On the counterfactual nature of envy: “It could have been me”

Abstract

We examined whether counterfactual thinking influences the experience of envy. Counterfactual thinking refers to comparing the situation as it is to what it could have been, and these thought processes have been shown to lead to a variety of emotions. We predicted that for envy the counterfactual thought “it could have been me” would be important. In four studies we found a clear link between such counterfactual thoughts and the intensity of envy. Furthermore, Studies 3 and 4 revealed that a manipulation known to affect the extent of counterfactual thinking (the perception of being close to obtaining the desired outcome oneself), had an effect on the intensity of envy via counterfactual thoughts. This relationship between counterfactual thinking and the experience of envy allows for new predictions concerning situations under which envy is likely be more intense.

Keywords:

• Envy
• Counterfactual thinking
• Appraisal
• Social comparison

Notes

¹ Two participants had not recalled an episode of envy, as they had copied the assignment in the box instead of written down a personal story. There were two pairs of cases that came from the same IP address, and because it could be that someone created two MTurk accounts and filled out the questionnaire twice, we left these participants out of the analyses. We used these exclusion criteria in the other studies as well.

² We had also added the Social Comparison Orientation (the INCOM, Gibbons & Buunk, 1999) for exploratory reasons. Unfortunately, we made a mistake with the scale labelling that prevented us from using the scale.

³ For exploratory reasons, we had also added questions on whether participants had thought “I wish I had received the promotion”, had felt “a little frustrated” and had felt “happy for the other”. Furthermore, in Studies 3 and 4 we had added a manipulation of target similarity, which did not influence envy nor counterfactual thinking. We left those out of this manuscript. Note that also within those conditions, counterfactual thinking correlated with envy, Study 3 r(175) = .43, p < .0001, Study 4 r(182) = .29, p < .0001. Finally, Study 4 also contained a manipulation check for perceived similarity to the target other. The descriptive statistics of these variables and manipulations that were left out of this manuscript can be found in Appendix A.

⁴ We conducted the meta-analysis with the metagen package in the statistical software R. For Studies 1, 3 and 4 we used the correlation reported in that study. In Study 2 we had three measures of counterfactual thinking that we had expected to be related to envy (the upward counterfactual thinking scales). For this meta-analysis we took the average of the three upward counterfactual scales and correlated that average with envy, r(308) = .32, p < .0001. We also added the two correlations from the additional conditions reported in Footnote 3, which gave us 6 correlations with a total sample size of 1826 participants.