Envy and admiration: emotion and motivation following upward social comparison

ABSTRACT

Two key emotions people can experience when someone else is better than them are envy and admiration. There are conflicting findings in the scientific literature on which behaviour is elicited by these emotions. In one study (with two samples, total N = 345), we test which motivations are triggered by envy and admiration. The main finding is that (benign) envy and admiration both lead to a motivation to improve oneself. This confirms earlier findings that admiration leads to a motivation to affiliate with the admired other and a motivation to improve one's own position. Furthermore, it supports the idea that envy can lead to both a motivation to improve oneself and a motivation to pull down the envied other, finding support for a subtypes theory of envy.

KEYWORDS:

• Envy
• admiration
• action tendencies
• motivation
• upward social comparison

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Smith's recent view on this is more nuanced (see, e.g., Hoogland, Thielke, and Smith, in press). However, as his review is still one of the core overview papers on envy, it is important to note here.

2. Jealousy is of course theoretically different from envy, as jealousy typically deals with three persons and the core aspect of it is the fear of losing something (or someone) to another person (one's partner in the classic case). However, people often refer to envy with the word jealousy (see Smith, Kim, & Parrott, 1988, for an extensive discussion).

3. After these questions about the experienced emotions and resulting motivations of interest to this study had been asked, some additional questions were added to explore other ideas for future research. Researchers interested in exploring this data further can contact the author. The questions were: “Do you think it was deserved that the other had X?”, How much did you think you could later get X yourself?”, “How important did you thought it was for you to have X before the situation occurred that you have just described?”, “How important did you thought it was for you to have X after the situation occurred that you have just described?”, “How much did you like the other before the situation occurred that you have just described?”, “How much did you like the other after the situation occurred that you have just described?”, and “How important do you think the accomplishment of the other is in the eye of the general public?”.

Furthermore, in the US sample we also asked two questions used to measure benign and malicious envy in a language that has only one word for envy, such as English, that was developed by Van de Ven et al. (2015) to explore their relationships with the current variables. These were not included in the main analyses of this manuscript, as the measure is so different from the other emotion measures used in this manuscript. This would not create a fair contrast for the main question on how benign envy and admiration relate to motivation, as the benign envy measure already contains a description that includes the motivation to improve. However, a quick look at how these measures relate to the other variables replicates the earlier finding that both the benign and malicious envy measure correlate with general envy, r(160) = .27, p < .001, r(160) = .18, p = .021, respectively. When we relate these envy measures to the moving up motivation, we see that benign envy correlates with the tendency to move up, r(160) = .38, p < .001, while malicious envy does not, r(160) = .02, p = .810. For the pulling down motivation, we see that malicious envy correlates with the tendency to pull down the other, r(160) = .37, p < .001, while benign envy actually correlates negatively with this motivation, r(160) = –.18, p = .020. When we test the main hypothesis of the current project and add both this English measure of benign envy and that of admiration as predictors of the motivation to improve, it is mainly the benign envy measure that has an effect, β = .34, t = 4.42, p < .001, and the admiration measure has a marginally significant effect, β = .14, t = 1.76, p = .080. As we discussed before, we do not wish to interpret this finding as this benign envy measure already contains the motivation to improve, and therefore does not allow a fair comparison to test how benign envy and admiration relate to a motivation to improve.