variation also predictive of envy unfolding differently or being more prevalent? We are yet to understand them.
(as told to Rohini Krishnamurthy)
This is the ninth of an 18-part series.
This was first published as part of the cover story of the 16-31 May, 2024 Print edition of Down To Earth