The man who is delighted by others’ misfortunes is identical with the man who envies others’ prosperity. For anyone who is pained by the occurrence or existence of a given thing must be pleased by that thing’s non-existence or destruction.
—ARISTOTLE1
Envy … is hatred in so far as it affects a man so that he is sad at the good fortune of another person and is glad when any evil happens to him.
—BARUCH SPINOZA2
Homer: Oh, come on, Lisa. I’m just glad to see him fall flat on his butt! He’s usually all happy and comfortable, and surrounded by loved ones, and it makes me feel … what’s the opposite of that shameful joy thing of yours?
Lisa: Sour grapes.
Homer: Boy, those Germans have a word for everything!
—THE SIMPSONS3
Koreans have a phrase, “When my cousin buys a rice paddy, my stomach twists.” This captures well the pain of envy and helps explain why a misfortune that brings an envied person down can yield emotional pay dirt in the form of schadenfreude. Envy is the familiar blend of painful discontent, ill will, and resentment that can result from noticing another person enjoying something that you desire but seem unable to obtain. But when a misfortune befalls the envied person, the negative comparison drops away, bringing relief and joy. Contemplating it “untwists” the stomach. The misfortune may even provide hope for the future by hobbling the competition.
Envy is a universal human emotion. It is natural to feel envy when we lose out to someone else and must continue to gaze on the envied person now enjoying the desired thing.4 As I underscored in Chapters 1 and 2, social comparisons matter, and envy is a special testimony to this fact. It matters when a person you love chooses someone else who is better looking and more talented than you. It matters when you aspire to compose great music but fail—in contrast to a friend who receives high praise for his recent composition. Most people can identify with the character of Salieri in the film Amadeus. Salieri, although accomplished in his own right, is rendered mediocre by Mozart’s effortless genius. Perhaps there is no better capturing of envy than the scene in the film where F. Murray Abraham (as Salieri) looks up in pain while sight-reading the miraculous notes on the originals of Mozart’s sheet music.5
Social psychologist and neuroscientist Susan Fiske, whose book, Envy Up, Scorn Down: How Status Divides Us, I referred to in Chapter 1, summarizes the neuroscientific evidence on envy and suggests a consistent pattern of brain activation when people feel envy.6 People responding to envied targets show brain activation in the amygdala, an area of the brain associated with reactions to something emotionally important to us, whether good or bad.7 The amygdala appears necessary for the instant evaluation of another person who is superior to us in an important way. Another part of the brain linked with envy is the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Fiske suggests that the ACC is important for envy as a “discrepancy detector.”8 In a sense, we cannot feel envy unless we detect a difference between ourselves and another (superior) person. A third part of the brain associated with envy is the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), an area that activates when we try to understand what another person is thinking and feeling.9 This seems especially important to do when confronted with an envied person who may control things we desire and whose presence matters to us more than does the presence of people with lower status.10 In sum, as one would expect with a blended emotion such as envy, brain activation is complex. But there seems to be a signature pattern of brain activation in envy that reflects our recognition that someone has something important that we do not have and that requires our keen attention if we are to do something about it.
Throughout this book, I have highlighted the personal benefits that result from downward comparisons. I have argued that just about any misfortune befalling another person, from a social comparison perspective, is a potential boost to self-esteem. Where such misfortunes reside, opportunity knocks. If any misfortune suffered by another person has the potential to yield benefit, a misfortune befalling an envied person is a windfall.11 Since envy thrives best in competitive circumstances, the gain from the misfortune will often be direct and palpable. Also, if we envy someone, by definition, the dimension of comparison is important to us, thus adding greater value to what the misfortune brings. An extra bonus is that the misfortune eliminates the painful feeling of envy—no small thing. It is transformational: inferiority and its unpleasantness become superiority and its joys. A painful upward comparison, in an instant, becomes a pleasing downward comparison. What a turnaround! The late American novelist and curmudgeon Gore Vidal famously confessed, “Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.”12 If this can be true, then the reverse can also be true: “Every time a friend fails, I am more alive.”
Mark Twain, in his autobiography Life on the Mississippi, describes a boyhood event in Hannibal, Missouri, that illustrates the joys of seeing an envied person fall. In his retelling, Twain notes that every boy in Hannibal, Twain heading the list, wanted to be a riverboat pilot and wanted it badly. One boy had the job that they craved. He also knew more than they did about everything that mattered, and he pulled it off with the kind of style that had the girls riveted. Twain’s and his friends’ hostile envy was about as intense as one sees it—and great was the schadenfreude when the boy suffered a misfortune on his riverboat. Twain described the feeling: “When his boat blew up at last, it diffused a tranquil contentment among us such as we had not known for months.”13
Novelist Walker Percy also captures the easy path from envy to schadenfreude in his eccentric self-help book, Lost in the Cosmos:14
Your neighbor comes out to get his paper. You look at him sympathetically. You know he has been having severe chest pains and is facing coronary bypass surgery. But he is not acting like a cardiac patient this morning. Over he jogs in his sweat pants, all smiles. He has triple good news. His chest ailment turns out to be hiatal hernia, not serious. He’s got a promotion and is moving to Greenwich [CT], where he can keep his boat in the water rather than on a trailer.
“Great, Charlie! I’m really happy for you.”
Are you happy for him?15
No, Percy argues. For the “envious self,” this kind of news is hardly cheering. He asks the question, “how much good news about Charlie can you tolerate without compensatory catastrophes …?”16 It is as if something unfortunate happening to Charlie is the only possible cure for the envy and unease that his good news is actually causing in you. What are the chances that your own fortunes will change? Also, is there a morally acceptable or doable way to bring Charlie down? Percy bets that if you find out later that the promotion failed to come through, this would not be bad news at all—although you may try to deny, suppress, or hide the joy the news brings.
Cognitive psychologist Terry Turner and I were part of a group of researchers who collaborated on an experiment testing a connection between envy and schadenfreude.17 We first evoked envy in our undergraduate participants by showing them a videotaped interview with a student who had plans to attend medical school. We hired an actor to play the role of either a superior (enviable) student or an average (unenviable) student (eventually, we let the participants in on our deception). As he discussed his academic and extracurricular activities, we added scenes in which he was engaging in these activities. In the envy version, we showed him working away on his organic chemistry homework, peering through a microscope in a cutting-edge biology lab, and walking across Harvard Yard on his way to a summer class that should help him get into Harvard Medical School. We also included a scene showing him entering an expensive condo that his father had bought for him while he was in school, driving a BMW, and cooking a meal with an attractive girlfriend. In the average version, we showed him struggling with his homework and washing test tubes in a biology lab. We also showed him entering an unappealing high-rise dorm, riding crowded public transportation, and eating pizza with an average-looking female acquaintance. Toward the end of each version, we paused the tape for a minute and asked participants to complete a mood questionnaire. Some of the items measured envy. Then, an epilogue appeared on the screen to update the participants about what had happened to the student since the interview. This was where we inserted a misfortune. The epilogue noted that the student had been arrested for stealing amphetamines from the lab where he worked and thus had been forced to delay plans for medical school. A second questionnaire contained items tapping pleased reactions (such as “happy over what happened to the student since the interview”), camouflaged by other items designed to distract the participants from our actual focus.
As we expected, participants felt more schadenfreude when the enviable student suffered than when the average student suffered. Even more telling, any envy reported after the initial pause in the video “explained” much of this effect. Participants who actually reported feeling envy while watching the first part of the interview were most likely to find the later misfortune pleasing. Also, participants who reported higher scores on a personality measure of envy completed before viewing the interview (i.e., “envious types”) were more likely to find the misfortune pleasing.
Research using brain-scan technology also supports the links between envy and pleasure—if the envied person suffers.18 A Japanese team of researchers monitored the brain activity of people as they imagined themselves in scenarios in which another person was of either higher or lower status. Imagining envy activated the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), an area of the brain also associated with experiencing physical pain. The participants were then asked to picture this other person suffering various forms of misfortune, from financial trouble to physical illness. This produced greater brain activity in a different brain region, the striatum, a pleasure or reward center. This pattern of activation was particularly true for those participants who had reported the most envy at first. The lead researcher, Hidehiko Takahashi, summed up the results using the Japanese phrase translated as: “The misfortunes of others are the taste of honey.”19 A Korean might add: Especially if the stomach has been twisting because of envy.
Envy is a blend of ingredients, each of which helps explain why it should be so closely connected to schadenfreude. Twain’s account highlighted the envied boy’s superiority, and envy indeed contains feelings of inferiority. But without accompanying hostility, the schadenfreude produced by the boat exploding would hardly have been so gratifying. People do not feel warmly toward those whom they envy. In fact, hostility may just be the feature of envy that distinguishes it from other unpleasant reactions to another person’s superiority, such as discontent alone.20 One can readily see this in Twain’s account. The envy that he and his friends felt is far from benign. The hostility in their envy clearly contributed to why the explosion caused such contentment.21
There is something distinctive about envious hostility. People feeling envy are willing to take a loss themselves, as long as it also means that the envied person will suffer to the same or greater relative degree.22 This can seem self-defeating, unless one realizes that, to the envious, the pleasure of gaining in an absolute sense is often insufficient compensation for the pain produced by witnessing the envied person’s relative advantage.
It is no surprise that envy is usually a hostile emotion. Envy is triggered by noticing a desired attribute enjoyed by another person, but it is largely a frustrated desire.23 Imagine the experience of noticing and wanting another person’s advantage, all the while knowing that one could easily obtain the advantage eventually. Perhaps there would be a brief feeling of discontent, but this would go away quickly when the path to acquiring the advantage was clear. This is a type of envy, but it is benign in nature.24 The experience would also be quite different if the prospect of obtaining the advantage were naught. The comparison itself may seem irrelevant. We envy people who are similar to ourselves, except that they have something that we dearly want but lack. The similarity allows us to imagine the possibility of our having the longed for thing, even if we know that our desires are likely to be frustrated. When we envy in a hostile way, we have the tantalizing sense of what it might be like to obtain what we want—we can almost taste it—but we feel unable to realize this desire. The frustration of any keen desire, the blocking of an important goal, is a dependable recipe for anger and hostility—and will often trigger schadenfreude if the person causing the frustration suffers.
The editors of popular tabloid magazines such as The National Enquirer would appreciate the observations of Edmund Burke, the 18th-century philosopher and statesman. He suggested that theatergoers anticipating a tragic performance on the stage would quickly lose interest and empty themselves from the theater if they heard that a criminal was just about to be executed outside in a nearby square.25 Burke believed that people have “a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pains of others.”26 Moreover, in his view, real misfortune probably trumps the “imitative arts” every time.
Some have taken this way of thinking even further. In their recent biography of Mao Tse-tung, Mao: The Unknown Story, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday make a persuasive case that Mao was someone who took a special joy “in upheaval and destruction.”27 But Mao also believed that he was not alone in this preference. For instance, he claimed that most people would choose war over perpetual harmony:
Long-lasting peace is unendurable to human beings, and tidal waves of disturbance have to be created in this state of peace. … When we look at history, we adore the times of [war] when dramas happened one after another … which make reading about them great fun. When we get to the periods of peace and prosperity, we are bored.28
Still others, such as Walker Percy, referred to earlier, have also claimed that people have a pleasure-linked fascination with disasters and calamity, at least when these things are happening to other people. The appeal of the tabloid press and the heavy coverage of crime, accidents, and natural disasters in the media testify to the validity of such claims.
In addition to its reliance on real misfortunes, another consistent feature of the tabloid press is its focus on troubles happening to celebrities. A study of The National Enquirer that I conducted with psychologist Katie Boucher confirmed this feature.29 We examined approximately 10 weeks of the magazine. For each story, we rated the status of the person who was the main focus of the story and how much the story detailed a misfortune happening to that person (e.g., divorce, scandal, weight gain, health problem, etc.). As the status of the person in the story increased, so did the likelihood that the story would also focus on misfortune. Although the rich and famous fascinate us, most of us feel infinitely less successful than they and probably a little envious. The chance to read about celebrities’ setbacks can be irresistible—which explains much of the success of these tabloid magazines.
Let’s examine the case of Martha Stewart,30 whose indictment and ultimate conviction for insider trading was made to order for the tabloids. Stewart is a remarkable American success story.31 But, as Michael Kinsley noted in an article for Slate, her period of troubles represent “a landmark in the history of schadenfreude.”32 Following an early career as a model and then as a successful stockbroker, she began using her long-time interests in cooking, decorating, and gardening to develop a series of hugely successful business ventures. After releasing her first book, Entertaining, which was a New York Times best seller, she published an almost yearly series of other books on topics ranging from pies, hors d’oeuvres, and weddings to pulling off a good Christmas celebration. Along the way, she wrote many magazine articles and newspaper columns and was a frequent guest on national television programs. By the time of her indictment for insider trading in 2002, she had created a media empire, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. It included her own magazine, Martha Stewart Living, a daily television program, a catalogue business (Martha by Mail), and a floral business (marthastewartflowers.com), among other ventures. When the company went public on the New York Stock Exchange, she became a billionaire by the end of the first day.
Before her indictment, as the information about her alleged stock dealings emerged, Martha Stewart allowed Jeffrey Toobin, legal analyst for The New Yorker, to interview her at her Connecticut home. He sensed that the ridicule that she was receiving (such as the mock magazine cover, Martha Stewart Living Behind Bars, ubiquitous on the internet) was probably taking its toll on her, and perhaps this seemed an opportunity to right the balance. His observations about this interview were telling.
Stewart positioned herself as just about perfect, free of flaws. When Toobin was served Hunan chicken for lunch, Stewart emphasized that it was done in the best way possible. She gave Toobin the recipe so that he could replicate it later. The kitchen was a marvel, with every kind of copper pot and cooking utensil. From Toobin’s description, everything about her home, about what she served him, about the way she talked and acted, seemed aimed at perfection. Martha Stewart was bound to inspire envy in many people.33
One senses a point of diminishing returns for Stewart as she revealed more about her marvelous lifestyle to Toobin, and comments Stewart made suggest that she was aware of the social price that could come with advantage. Toobin noticed that the utensils for lunch were thin silver chopsticks. Stewart explained that the Chinese associate thinner chopsticks with higher status, which was why she “got the thinnest I could find. That’s why people hate me.”34 She also seemed well aware of the schadenfreude that her troubles were creating for her and even used the word to capture the tabloid tenor of most reactions in the media. However, she expressed puzzlement over this because she saw her main business as helping women become better homemakers, and “to be maligned for that is kind of weird.”35
Stewart must have suffered emotionally from the negative treatment she received from much of the media. Toobin noted that the unattractive photos of her in many publications irritated her. She was peeved that Newsweek suggested that people would have treated her better if she had been nicer to them during her rise to fame and fortune. Her response in each case added to the sense that she thought pretty highly of herself. About the photos, she said, “I’m a pretty photogenic person, I mean, and they manage to find the doozies.” About Newsweek’s claim, she said, “I’ve never not been nice to anybody.”36
Stewart’s unrelenting pursuit of flawless living, however close it may be to realization, created a big target for envy. I am reminded of an often-cited experiment done in the mid-sixties by Elliot Aronson and colleagues, not long after the Kennedy administration’s bungling of the U.S. invasion of Cuba.37 These social psychologists had been struck by the rise in Kennedy’s popularity following this botched attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro. Why would a blunder enhance the president’s appeal? They reasoned that before this incident, the handsome, talented, and charismatic Kennedy had cut so impressive a figure that people might have found it hard to identify with him and thus harder to like him. Perhaps this mistake “humanized” him and made him more likeable. In the experiment, participants listened to an audio tape that showed another student either performing very well or poorly on a College Bowl quiz team. Following the performance, in some cases, participants then heard the student clumsily spill a cup of coffee. Ordinarily, one might think that clumsy behavior would reduce the appeal of both the superior and the average performing student. But, consistent with the researchers’ intuitions, the superior performing student actually became more attractive and likeable after he made the spill. If there were any negative effects from the pratfall, the average performer was perceived as less appealing.
There is an obvious lesson in this for Stewart. As much as people might admire competence in other people, when it comes to actually liking them, too much competence becomes a handicap. We might select the highly able person to be our neurosurgeon or lawyer, but we avoid their company for lunch. A touch of weakness and vulnerability goes a long way toward taking the edge off the negative effects of superiority. A little less of “I’m Chevy Chase, and you’re not” tempers the evil eye of envy.38
I remember watching a Tonight Show episode around the time of the first season of Survivor, the TV show that helped ignite the ascent of reality TV. The basic premise of the show is that members of a group are placed in a remote location and are voted off until a single “survivor” remains. Jay Leno, the host of the Tonight Show, chose about five people from his audience and placed them on a traffic “island” somewhere in Burbank. In a parody of the Survivor show, every 10 minutes or so, the audience voted off one from the group. Before they headed off for the island, however, Leno introduced the group to the studio audience by letting each say a few things about him- or herself. I recall being a little put off by the first person. He introduced himself as student at Stanford University and then went on to list a number of impressive things he was doing with his life. My initial, uncharitable thought was that I hoped he was the first to go. And I was not surprised when he was indeed the first one booted off. The other contestants were just average folks and certainly were more humble. I detected an emphatic quality in the audience’s first decision—and a burst of laughter-spiked schadenfreude accompanied the verdict.
Jay Leno would appreciate as much as anyone why his audience laughed. In a 2012 interview for Parade Magazine, he was asked whether the digital age influenced his approach to comedy. His view was that humor really does not change much across generations. If one looks at the trappings, there may appear to be shifts in content, but the underlying process remains the same. Leno summed it up well: “[T]he fat rich man stepping out of the Cadillac and into the mud puddle” will always be funny.39
Leno’s use of an expensive car in his example is a good one because cars are often the source of envy. According to consumer psychologist Jill Sundie, the flaunting of luxury items has been a common theme in most cultures from Egyptian pharaohs and their golden thrones to present-day Lamborghini owners.40 In one study, she and her colleagues asked student participants to respond to one of two articles about another student. The student in the article noted that he owned either a $65,000 Mercedes or a $16,080 Ford Focus. Next, participants were shown a photo ostensibly taken of the car, along with a verbal description of how it had broken down at a shopping center, stranding the owner and some friends. The car had its hood up in the photo. Students reading about the Mercedes were much more likely to admit feeling happy when learning of the car’s mechanical failure than were those who read about the Ford, especially if they also reported envy. As one would expect when envy is involved, it was the hostility linked with their envy that was most closely related to their pleasure.
An analogue to this study occurred in May 2012, and a video of it produced many approving hits.41 A bright yellow, $250,000 Lamborghini spun out of control when the driver oversteered while making a turn in a Chicago neighborhood. No one was hurt, but the car ended up sandwiched between two other cars. Passengers in another car recorded it all. The video shows these passengers making invidious comments about the Lamborghini before the accident and their keen delight after it happened. They even turned around to take a closer look. The video collected 3.8 million views in about 24 hours based on YouTube statistics. The unfortunate driver took quite a ribbing. Echoing SpiderMan, one viewer wrote, “With great horsepower comes great responsibility.”42 Many were dripping with envious ill will, with comments such as “stupid rich person trying to show off.”43
Would hostile envy directed at highly competent people be dulled if they are likeable? One would think so. Naturally, the suffering of a liked person produces less schadenfreude than the suffering of a disliked person, as studies led by Israeli psychologist Shlomo Hareli confirm.44 And yet envy may not be so easily defeated. In our study that I described earlier, where we showed envy leading to schadenfreude, we were careful to make the interviewed students likeable, and equally so, in both the high- (superior student) and low-envy (average student) conditions. Nonetheless, in the high-envy condition compared with the low-envy condition, greater schadenfreude followed the misfortune.
I have collected many accounts of people’s experiences of envy. It is not unusual for the target of the envy to be described as friendly and nice, in addition to having desirable talents or possessions. But the effect of these likeable qualities on the envying person can sometimes worsen the frustration of not having what is desired. Typically, people feeling envy find reasons to dislike the target of their envy so as to rationalize their invidious ill will. The envied person might be unfairly seen as “arrogant” or “obnoxious,” for example. Likeable qualities in the envied person short circuit the easy route to rationalizing one’s ill will—these qualities make it difficult to find plausible reasons to justify it. But because the frustrating disadvantage cannot be willed away, the envy does not necessarily cease. One participant wrote: “I envied and hated Sarah because she was smarter and more beautiful than me, and what made it worse, she was also a nice person. I had no good reason to hate her.” Likability, therefore, may be no sure antidote for defusing another person’s envy. Even though the nice envied person suffers less hostility from others than the obnoxious envied person, niceness does not solve the fundamental problem that envied people represent—they are advantaged and superior. No wonder Jonathan Swift, who had imagined both small Lilliputians and large Brobdingnagians in Gulliver’s Travels, could write about the possible hostile consequences of an envy-causing contrast with a fellow writer in this way:
In Pope I cannot read a line,
But with a sigh I wish it mine;
When he can in one couplet fix
More sense than I can do in six;
It gives me such a jealous fit,
I cry, “Pox take him and his wit!”45
Toobin had many good things to say about Martha Stewart. Although she lives a life of privilege, she was not born into wealth. She lives her well-earned life of luxury with gusto and a good measure of authenticity. As he put it, “[the] Martha Stewart persona is no act.”46 And she has plenty of friends who can testify to her good character and good deeds. Toobin noted that she generally declined to criticize her tormentors; she had no complaint with the late-night comedians.47
But envy has a logic all its own. Homer Simpson’s envy of his neighbor Ned Flanders is a case in point. In the episode of The Simpsons, “Dead Putting Society,” Ned invites Homer to tour his recreation room. It has all the bells and whistles, including a bar with exotic, foreign beers on tap. Ned’s son skips into the room, kisses him on the cheek, and thanks him for the help his father gave him on his science project. “Kids can be a trial, sometimes,” Ned says, as if this was the worst of his son’s behavior. Then, Ned’s attractive wife appears with a tray of tasty-looking sandwiches for them to enjoy. Homer soon brims over with envious ill will toward Ned, despite the fact that Ned gives him no just cause for it. Homer accuses the bewildered Ned of deliberately flaunting his advantages, and he leaves after hurling a flurry of insults.
Homer hates Ned but without being able to articulate a credible reason for doing so. That evening, Homer unloads his envy-caused hostility on Ned as he lies in bed with his wife Marge. She is puzzled because, despite her probing questions, Homer is unable to come up with a legitimate reason for his hostility. The exchange ends in this way:48
MARGE: Was he angry?
HOMER: No.
MARGE: Was he rude?
HOMER: Okay, okay, it wasn’t how he said it either. But the message was loud and clear: Our family stinks!49
Ned Flanders is a painful irritant to Homer simply because he is a frequent presence and because he is superior. Homer lacks the self-awareness to label his pain as envy, but he is able to appreciate why having Ned as a neighbor can be more of a curse than a blessing. This is why Homer finds it so delightful when Ned’s business does so poorly. Likewise, Martha Stewart, who is so attractive, so very cultured, so astonishingly accomplished—and rich—is just about perfect. Too much so. The average person probably needed relief from the impossible standard that she represents and the envy her success creates, as the schadenfreude over her legal troubles showed.
