What exactly is envy?

We all know envy, a social emotion that we encounter every day. And although in most cases it has a negative connotation, it fulfills important functions. Psychology teaches us that emotions are neither bad nor good (outside of pathological aspects), they can simply be pleasant or unpleasant. Plus, they always fulfill a function.

Envy in its simplest aspects is represented in a triadic relationship of inequality. This relationship would be composed of two people and an object. And inequality is generated by the fact that one of those people has the object and the other does not, but they want it. Therefore, we are faced with an emotion where social comparison arises.

The social comparison

Human beings live in complex societies, where social status influences our lives. Therefore it makes sense, from an adaptive point of view, that we worry about our social life. This is where social comparison is born, in an effort to be better positioned and have better social resources.

Social comparison can occur in two ways: (a) upward, comparing ourselves with people who are/we perceive better than us, or (b) downward, comparing ourselves with those who are/we perceive worse than us. Each of them fulfills a function and has its reasons, but for the study of envy we are interested in upward comparison: we envy those who have something we want.

Upward social comparison usually aims to identify what differentiates us from the person of higher status, to equal or surpass them. This objective may vary depending on the content of the comparison and the person to be compared. For example, emotions of pride may arise if we compare ourselves to a close person in an aspect that is not relevant to us.

Envy will play an essential role when trying to equal or surpass status in that upward comparison. Our motivation will be to achieve that higher status due to the extra social resources that it would provide us with respect to the other person. And to achieve this, envy can act in different ways, which we will address later.

What is envy?

Envy is a painful social emotion in that it is the product of an unequal relationship. As we have mentioned, it is related to social comparisons and the evaluation of our self. Therefore, we can sometimes refer to envy as a social thermometer that allows us to gauge our social status and take action if it is not what we would like.

Although on occasion envy is expressed openly as a sign of admiration (I’m so envious!), it is normal for it to be hidden. In this sense, hiding envy is part of our social protocol. This fulfills two clear functions: on the one hand, it prevents the envious person from making public the lack of it, thus protecting themselves from a possible devaluation of the self; and the other to prevent the envied person from feeling threatened.

The object of envy can refer to a wide variety of elements. It can encompass possessions, but also personal characteristics or recognitions. This will acquire its characteristic as an object of envy, when it is desired by one person, this person does not possess it and identifies it in another. The desire may largely come from the attempt to restore a position of inferiority or disadvantage. That is, not because of what the object is, but because of what the object represents.

However, How can we react when the emotion of envy appears in us? This is where the two types of envious responses and their consequences come in, which we talk about in the next section.

Types of envy

We can say that there are two main aspects: we could talk about benign envy and malignant envy (also known as schadenfreude). Benign envy arises when the envious person feels discomfort about the well-being or success of the other, but does not harbor ill wishes towards them. The behavior that arises from this type of envy will be attempts, on the part of the envious person, to improve their status. This will be achieved through the acquisition of the object of envy without intervening in the envied person.

In the malicious one, on the contrary, in addition to the discomfort due to success, there are bad desires towards the envied person. Therefore, we will no longer see improvement behaviors; What will appear will be attempts to depreciate the value of the object of envy, or even attempts to decrease the status of the envied person by taking away the object.

Both types of envy seek the same thing, the envious person wants to have a status equal to or superior to that envied. In the malignant one, it would achieve this by reducing the status of the envied, and in the benign one, by increasing the status of the envious. Although the first has a prosocial nature, we must not forget that schadenfreude is also a very present emotion in our lives.

A question to reflect on: when we envy another person, What predominates in us, a benign envy or schadenfreude?

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