Justice for the average Joe: The role of envy and the mentalizing network in the deservingness of others’ misfortunes

Abstract

The misfortunes of enviable individuals are met by observers with pleasure whereas those of “average”, non-enviable individuals elicit pain. These responses are mirrored in deservingness judgments, as enviable individuals’ misfortunes are perceived as deserved and those of non-enviable individuals perceived as undeserved. However, the neural underpinnings of these deservingness disparities remain unknown. To explore this phenomenon, we utilized fMRI to test the hypotheses that (A) non-enviable targets’ misfortunes would be associated with activation of brain regions that mediate empathic responding (pain matrix, mentalizing network) and not for enviable targets and (B) that activation of those regions would predict decreases in deservingness judgments. Supporting our first hypothesis, the misfortunes of non-enviable targets (as opposed to good fortunes) were associated with activation of the mentalizing network: medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, temporal–parietal junction, and anterior temporal lobes. Supporting our second hypothesis, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex activation from this contrast was negatively correlated with subsequent reports of how much the non-enviable target deserved his/her misfortune. These findings suggest that non-enviable individuals’ misfortunes are perceived as unjust due, in part, to the recruitment of the mentalizing network.

Keywords:

• Envy
• Deservingness
• Empathy
• Misfortune
• Mentalizing network
• fMRI

We thank David Powell for his technical help in the running of this study and Nancy Bailey for her help in scheduling participants.

This experiment was funded by a Research Support Grant from the University of Kentucky’s Dean of Arts and Sciences and from the Department of Psychology.

Notes

3. ¹ These inter-stimulus intervals may have been too short in duration, leading to the presence of residual signal from one trial to the next. However, this would have been an issue for only half of the trials as they were followed by a longer baseline fixation. Further, this issue would only serve to dampen the differences we observed between experimental conditions, though it may have contributed to our failures to replicate several findings relevant to schadenfreude and empathic pain.