When envy leads to schadenfreude

Abstract

Previous research has yielded inconsistent findings concerning the relationship between envy and schadenfreude. Three studies examined whether the distinction between benign and malicious envy can resolve this inconsistency. We found that malicious envy is related to schadenfreude, while benign envy is not. This result held both in the Netherlands where benign and malicious envy are indicated by separate words (Study 1: Sample A, N = 139; Sample B, N = 150), and in the USA where a single word is used to denote both types (Study 2, N = 180; Study 3, N = 349). Moreover, the effect of malicious envy on schadenfreude was independent of other antecedents of schadenfreude (such as feelings of inferiority, disliking the target person, anger, and perceived deservedness). These findings improve our understanding of the antecedents of schadenfreude and help reconcile seemingly contradictory findings on the relationship between envy and schadenfreude.

Keywords:

• Envy
• Malicious envy
• Benign envy
• Schadenfreude
• Social comparison
• Deservedness

The authors thank the various members of the Social Psychology Laboratory at Tilburg University for their help in collecting the data for Study 1 and Ellen Evers for her help with Study 2. Support from the Basic Research Program of the National Research University Higher School of Economics to the fifth author is gratefully acknowledged.

The authors thank the various members of the Social Psychology Laboratory at Tilburg University for their help in collecting the data for Study 1 and Ellen Evers for her help with Study 2. Support from the Basic Research Program of the National Research University Higher School of Economics to the fifth author is gratefully acknowledged.

Notes

¹ In Sample A, the 7-point scale used for all questions actually ranged from 1 to 7 instead of 0 to 6 (except for the scale that assessed perceived deservingness of the other's advantage, which was assessed in the same way as in Sample B). For ease of interpretation and comparison between studies, we present the results of Sample A also on the 0–6 scales by subtracting 1 point from the original answers.

² We had also added “I resented the other” as a measure of resentment, and included such a measure in all studies. Because anger and resentment correlated between .75 and .83, we chose to report only anger throughout the manuscript as that generally had the strongest effect on schadenfreude in the multiple regressions we conducted. If we replace anger with resentment, we find very similar effects in all studies. If we add both measures, the multiple regression analyses show that one of them has an effect on schadenfreude. In all these analyses, the effect of malicious envy on schadenfreude remains.

³ The study was only accessible to workers with >50 earlier approved tasks, with a 95% acceptance rate of those performed tasks. The instructions also stated that if participants did not recall and write a short but serious situation in which they had been envious, we would have to reject their work. Note that we did not reject the work of any participant, but hoped that this warning would make people take the task seriously.We had initially also added another manipulation asking participants to recall either a situation in which the other was better off in an unimportant or an important domain for exploratory reasons. For the current study, we only reported the important conditions. If we include these conditions, there are no differences for the manipulation of deservedness and the only thing that differs in the multiple regression analyses is that dislike does become a significant predictor of schadenfreude (just as we found in the samples of Study 1 and Study 3).

⁴ Note that we instructed participants to not fill out this question if they did not experience any envy, and 4 of the 180 participants (2.2%) did not answer this question. Analyses including this variable thus have 176 participants.

⁵ To validate this measure, we presented 74 Dutch students with the information about the envy types that we used in the USA. We gave them the same description that there are two types of envy, that both feel frustrating, but one focuses on what you miss yourself (Envy Type A), and one on the other person and his or her advantage (Envy Type B). We then asked them, using a 9-point answer scale, whether the feeling of benign envy (benijden) reflects Envy Type A or Envy Type B more (–4 Type A; +4 Type B), and asked the same for malicious envy (afgunst). After this, we also asked them to make a choice, between either classifying Envy Type A as benign envy and Envy Type B as malicious envy or the other way around.Results confirmed that participants thought benign envy (benijden) reflected Envy Type A more (M = –0.68, SD = 2.64) while malicious envy (afgunst) reflected Envy Type B more (M = 1.91, SD = 2.41; paired-t(73) = 4.92, p < .001, d = 0.57). Both for benign envy, t(73) = 2.21, p = .030, d = 0.26, and for malicious envy, t(73) = 6.82, p < .001, d = 0.79, the means differed from the midpoint of the scale, suggesting that participants tended to agree with the classification. When asked to make a choice, 55 out of 74 (74%) indicated that Envy Type A was benign envy and Envy Type B was malicious, which differed from random choices or chance with p < .001. Participants were thus three times as likely to classify benign envy as Type A and malicious envy as Type B than the other way around. This provides support for our idea that this measure reflects benign and malicious envy.