Why Your Neighbor’s New Car Feels Like a Personal Attack

When anthropologist Donald E. Brown chronicled the “human universals,” he rightfully listed envy, social comparison, and a desire for positive self-image among the many traits we all share across cultures.

What he could have done instead is simply write "crab bucket mentality" and be done with it, given how universal it is for humans to hate seeing other humans succeed.

If you've ever rolled your eyes at a friend's promotion, side-eyed a colleague’s LinkedIn humblebrag, or instinctively rooted against the frontrunner in a reality TV show, then congrats, you’ve been right there in the trenches with the rest of us.

What’s curious isn’t that this exists, but how uncurious we are about it. We all feel it, most of us act on it, and yet almost no one finds it particularly odd that the success of the people we call our own often irks us the most.

Let’s zoom in and see if a bit of evolutionary theory can't help us make sense of it all.

Why does someone else's success feel like a threat?

In a world of eight billion people, why should your neighbor’s new Tesla or the new book deal they struck feel like they somehow come at your expense?

It’s not envy in the abstract that's triggering these emotions, nor is it some innate balance of fairness or karma being broken by their win. Indeed, no one alive today is waking up upset about Rockefeller’s past fortune, and relatively few in the United States are pacing over Alisher Usmanov’s palaces by the Caspian. Wealth and success that knows to keep its distance doesn't really bother us. The kind that does is always much closer to home, familiar, and comparable.

In fact, that’s the key to it all right there.

What researchers call "social comparison theory" helps explain where this all is coming from. First introduced by Leon Festinger in 1954, the theory suggests that we evaluate our own self-worth not in a vacuum but by comparing ourselves to others, especially those we perceive to be similar to us in age, background, or status. When someone close to us pulls ahead, our internal balance shifts just as in a pneumatic system.

It’s not just that they’re winning that gets us going. It’s that they're winning, and because of that, I’m falling behind.

Recent research sharpens the picture of how such social comparisons trigger our envy. For example, Uzum et al. (2022) explored the “crab barrel syndrome” and found that individuals with more competitive, Type A personalities were especially prone to experiencing distress when peers succeeded. In other words, the people most obsessed with climbing the ladder are also the ones most agitated when someone else moves up first.

And this isn’t just psychological fluff that disappears when you increase the n in your studies. Neuroimaging studies have shown that social comparison triggers activity in the same brain regions as physical pain, particularly the anterior cingulate cortex and insula (Takahashi et al., 2009). This is why your friend's new car doesn’t just annoy you. It actually hurts.

Why we root for the underdog

Now, let’s flip the script for a moment.

Just as we dislike those above us, we often root for the ones below us in what is known as "the underdog effect"—our reflexive tendency to cheer for the party with the least power, fewest resources, or longest odds.

Look closely and you can see it everywhere from March Madness, David vs. Goliath to international politics and corporate wars, public opinion often sides with the party seen as less advantaged, regardless of actual merit.

One potential explanation is that underdog support is a form of identity management. We sometimes align ourselves with the perceived “loser” not just out of empathy but to defend our own sense of self and fairness. Backing the longshot helps protect our belief that success should be earned, not inherited. It’s a way to restore justice when the world feels unfair.

Another perspective is decidedly more evolutionary: If you’re not already allied with the current alpha, then investing in the next contender is just smart strategy. In ancestral environments, social status determined access to food, mates, and protection. If your clan’s top dog didn’t see you as useful, you had a better chance siding with a rising rival than hoping to get adopted into the inner circle. Backing the underdog, in other words, is an ancient form of status-hedging.

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This also explains why the “haters” aren’t necessarily irrational. If success is a zero-sum perception game where someone else's rise feels like your fall, then tearing them down is just a primitive form of self-preservation.

And in fact, we don’t need to actually see someone fail to feel better about ourselves. A study by Fiske (2011) found that just the thought of the overachiever stumbling triggers reward signals.

The social ladder, it turns out, is pneumatic: Push someone down, even in your imagination, and you rise.

So, are we all doomed to be petty little crabs in a bucket?

Not at all. These instincts might be hardwired, but they’re not destiny.

There’s no avoiding envy. It’s a Brownian universal that is wired deep and felt everywhere. But what you can do is weaponize it for personal growth.

Most negative emotions have a positive deflection if you learn to catch them early, and envy is no exception. Properly understood, envy isn’t proof of your moral failure, it's a signal about what you yourself desire. It is a clear and fully evolved alert that someone else has attained something you care about having, or at least care about being perceived as having, and that it’s time for you to act.

Suppressing envy or, worse, treating it as something shameful and beneath you, doesn’t make it disappear. You can pretend you’re not envious and you can even learn to set envy aside faster with age or self-awareness, but there’s a better option at hand.

Treat it as a call to action. A colleague got the promotion you secretly hoped for? A friend launched the thing you kept on your Notion list? Great for them, and rocket fuel for you. The alert you're hearing means you want that thing, or at least the recognition that comes with it. So instead of letting the emotion rot inside you, take the signal seriously.

And then go act on it.