Envy Across Adulthood: The What and the Who

Abstract

Two studies assessed envy across adulthood. Study 1 (n = 987) examined subjects’ experiences of feeling envy. Study 2 (n = 843) examined being the target of another's envy. Envy primarily occurred between same-gender and similarly aged others. Fewer older adults reported envy incidents. Envy was reported in both distant and close relationships. Both studies found that the likelihood of envying certain domains shifted across the life span: scholastic success, social success, looks, and romantic success were less envied with age, whereas money was more envied with age. Envy in some domains (luck, overall better life) was fairly consistent across the life span.

Notes

¹Our data analysis began last year before the change in the BASP policy. Therefore, we had performed traditional statistical tests in most of our analyses for this article. These are available from the authors. In the current work, we include correlations as a measure of effect size, as well as odds ratios for gender effects.

²Other unrelated items were included in this questionnaire that are not discussed in the present report.

³For ease of display and discussion, we often present age in categories by decade (e.g., 20s, 30s, 40s). However, throughout this article, any correlations with age are based on the full continuous range of ages, not on the constructed categories.

⁴The focus of the present article is on what triggers envy: the characteristics of the people and domains that are envied. In this questionnaire, we also asked about subsequent envious behaviors (e.g., hostility, ingratiation) and the envied person's responses to those behaviors (e.g., helping, avoidance). However, the full theoretical background and analyses of these items would not fit the focus of the present article and would greatly lengthen it. The authors welcome correspondence about these findings and intend to publish them in future work. Relationship closeness, gender, and age are the only variables that are used in both sets of analyses. Elsewhere, the connection between political ideology and dispositional envy (Harris & Henniger, 2013) was examined using a subset of this sample.

⁵This is also supported by point-biserial correlations. When people's acquaintances, r(475) = .222, and close relationships, r(475) = .177, consisted of more women (or more men), they were more likely to be envied by a woman (or man).

⁶As in Study 1, point biserial correlations are provided as a description of the relationship between age and the binary measure of whether participants reported being envied in that domain. However, we do not propose that the actual model of these relationships is strictly linear.

⁷As in Study 1, older people were less likely to report being envied and tended to report fewer domains when they were envied, resulting in some domains having small numbers (n < 5) of older participants of each gender. Therefore, we do not comment on possible interactions at the oldest age group, because these analyses may not be reliable.