In Ovid’s Metamorphoses the goddess Envy lives in a shack, eats snakes, has black teeth and oozes bile out of parts of her body it’s probably best not to mention. It’s no wonder envy has a bad name. But when people refer to the sin in everyday conversation, they often don’t have in mind anything like the corrupt, bile-dripping brand of envy portrayed by Ovid.
One of the most influential psychological definitions of this sin comes from the work of W. Gerrod Parrott of Georgetown University and Richard Smith of the University of Kentucky: ‘Envy occurs when a person lacks another’s superior quality, achievement, or possession, and either desires it or wishes that the other lacks it.’1 And while other psychologists have been a little more creative with their definitions, grounding envy in childhood longings for penises and breasts, it’s the more mundane, body-part-neutral description of Parrott and Smith’s that holds sway in modern, mainstream psychology.
In this definition we can clearly see that envy has two meanings. In the first, the envier lacks what another has and simply wants it. A guy in a Ferrari 599 GTB pulls up next to you at the traffic lights and you think, ‘Ah, nice car. I want one.’ Nothing too insidious here. In the second sense of the sin, the envier lacks what another has, but this time wants the other not to have it: ‘Ah, nice car. Wouldn’t it be great if an artic ploughed into the back of it.’ The first kind is the good kind, what we psychologists call benign envy; the second, not-so-pleasant brand, which is a close relative of resentment, we call malicious envy. And it probably won’t surprise you that I’ll be focusing on the benign variety in this chapter.
(Another definitional point to clear up: ‘Envy’ and ‘jealousy’ are often used interchangeably; they are not the same thing to psychologists. Envy involves wanting something that another person possesses – some quality or object. This is a two-person affair: the envier and the envied person, as well as the envied object or attribute. In other words: you, the guy in the Ferrari, and the Ferrari itself. Jealousy, however, is a three-way affair. I’m jealous of someone if they pose a threat of stealing another person away from me. I’m jealous of Ferrari guy if he makes a move on my girlfriend. Three people are involved here: me, Ferrari guy and girlfriend. Jealousy is not the topic of this chapter.)
For social psychologists, envy is all about what we call ‘social comparison’. In 1954, the social psychologist Leon Festinger put forward a rather elaborate, yet elegantly simple theory of this ubiquitous psychological process.2 The elaborate part is the nine hypotheses, eight corollaries and eight derivations that make up this classic paper. The elegantly simple part is this: when people are uncertain about their own abilities or attitudes, they compare themselves to others. We all engage in such comparison, all the time. Is she more attractive than me? Taller? Shorter? Fatter? Cleverer? Richer? Wiser? Much of what we know, think, believe and value is known, thought, believed and valued in comparison to other people.
Now, logically, social comparison can go in three directions: up, down, or sideways. Envy, of course, is all about the upward variety; it’s about comparing ourselves to those better off. In his famous essay on the sin, the philosopher Francis Bacon noted that ‘deformed persons and eunuchs and old men and bastards are envious’.3 This may be true, but they’re not the only ones. It turns out that the upward comparison so central to envy is quite common indeed. In fact, social comparison is so central a part of our lives that we often do it spontaneously, without intending to.4 Common it may be, but what precisely is all this envious upward comparison good for?
We’ve all heard that piece of folk wisdom: there’s always someone worse off than you. And although this is technically true for all but one of us, the intuition that we must compare downward in order to feel better about ourselves doesn’t always prove true. In fact, in many cases, it is upward comparison that does a better job of improving our moods.
Starting university is a rather stressful experience. You have all the pressures of the first term of classes, of working out the complexities of your schedule, of settling into halls, and so on. Imagine that you’re about halfway through your first year and you learn that you’ll be getting a new room-mate. And imagine, unlikely as it may sound, that you get a choice: Rebecca or Stacey. Rebecca, you learn, is coping quite well with uni life: she has easily adjusted to being away from home, has made plenty of friends and is doing very well in class. Stacey, on the other hand, isn’t coping so well. She is homesick, has had a hard time making friends and is not faring too well in her courses. Which room-mate would be a more sensible choice? The enviable Rebecca, or poor old Stacey?
Lisa Aspinwall and Shelley Taylor, then both at UCLA, ran a study getting at a similar question.5 They brought undergraduates into their lab and exposed them to a Rebecca or to a Stacey – to a successful or unsuccessful comparison target. When these researchers later measured participants’ moods, they found that those exposed to a successful Rebecca type felt better than those who compared downward, to a less successful target. When Aspinwall and Taylor probed the results a little further, they found that such mood boosts coincided with feelings of hope. The enviable, successful student shows the rest of us that, yes, it can be done. That we too can do well in class and have friends. And this sense of hope makes us feel better.
There’s an even simpler means by which envious upward comparison makes us feel better about ourselves: when we size ourselves up against someone better off, we actually come to view ourselves as more similar to them and thus in a more positive light.
The classic demonstration of this comes from a study by Ladd Wheeler of Macquarie University in Sydney.6 In what has come to be known as the rank-order paradigm, Wheeler first gave participants a basic task. Then, being a true social psychologist, he provided false feedback. He gave subjects a score on the task, told them their ranking, and made it clear that they’d performed at an average level, falling somewhere in the middle of the distribution. Next he gave participants a rank-ordered list of other people who had done the same task. He told participants that they could look at the score of any person on the list.
The question Wheeler was interested in was: to whom would participants compare themselves? They could choose someone worse off, or someone ranked higher. What he found was that 87 per cent of people chose to compare themselves to someone who performed better. Upward comparison was the norm.
But the really interesting part of this study is what came next. When Wheeler asked participants to indicate how similar they were to the person they had chosen to compare themselves with, he discovered that those who compared up tended to see themselves as similar to their comparison targets. According to Wheeler, these envious participants were trying to confirm that they were ‘almost as good as the very good ones’. The participants who didn’t compare up had accepted their inferiority, judging themselves as similar to those below them.
Another study by Penelope Lockwood and Ziva Kunda, then both at the University of Waterloo, Canada, makes this point even more clearly.7 Female undergraduate students at Waterloo with career aspirations of being teachers were recruited for a study on ‘the effects of journalistic styles on social perception’. Some students read a fake newspaper article describing a female teacher who had recently won an award for outstanding career achievement. This teacher worked in an inner city high school, had met difficult challenges with enthusiasm, and was adept at motivating her students. She was described as being ‘one of the most talented, creative and innovative teachers’ that her school principal had ever worked with. A target of envy, without doubt.
After reading this article, the would-be teachers next answered some questions about themselves, allegedly to ensure that their personality characteristics wouldn’t bias their perceptions of the article. They rated themselves on intelligence, skill and competence, among other traits. The researchers were interested not in how these ratings would influence perceptions of the article, but in how reading the article would influence these very ratings. So did comparing oneself to a successful other, somehow boost one’s self-image, making these would-be teachers view themselves as more talented and creative, just like the teacher in the article? It sure did. Students who compared themselves to this inspirational teacher rated themselves as more bright and skilful and less incompetent than did students who made no such comparison. Making this upward comparison quite literally changed these students’ evaluations of their own personality characteristics.
There is a final way, in addition to promoting hope and creating a positive self-image, that envy can make us feel better.
Consider this choice. You can either: (1) have dinner at a fancy restaurant this coming weekend and then eat at home for the following two weekends or (2) eat at home this weekend, go to the fancy restaurant next weekend, and then eat at home the weekend after that.
Which option would you choose? If you’re like 84 per cent of respondents, you’d choose option 2, the home-fancy-home option. Why?8
When economists talk about the value of things – of goods or of experiences – they talk about ‘utility’. This is just a technical way of describing the amount of satisfaction or happiness one derives from something. Now if you think about options 1 and 2 above, at first glance they seem to have the same utility; both options involve one fancy dinner out and two dinners at home.
So why do so many people choose option 2? It’s because option 2 has a kind of utility that option 1 lacks. Both have the same consumption utility – they involve the same experiences, which when consumed, should bring the same amount of satisfaction. But by delaying the expensive dinner for a week (as in option 2), one can derive pleasure from the very act of anticipating this special experience. Option 2 has anticipation utility; option 1 does not. And so overall, option 2 brings more satisfaction.
You find a similar preference for the delay of valued experiences in a study by the behavioural economist George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon University.9 When Loewenstein asked college students how much they would pay for a kiss from their favourite film star, he found that students were willing to pay more to be kissed in three days’ time than they were to be kissed immediately. Even though the consumption utility would be the same for an immediate and a delayed kiss, the anticipation utility of the delayed kiss brings pleasure in itself and so ups the amount one is willing to pay.
Now envy, by its very nature, is steeped in anticipation utility. One of the central characteristics of the emotion is a sense of longing, that feeling of ‘if only I had what she has’.10 The envier simulates what life would be like with the envied object or attribute, and this simulation itself brings pleasure.
Blessed are the envious, for they shall be smarter and more creative
I want you to take a minute and think about as many possible uses for a brick as you can. Not the run-of-the-mill, boring uses (building houses, throwing through windows), but weird, unusual, creative uses.
Psychologists ask people questions like this, about bricks and other things, to assess creativity. This is an example of what is called an ‘alternative uses task’. The more original and elaborate one’s listed uses, the more creative one is deemed to be. (The best weird brick use I’ve ever come across: ‘mock coffin at a Barbie funeral’, although ‘hitting my sister on the head’ is a close second.)
What does any of this have to do with envy? Well, envy can actually make you more creative. In a study by Camille Johnson of Stanford and Diederik Stapel of Tilburg University, students came into the lab to do a test of ‘integrative orientation intelligence’.11 At least that’s what these unwitting subjects were told. In fact, the researchers were actually interested in the impact of social comparison processes on creativity. When participants first arrived at the lab, some read a description of a successful peer who routinely scored in the top 5 per cent of his classes, was popular and had lots of friends. This person served as a comparison target – an obviously enviable, upward comparison target for most. Participants in another condition, the control condition, read an uninspiring article about the university campus. Next, participants did the brick uses task. And, once again proving that envy is not all bile and black teeth, the envious, upwardly comparing participants were more creative, thinking of more things to do with a brick than the controls.
So, just as one evaluates oneself as more talented when comparing to an envied other, one also becomes more talented. But such behavioural effects aren’t restricted to creativity.
Hart Blanton of the University at Albany and some of his colleagues examined the effects of social comparison in that cauldron of envy: the classroom.12 These researchers kept tabs on about nine hundred Dutch school kids for a year. What Blanton and his colleagues were interested in was the kids’ grades: how well did they perform in Biology, French, Maths? But they were also interested in the ways in which students compared themselves to others. One might imagine that kids would take every opportunity to compare downward in an attempt to feel better about their own academic abilities. But this is not what Blanton found. The typical student actually compared up. Just as with adults, for school-kids, envious comparison is the norm.
But the even more interesting outcome is what such upward comparisons did to students’ grades. Over the course of the year, comparing upward to their better-performing classmates improved students’ grades. And such results are not limited to the classroom. We see similar performance benefits in the lab, when people perform tedious reaction time tasks with superior partners, or when women are given a maths test by a competent rather than incompetent female experimenter.13
How does social comparison work here? There are a few reasons why envy might make us cleverer and more creative.
First, comparison can provide information on how a task is done. If you have the good fortune to observe a skilled performer, you watch, you learn, and so you perform better.
Second, envy can change your expectations about what it is possible to achieve. In other words, it can change your perceived likelihood of success. For example, business students who read about a successful business graduate forecast higher salaries for themselves than those who read about an unsuccessful student.14 Exposure to the successful role model gave these students hope that they too could achieve similar financial success.
And third, envying a role model might simply increase your general motivation to do well.
Hopefully you are starting to see that envy isn’t as bad as Ovid makes out. But neither is it a foolproof means of self-enhancement and self-improvement. In some circumstances, envy can go horribly wrong. To avoid the pitfalls of envying badly, one needs to be cautious both of whom and of what one is envious.
Who would envy an accountant?
Who we compare ourselves with matters a lot. Typically, people are in the habit of envying those slightly better than themselves, but you can’t take just any old better-than-you target and hope that envying them will pay off. Your idol needs to be someone similar to you. And one thing that determines similarity is the social category to which a comparison target belongs.
Remember the study by Penelope Lockwood and Ziva Kunda in which aspiring teachers judged themselves as smarter and more skilled after comparing themselves to an inspirational role model? Well, these researchers got another group of teaching students to compare themselves not to a successful teacher, but to a successful accountant.15 These subjects read an article describing the achievements of a high-flying accountant who had become one of the youngest partners ever in her firm and who was described by her boss as an extraordinary and innovative individual. When participants were then asked to rate their own competence and intelligence, upward comparison made no difference. For upward comparison to work, you have to get the category right.
But simply getting the category right isn’t always enough. Yes, teachers should envy teachers, and accountants should envy accountants, but not any old teacher or accountant will do. Once you’ve hit on the right social category (teacher or accountant), you have to pick the right exemplar. Teachers need to chose the right teacher to envy.
What determines the right exemplar? One key factor is that the person you envy has to have qualities, achievements, or goods that are attainable.
In another study by Lockwood and Kunda, budding accountants this time were exposed to a fake newspaper article about an outstanding fourth-year accountancy student, Jennifer Walker.16 Ms Walker had a superb academic record and also excelled in extracurricular activities, sports, community service, and so on. And just as in Lockwood and Kunda’s teacher/accountant study, after reading this article, participants rated themselves on a set of attributes relating to career success. The catch here, however, was that some of the budding accountants exposed to this actuarial superstar were first-year accountancy students, whereas others were fourth-year students. For the first years, accountancy superstardom was, at least in principle, still attainable. If they remained focused on their studies and worked hard enough, then they could be the next Jennifer Walker. But for the fourth-year students, already at Jennifer’s career stage, such achievements were out of reach. These students had no time to become the next Ms Walker. When Lockwood and Kunda analyzed the results, they found that this difference in attainability had a big impact on self-evaluations: first-year students, for whom success was still achievable, were buoyed by reading about Jennifer’s achievements; fourth-year students were not.
The moral of the story here is straightforward: if you’re in the mood for feeling better about yourself, envy someone whose qualities you can achieve.
Envying the wrong kind of person is one pitfall; another is envying the wrong kind of stuff. You may covet your neighbour’s wife or his recent lottery win, and you may, as a result, try to get your hands on a wife or some lottery tickets of your own. But chances are that, even if you do go out and get what you want, you won’t be all that satisfied once you have it. Don’t worry, you’re not alone. It turns out that most of us are notoriously bad at predicting what will make us happy.
There are a number of reasons why people don’t get their happiness predictions right. A central problem is that we tend to overestimate the longevity of our positive emotions. This is partly because when predicting the emotional future, we concentrate on certain key events or objects and fail to take into account everything else that could potentially influence happiness.
Think about your favourite sports team winning an important match. How happy would you be in the days following the victory? When Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia asked college students just this question, he discovered a clear tendency to mispredict: people thought that a win would produce longer-lasting happiness than it in fact did.17 The reason for this is that people tended to concentrate on the event itself (the sporting win) and failed to appreciate that in the days following the win they’d be engaged in the banalities of going to class, doing the dishes, and a host of other mundane activities that would distract them from the victory and so dilute their happiness.
The simple fact is that people fail to realize that they will adapt to whatever happens to them. Your football team wins and you are happy for a while, but you adapt. You win the lottery, but then you focus on other things.18 You get married and, yes, you adapt.19
The point here is that you should be careful in envying your neighbours their married lives and lottery wins, because these things probably won’t bring as much happiness as you expect. I’m not saying that lotteries and marriage won’t bring a rush of emotion when they first happen. Of course they do. The point to remember is that this happiness often fades with time.
But the good news is that some factors slow the process of adaptation. It turns out that we tend to adapt to things more quickly if they are stable, predictable and certain. However, if events are unstable, variable and uncertain, adaptation slows, and we get more happiness for longer.
In one clever study, Jaime Kurtz of the University of Virginia, along with Timothy Wilson and Harvard social psychologist Daniel Gilbert, brought participants into the lab to do an experiment about the effectiveness of website designs.20 At the beginning of the session participants learned that one in five of them would win a prize. They were given a list of the prizes offered: a camera, a box of chocolates, a mug and so on. They were then asked to pick their two favourite prizes. Next, participants played a virtual roulette-style game that would determine whether they were one of the lucky winners. (Although participants believed they had only a one-in-five chance of winning, the game was, in fact, rigged such that everyone won.)
The key manipulation came next. Some subjects immediately played another game to determine which of their two favoured prizes they would actually win. They spun another virtual roulette wheel, which randomly landed on one of their two preferred prizes. Other participants, however, were told that they wouldn’t find out which prize they had won until the end of the experiment.
The researchers were interested in how participants’ happiness levels would change over time depending on this manipulation. What we have here is a manipulation of certainty. Those who immediately discovered the identity of their prize were certain of what they had won. Those who had to wait until the experiment’s end were uncertain. As expected, all participants were fairly happy when they initially discovered that they would win something. However, the interesting finding was that those participants who had to wait until the end of the study to find out which prize they had won, and were thus in a state of uncertainty, had longer-lasting happiness (as measured by self-reported mood questionnaires) than those who immediately became aware of which prize they would get.
Uncertain events produce lasting happiness because they are harder to ‘ordinize’.21 When people have an emotional experience, positive or negative, they try to make sense of it, they try to make it ‘ordinary’, and as a result its emotional impact is dampened. Wilson calls this the ‘pleasure paradox’: people try to rationalize and understand positive events so that they can control them and increase their predictability, but in doing so they attenuate the very pleasure they’re trying to maximize.22 Thus, the paradox.
So, yes, uncertainty matters for adaptation. But so does variability.
I like wine. I have a friend who has a very impressive cellar, and I am quite envious of him. Let’s say this envy motivates me to go out and stock my own cellar with something better than the ten-dollar stuff I usually buy. What strategy should I use here? Let’s say I have $500 dollars to spend. I can go out and buy seven bottles of $44 wine and three bottles of better quality $64 wine, or I can buy three bottles of $36 wine and seven bottles of $56 wine. (I could of course do other things, but I’m trying to make a point here.) Which is a better investment? Which set of ten wines am I more likely to enjoy?
At first glance it might seem that the second option is the better one. Here I’m more frequently consuming a higher quality wine and only occasionally resorting to the cheaper $36 variety. The occasional cheaper wine reminds me of just how good the more expensive wine is, which makes me appreciate the $56 wine all the more. And this is what a lot of psychology research shows us: people are happier in situations in which there are frequent high-value options and fewer low-value options.23
However, there’s an important caveat here. If I come to expect to drink expensive wine, then the second option might actually turn out to be worse. If I view the expensive, $56 wine as the norm, and the cheaper $36 wine as an exception, then when I drink the more expensive wine, my expectations are met and it doesn’t really bring all that much pleasure. But when I drink the cheaper wine, my expectations aren’t met, and so I experience displeasure. If I do indeed come to view the more frequent experience as the norm, then the first option is actually better. Here, the norm is the cheaper $44 bottle, and when I drink it, my expectations are met. The exception is the more expensive $64 bottle, which exceeds my expectations and brings me more satisfaction.24
The point in all this is that you should be careful what you wish for. We aren’t very good at predicting what makes us happy and so the objects of envy might not change our lives in the ways we expect. But there are ways around this. Inject a little uncertainty and appropriate variability into your envied experiences once acquired, and you’ll be well on the way to getting the most out of them.
Ambient temperature is a girl’s best friend
What’s the difference between bathwater and a diamond? This is not a trick question. There are some obvious differences, of course: bathwater is, well, water, and a diamond isn’t. But there is one very important distinction that needs to be appreciated if we are to envy well. And it’s a distinction that Christopher Hsee (pronounced ‘shee’), a behavioural economist at the University of Chicago, is very familiar with.
In a study conducted with numerous colleagues in psychology and marketing, Hsee recruited 136 female students from a university in China.25 When these students arrived at the lab, they were, unbeknown to themselves, assigned to one of two groups: a ‘poor’ group and a ‘rich’ group. Depending on the group they were in, participants were given goods of different value to compare. In the poor group, each person was paired with another poor group member and each pair was given two diamonds: one person in the pair got a 3-millimetre diamond; the other, a 4.4-millimetre diamond. They were asked to compare their diamonds and then, while holding their diamond in their hand, to indicate how happy they would feel wearing a ring with a setting of that size. People in the rich group did exactly the same thing, but their two diamonds were bigger: one was 5.8 millimetres in diameter, the other 7.2.
When Hsee and colleagues examined predicted happiness ratings, they found that only relative diamond size mattered. Within each group, the person with the larger diamond was happier. Participants within groups could compare their diamonds with each other and as a result based their happiness on their relative standing within groups. However, there was no average difference in happiness between the poor and rich groups. Even though those in the rich group had larger diamonds, they were no happier than those in the poor group. So for diamonds, it appears happiness depends on comparison, not on absolute size.
These ‘poor’ and ‘rich’ participants were also asked to make another comparison: this time not between diamonds, but between bottles of water. Much like the diamond situation, pairs of participants in the poor and rich groups were given two bottles of water. In the poor group, one member got a bottle of 12°C water and the other, a 22°C bottle. Pairs in the rich group got 32°C and 42°C bottles. Partners were then encouraged to compare their bottles and rate how happy they would feel taking a bath in water of the same temperature as that in their bottle.
A very different happiness pattern emerged here. Unlike in the diamond case, for water temperature, people in the rich group (those with 32°C and 42°C bottles) predicted greater happiness than those in the poor group. In fact, when Hsee looked at happiness ratings across groups, he found a linear increase as a function of temperature: 42°C produced greater happiness than 32°C, which in turn produced greater happiness that 22°C, which in turn produced greater happiness than 12°C. What this suggests is that the pleasure that temperature brings is not relative, but absolute. Because participants did not have the opportunity to compare between groups, the resulting happiness differences can’t be based on comparison.
This study examined predicted rather than actual happiness. To address this shortcoming, Hsee did a follow-up field study in which 6,951 people in thirty-one of mainland China’s major cities were contacted for a phone survey.26 The researchers asked each person a number of questions, four of which are pertinent here:
1. How happy do you feel when you think about the present temperature of your room?
2. How happy do you feel when you think about your jewellery (watches included)?
3. What is the present temperature of your room?
4. How much is your jewellery worth?
You can think about this study as a larger version of the diamonds and bathwater experiment. Here diamonds are replaced with jewellery, and water temperature with ambient room temperature. When Hsee analyzed the results, he found a consistent pattern. Just as diamond-based happiness depended on comparison, so too did jewellery-based happiness. Within cities, those with more valuable jewellery felt happier. People are likely to compare their own jewellery with that of other people living in the same city and thus derive comparison-based happiness. But between cities, jewellery value made no difference: those cities with higher average jewellery values were not happier cities. The pattern of results for room temperature was again strikingly different. Yes, within cities, those in warmer rooms were happier, but this difference emerged at the city level, too: cities with higher average room temperatures had happier citizens.
The key difference then, between bathwater and diamonds (and between room temperature and jewellery) is the difference between absolute and relative happiness. Ambient temperature increases absolute happiness, not relative happiness. This is because the pleasure of a warm bath is independent of what anyone else is doing or experiencing. If we’re warm, we’re happy, and we’re not any less happy if the guy down the street is also warm. Comparison doesn’t matter for temperature. And it shouldn’t matter for other things, like sleep, for which we have innate, physiological scales for assessing where we stand. If I’m tired, I know it; I don’t need to compare myself to anyone else to get this information. And if I get enough sleep, I’m happy. I’m no happier if my neighbour is sleeping longer than I am.
But we don’t have internal scales for measuring diamond size or jewellery value. The joy we derive from a 3-millimetre diamond depends on the size of the diamonds that those around us have. If someone has a bigger diamond, we’re not as happy.
There are two basic lessons to take from this when it comes to envy. First, it’s generally a good bet to envy others their ambient temperatures and similar goods. If your envy drives you to acquire such things, you can ensure happiness regardless of what those around you have.
There is of course more to life than just sleep and temperature. We will inevitably envy others their cars, houses, and all manner of other things whose value we can only gauge through comparison to others. These aren’t the best things to envy because we’ll only be happy with them if our cars and houses are bigger than our neighbours’. So the second point to note: if you must envy others’ goods that influence relative happiness, then once you get your hands on such goods, be sure to compare downward. Our shiny new Ford will make us happy when we compare it to the less shiny, older Buick that our neighbour drives. If we compare it to the Ferrari across the street, we won’t feel so good about our new purchase.
There are quite a few tricks to envying well, not least of which are choosing the right people and the right stuff to envy. Add a little variability and a little uncertainty in the right places and you’re well on the way to not only feeling better but perhaps actually becoming a little cleverer or more creative. Choose poorly, however – wrong people, wrong stuff, wrong kinds of variability, and overly certain outcomes – and you may end up bearing more a of resemblance to Ovid’s bile-oozing Envy than you might like.