Does Envy Lead to Antisocial Behaviors?

Can envy cause antisocial behaviors?

Source: Nastya_gepp/Pixabay

While jealousy is referred to as the “green-eyed monster,” envy is often seen as its tamer, more innocent counterpart. Therefore, there has been relatively little research on the consequences of envy. Existing studies suggest that envy is linked to lower personal well-being, however, little research has investigated the interpersonal consequences of envy (Behler, Wall, Bos, & Green, 2020). Behler et al. (2020) thus conducted a set of experiments to understand whether envy can lead to interpersonal harm. In addition to studying the effects of envy, the researchers looked at gratitude, which can be thought of as the opposite of envy given that a grateful person appreciates what they already have, whereas an envious person wants what others have.

Study 1

In the first study, researchers recruited an ethnically diverse sample of 143 undergraduates at a university on the East coast of the U.S. In the laboratory, participants participated in a writing task designed to induce envy, gratitude, or a neutral state. In the envy condition, participants were told: “Envy is a negative feeling or emotional state that results from a desire to have the possessions, achievements, or qualities of another for yourself” (p.3). Next, they were instructed to spend 10 minutes writing about an instance in which they felt envious. In the gratitude condition, participants were told: “Gratitude is a positive feeling or emotional state that results from recognizing sources of goodness in others and the benefits you have received from others” (p.3). Similar to in the envy condition, participants then wrote about an instance in which they felt gratitude. Finally, in the neutral condition, participants reflected on a “typical interaction” with a salesperson and then wrote about their feelings during this interaction.

After the writing task, participants were paired with a gender-matched partner whom they believed they would be completing another task with. A partner of the same gender was chosen as people are more likely to compare themselves to those who are similar to them. This partner was actually a trained confederate who then “accidentally” knocked down a cup of 30 pencils when the experimenter was out of the room. The confederate then slowly picked up the pencils and recorded how many pencils the participant helped them pick up.

The researchers found that those who were induced to feel envy picked up fewer pencils (10.36 on average) compared to those in the gratitude (13.50 pencils on average) or neutral (13.48 pencils on average) conditions. Meanwhile, those in the gratitude and neutral conditions did not differ in the number of pencils they picked up.

Study 2

In Study 2, the researchers aimed to understand whether envy could cause harm rather than simply the unwillingness to help. An ethnically diverse sample of 127 students from the same university as in Study 1 came into the laboratory and were assigned to one of the three conditions: envy, gratitude, or neutral. To induce the emotions, the researchers used the same writing tasks as in Study 1 with one exception. Due to the concern that the salesperson task might have induced positive feelings, students in the neutral condition were instead asked to observe the details of the room they were in and to write about these details.

Afterward, participants completed a modified version of the Tangram Help Hurt Task (Saleem et al., 2015), a puzzle game through which participants can help or harm their partners. In this case, participants were told that they and their partner would select puzzles, varying in difficulty, for each other. They were further informed that if they both completed all of the puzzles in 10 minutes, they would each receive an extra .25 points of course credit. However, if they failed to complete the puzzles in 10 minutes, only one of them, the faster one, would receive extra course credit. This person would receive .5 extra points of course credit.

Findings indicated that participants who were induced to feel envy were more likely than those in the neutral or gratitude conditions to assign harder puzzles to their partner. Those in the envy condition also reported a greater desire to harm the partner (i.e., the intention to make it hard for them to earn credits) compared with those in the neutral condition. Contrary to expectations, there were no differences in desire to harm for those in the envy versus gratitude conditions. Surprisingly, there were also no differences between the three groups in the desire to help the partner nor the assignment of easier puzzles to the partner. The researchers suggest that this lack of differences in prosocial behaviors may be due to the competitive nature of the scenario.

Implications

Taken together, these findings show that envy can cause people not only to passively refrain from helping others but also to actively harm others. Importantly, the harmful interpersonal effects extend to those who are not the original targets of envy. In this study, participants harmed (or did not help) a complete stranger due to their feelings of envy.

The study also found unexpectedly that inducing gratitude did not boost prosocial behaviors nor reduce antisocial behaviors in comparison to the neutral condition. The researchers point out that recent meta-analyses (e.g., Dickens, 2017) have also suggested that while gratitude interventions may boost one’s positive affect, they are rather ineffective in improving interpersonal relationships. The researchers suggest that instead, self-affirmation tasks, in which a person reflects on the values that are the most important to them, may be used to keep people from feeling the harmful emotion of envy.