Speaking of Psychology: Can envy be good for you? With Jens Lange, PhD, and Sara Protasi, PhD

We’ve all felt a pang of envy watching a friend’s success or a colleague’s promotion. But does this much-maligned emotion deserve its negative reputation? Psychologist Jens Lange, PhD, and philosopher Sara Protasi, PhD, discuss the difference between envy and jealousy; why we’re often most envious of the people closest to us; and how envy may, in the right circumstances, motivate us to grow.

Jens Lange, PhD, is a professor of psychology at the Health and Medical University in Erfurt, Germany. His research focuses on measuring emotions, especially envy and pride, and understanding the role they play in interpersonal behavior. 

Sara Protasi, PhD, is a professor of philosophy at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, where she studies moral psychology and the philosophy of emotions. 

Kim Mills: Envy is a much maligned emotion. Our feelings about it are evident even in the language we use to describe: We say people are twisted or consumed by or eaten up with envy. In folktales, books and movies, envy is a villain. In the Christian tradition, envy is one of the seven deadly sins. But in recent years, some psychologists and philosophers have begun taking a second look at this long-vilified emotion and making the case that envy is not always destructive. In some cases, it can even be a force for good.

So what exactly is envy and how has it gotten such a bad rap? Why are we often envious of people closest to us? And how does envy affect our relationships? How can we learn to use envy in more constructive ways? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I’m Kim Mills.

I have two guests today, a psychologist and a philosopher who both study envy. First is Dr. Jens Lange, a professor of psychology at the Health and Medical University in Erfurt, Germany. His research focuses on measuring emotions, especially envy and pride, and understanding the role they play in interpersonal behavior. He is the author of dozens of journal articles on topics including how envy shapes social hierarchies, how personality traits such as narcissism link to envy, and the difference between benign and malicious envy.

My next guest is Dr. Sara Protasi. Dr. Protasi is a professor of philosophy at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, where she studies moral psychology and the philosophy of emotions. She is author of the books The Philosophy of Envy and The Moral Psychology of Envy, and she has discussed the value of envy with media outlets including The Wall Street Journal, The Globe and Mail, and ABC Radio Australia.

Dr. Lange, Dr. Protasi, thank you both for joining me.

Sara Protasi, PhD: Thank you so much for having us, Kim.

Mills: Let me start by asking how you define envy in your work—and what’s the difference between jealousy and envy? Because people often use those terms interchangeably and they’re not really the same. Dr. Lange, why don’t you take that one?

Jens Lange, PhD: So envy is initially a painful feeling resulting from an unflattering comparison with another person. And so this higher ranked person is superior in a domain of high personal relevance to the lower ranked person. So I’m for instance, I can be envious of Sara’s amazing book on envy because I’m a scientist, this is personally relevant, but I wouldn’t be envious of Leonardo DiCaprio’s acting skills because I’m not an actor. So envy occurs when someone else has something that a person desires. And in contrast, jealousy occurs when a person is afraid of losing something that they already have, so typically a romantic partner.

Mills: Dr. Protasi, you’ve written about four different types of envy. What are they and what do they tell us about the different ways that envy can show up in our lives?

Protasi: So it’s funny because I was also planning to use my envy for Jens as an example. And so he stole my idea and now I’m very envious of that. So let’s take the example of professional envy. And as Jens beautifully explained, envy is this unpleasant aversive response to some kind of perceived inferiority or disadvantage vis-a-vis a similar other. So Jens and I are roughly the same age, the same occupation. And so even though he’s a man and I’m a woman, there’s going to be some other differences, but I can perceive him as a similar to me and I can envy him with regard to a good that is relevant to my sense of identity—such as, for instance, academic success. So I envy the fact that he is a renowned expert on envy and he has all these publications. He has many more publications than me. I may have a book, but he has many, many publications.

But now there are some other conditions that—so this is kind of the background that just envy in general situation. But then in my work, I present a model that is not meant to be cross-cultural. It’s meant to characterize the kinds of envy that contemporary people in Western societies, like Jens and I, may experience. Now imagine that I am really concerned with being a good researcher, right? I mean, that’s something that is at the core of my identity. I really care about that. And I envy Jens, but what I’m mostly concerned is, Okay, I am not as good as Jens and his academic excellence exacerbates my pain, but it’s not the main focus of concern for me. It’s just that the fact that he’s similar to me is a sort of, as a researcher would say, it’s a reproach to me—why haven’t I been able to be as productive? But mostly what I care about is becoming better as a researcher.

And let’s suppose that I’m a fairly self-confident person and then thanks to Jens’s generosity, he has maybe shown me how to be a successful researcher, I feel confident that I can improve my situation, that I can emulate Jens and become a better researcher myself. And so I feel what I call emulative envy, which is still painful because it’s still a perception of my inferiority compared to this other person, but there is hope. It’s a productive emotion that motivates me to self-improve.

Now, let’s change the example a little bit. Imagine that I’m actually fairly insecure or perhaps I’m in a difficult work situation. I have a lot of teaching at my institution and I start fretting and I’m like, Oh no, my God, I will never be able to be as good as Jens as a researcher. And so even though it’s not like I’m hostile to Jens, I start feeling like, yeah, maybe I shouldn’t talk to him as much, otherwise I feel bad about myself. I start withdrawing from the relationship, I start sulking a little bit. And I feel this kind of self-defeating emotion where I want to have something that I perceive as unattainable. And this is what I call, this is the unproductive version of emulative envy and I’ve called it inert envy. And I think this, for instance, applies well to cases of baby envy where there is someone who wants to have a biological child and that’s really tough sometimes. Sometimes it’s just a matter of what your body can and cannot do. And it’s not like you want other people to lose their children, God forbid, but maybe you stop hanging out with your friends with children because it’s a little too painful.

Now imagine that maybe I’ve known Jens for a long time, maybe we’re childhood friends and I’ve always kind of, he was always so successful and I wasn’t. And that’s kind of irritating. Why is Jens always good at everything? And so for whatever reason, I developed this rivalry with this person. And so it’s not like I necessarily care about the good that I feel I lack. It’s just that there is this background of rivalry and so I am motivated to kind of pull him down. I want him to do less well rather than improve myself. And so maybe I will engage in this malicious behaviors that are often so salient in envy, our discussions of envy. I want to sabotage him in some way.

And then I have two options. Maybe I feel confident that I can pull him down. Maybe I can metaphorically steal the good or really steal the good and I can sabotage it and maybe I get to take his place in a grant application somehow, but not because I’ve become a better researcher. I’ve operated in mischievous ways and so I can steal the good. And that’s what I call aggressive envy.

Or finally, maybe I can spread rumors about something about Jen’s behavior. And so people don’t invite him to conferences or don’t invite him to participate in symposia and all of that. But I haven’t improved my situation. I’ve just spoiled the good. I’ve just spoiled his success without thereby getting anything in exchange. And I called that spiteful envy. And that again might be because I don’t feel confident in taking away the good from him or maybe the situation is such that it doesn’t allow it.

So those are the four kinds of envy, emulative, inert, aggressive and spiteful. And in the book I talk more about the moral implications and also why I think this model might be helpful to think about our envy and so that we can move from the worst kinds of envy to the better kinds of envy.

Mills: Dr. Lange, I want to ask you if psychological research draws similar distinctions among the different types of envy?

Lange: Yeah. I think they are similar but not identical. So in psychology in general and also for envy, people typically take a so-called social functional approach. So the idea being that emotions help people dealing with certain social situations, typically social problems or challenges. And for envy, the problem is that someone is better off or that the self is worse off in a domain of high personal relevance. So people want to deal with the situation and they can do this by improving themselves—then problem solved. This is what psychologists often call benign envy. Or they can try to pull the other person down, to harm the other person’s position, which also levels the difference. And this is typically called malicious envy. And this maps onto the types that Sarah mentioned. So she herself wrote in one of her papers that benign envy is very close to emulative envy or malicious envy is very close to aggressive envy and that this benign malicious/distinction kind of misses, especially inert envy.

In general, my personal opinion is that envy doesn’t occur in different types or in different categories. So in my opinion, emotions and also envy processes unfold in particular social situations. So in the case of envy, people encounter a higher ranked person, they experience pain because not having this is relevant to them and then they want to deal with the situation. And depending on how they evaluate it, then this may become benign or malicious envy or may lead to self-improvement or harming. So for instance, evidence indicates that when people consider the other person’s advantage to be undeserved, then the situation is more likely to unfold towards harming behavior, so malicious envy. And when people consider it likely that they will obtain the envied good themselves, then the situation is more likely to unfold towards self-improvement. So benign envy. So I find these types to be interesting and inspiring.

And if it would occur in data, then it would also be perfectly fine. So in our research, we took a purely empirical approach. So we asked people to rate whether certain elements of this envy process applied to situations in which they experience envy. So for instance, how much did you actually desire the envy object? How much did you feel inferior and so on. And then we used analytic techniques that helped you to identify higher order factors, so things that group certain elements of this envy process together. And we find evidence for these painful feelings, for what psychologists like to call benign envy, and for what psychologists like to call malicious envy. And we didn’t find any other factors. And so just based on an empirical level, I think we cannot find these four different types. But we have a very similar distinction. So I don’t think that this leads to a deep disagreement between the two of us, but we don’t find these four types in the data and I also prefer not calling them types.

Mills: And in your research, do you find that everybody admits to feeling envy at some point or are there people who never feel envy?

Lange: I think that people often say they don’t experience envy, but in my opinion, the truth is everyone does. If you ask someone like, Are you envious or did you ever experience envy? Then they often say, No, I never did because it’s a sin, as you said. But then if you ask them, for instance, Have you ever compared to someone else in a domain of high personal relevance to you, let’s say in your job, for instance, and then you were either motivated or you gossiped about the other person. So then they say, Yeah, obviously this just happened to me yesterday. So I think if you describe it by not using the word envy, given that it is so—considered to be as evil as you said in your introduction, people never agree to it, but the basic process, what I would call the envy process, this is what people frequently experience.

Protasi: I do like to think that my taxonomy has at least some empirical support, partly because I also use a lot of your work to argue for it, but maybe the details of that are appropriate to another place and time. But in my experience, I have to say that when I talk about—once people are familiar with the way I and other people think about envy as not necessarily this terrible sin or this dysfunctional emotion, they tend to be more willing to discuss their envy and admit it. I find that a lot more people now confess their envy to me in those terms precisely because they know that I don’t think envy is all bad. So I do think that the framing is really important more so than the words we use.

Lange: Yeah, true.

Mills: Does envy only apply to people or could I envy a thing like your beautiful car or your expensive house?

Protasi: I like to think about this as a tripartite relation where you, the agent, the person who’s feeling the emotion, envy is directed at a person because of some kind of object where that object that one perceives as lacking and the object can be a physical object, a material object, or it can be a property of a person or it can be something more abstract. But in the logical sense, there’s always three things, the envier, the envied and the object, the good, something that is perceived as good that I don’t have and the other person has, I would say.

Lange: I agree. Yeah. And I think it would be strange to say that you are envying the car because of the car’s, I don’t know, nice steering wheel.

Mills: Well, let me change the subject a little bit. The two of you wrote a paper together called An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Value of Envy. What inspired you to take this look at the topic and what can we learn from approaching it from both your perspectives?

Protasi: Yeah. So Jens and I met in 2019 at a conference organized by Thiemo Breyer, who had this wonderful idea of this conference that was titled Hostile Emotions: Perspectives from Philosophy and Psychology. And he thought about a set of emotions—it was disgust, contempt, envy, antipathy, and maybe a couple of others. And for each session, he invited a philosopher and a psychologist to talk about it. And so that’s where Jens and I met. And I was super excited actually when I saw the program because Jens had published these very important papers that I had read and I was really thrilled to be part of this event. And the outcome of the conference was Thiemo curated this special issue of the journal in which we ultimately published this collaboration. And we really wanted to show how this topic has to be investigated from an interdisciplinary perspective.

And even though again, there might be some ways in which the methodologies are different to some extent, the kind of things and the explanations and the focus that I’m interested in might be different from a psychologist. There is a lot of convergence. And so again, for instance, I think philosophers who work on emotions and especially what are traditionally considered sins or vices really ought to take into account the available empirical evidence. And I also think that sometimes psychologists can benefit from more nuanced conceptual distinctions.

Lange: Yeah. What I found very interesting about this conference—it was actually the first time that I engaged with so many philosophers, to be honest. So I never met that many philosophers before. And in psychology, we always have this approach that we are kind of non-judgmental. So we just take a concept such as envy and then we investigate it and try to find out whether it’s functional or not, or when it is functional, when it is not, and so on.

But then all the philosophers at these conferences are giving all these talks where they were discussing whether a certain emotion is actually good or bad or when it is supposed to be good or bad. And this is where I felt we have actually complimentary value. So we try to identify what envy leads to, what it includes, what this process is and so on. And then, each time you talk to someone from the media, they always want to know, is it good or can you change it? Or should we never experience envy or should we not always experience envy? And this is something that psychologists never think about, so they cannot answer it, because they don’t have the means to do so. But this is something philosophers are actually extremely good at. So we thought we could join forces and show how envy may work from a psychological perspective and then take different philosophical perspectives to find out how you should actually evaluate it.

Mills: Well, Dr. Protasi, I want to ask you, a few years ago, you published an essay about envy and frenemies, which leads me to the question, why are we often envious of people we’re close to, whether they’re our friends or siblings, colleagues, even our romantic partners? I mean, why can someone else’s success be so much harder to celebrate when we know that person well?

Protasi: So it’s interesting because I’ve seen two reactions when I suggest that you can envy a person, a beloved, a person you love. People either react by saying, Well, of course, obviously, this isn’t interesting to even discuss. And other people are like, What are you talking about? I would never, that’s impossible. If you envy someone you love, you don’t truly love them. And I think both things are true, right? In the religious tradition especially, and in some philosophical approaches, envy and love are seen as complete opposites, incompatible, both descriptively and normatively. But again, that’s because one, I think there are two things happening. One is that we think of envy only in its worst manifestations, its most destructive and aggressive manifestations. And so it’s true that, of course, if you’re very aggressively, maliciously envious of someone, the relationship will break down or perhaps the love maybe in some sense was never there.

But again, envy comes in different forms. And also descriptively, unfortunately, what happens is that because the envy thrives in similarity, in conditions of similarity, and because we often are similar—in different loving relationships, the similarity is different, for instance, fathers and children will be similar in some obvious ways, or people who are genetically related will be similar in some obvious ways. And also, maybe they grew up in similar—friends, childhood friends will grow up in similar environments. But even romantic partners, we know from actually scientific evidence that similars attract, we tend to couple with people who have similar values and similar interests. And so there is a lot of similarity. I want to be friends with people that I enjoy doing things with, people that I like, that I am attracted to people in various ways. So we look for people who are attractive and we are usually connected to people who are similar to us in various ways.

But then of course, we might find out that they are better than us at a variety of things that perhaps we enjoy doing. So in the essay, I talk about childhood friends, like high school friends where you have this very intense relationship with someone, you do all the things together, but then comparison lurks at every corner. And so the trick there, and I talk a little bit more about some philosophical discussions of it, we don’t have the time to go into, but for me, the key is on the one hand to understand that actually envy is the dark side of love and vice versa. There are two sides of the same coin. And we have to normalize the fact that, yeah, we envy people we love all the time. And it might be hard to confess and it’s stigmatized, but it happens. And if we all normalize it, then we don’t feel monstrous and we can talk about it.

For instance, with my husband, we have competed for the same jobs when we were on the job market. We’re both philosophers. We actually work in somewhat similar areas. There’s going to be times where we envy each other, but it’s okay to say, You know what? I’m feeling a little envious here. But of course, we don’t want to feel the bad kind of envy. I mean, so that’s where the other intervention takes place and where I think my model is helpful in understanding what are the factors that are at place. And so it’s important to find oneself in a kind of growth mindset and think about, okay, how can I emulate the person? If my beloved is doing better than me in this regard, what can I learn from them? And the beloved, the other person can be generous and share their good fortune and we can focus on how we can improve.

And we can also focus on the fact that when there is a loving relationship, our identity is also somewhat shared. And so their fortune can be seen as our fortune. Although again, I don’t think that’s always the case. I think it’s also important to acknowledge that we are still individuals and we thrive in our own ways. And so I’m a little skeptical of the solution of thinking just about shared identity. But so we can encourage the growth of emulative envy. And when that’s not possible, we can acknowledge that envying a loved one is part of the human condition. And so we have to kind of love wisely and be able to forgive and forget when appropriate, but also simply just have frank conversations, be mindful about our hostile feelings when they arise and try to not shove them because I think a lot of relationship, my experience personal and also otherwise, when relationships break down is often because we’re not able to talk about these things in the open.

Mills: Dr. Lange, I want to ask you a personality related question, which is whether some personality types are more prone to envy than others. I mean, what might make someone particularly vulnerable to becoming envious?

Lange: So as I said, people experience envy when they compare to someone else in a domain of high personal relevance. So all kinds of personality traits that describe tendencies to engage in such a process will predict envy. And so most obviously social comparison orientation. So people tend to compare a lot and they’re also more likely to experience envy. Then all kinds of predictors of people preferring to deal with standards of excellence. So for instance, achievement motivation, approach and avoidance motivation, narcissism, right? So also narcissism, people are kind of dealing with standards of excellence, so they want to have an excellent self or they don’t want to fall short of certain standards and so on. And also other dark traits such as Machiavellianism, psychopathy, entitlement, or greed.

And envy is also predicted by circumstances that intensify personal relevance of the situation, obviously the self-relevance of the comparison domain. So as I said, if a certain domain, it’s very close to my own identity, then I’m more likely to experience envy. And when the higher ranked person shows pride, for instance, because if it is plausible to be proud of an achievement that you have in a certain group, then this signals that this is an important achievement to have. So this also increases the relevance of the domain and can make people more envious or other kinds of signals that the person is low in status, which is something that people dislike. So being low in status, sometimes people dislike, they don’t want to be worse off because it has negative consequences for their wellbeing. So if these signals occur, for instance, the other person signals that they are very prestigious or very dominant or they gain influence and this can intensify envy. And also what Sarah already mentioned, for instance, competitions or rivalries, there’s also very high self-relevance to outperforming your rivals. So if your rival outperforms you, then this is definitely a circumstance that can intensify your envy.

Mills: I want to ask if envy is kind of baked into us as humans, or is it something that we’re taught either inadvertently or overtly by say our parents or caregivers? And is there an age when it begins to manifest itself?

Lange: So my first boss always used to say, Social comparisons are ubiquitous. So it is very hard to imagine a world in which you don’t compare yourself. Let’s say even if you want to say that you are a nice person, how would you actually know that you are nice, if not, if you know that you are nicer than most other people, right? In a world where everyone is very nice, then you need to be much nicer than in a world in which there are not that many people who are so nice. So everything is kind of relative, so people always compare. But as far as I know, there is no behavior genetics research showing how much variance and dispositional envy is accounted for by variance in genes or so on.

Protasi: I mean, surely there’s going to be cultural influences, right? Like anything else, different cultures at different times have shaped the way we feel these social comparison emotions. So we know that the ancient Greek cultures or peasant cultures, I mean, there is a lot of anthropological work on envy that seems to show that, for instance, the kind of emulative envy that I talk about, or even just what you call benign envy, which there is some overlap between the two, it is much harder to find examples of that in cultures where resources are very limited. There’s a lot of competition just for sheer survival. And that’s also why in some of those cultures, there is this superstition of the evil eye where if someone looks at you or look at your children or your cattle, then misfortune happens. There is this kind of curse, and so you have to protect yourself from envy.

But that’s because again, we are in a cultural context where it’s really hard to flourish and resources are limited. And so malicious envy is much more salient and common. It’s hard to find yourself in a situation where you can improve how you’re doing. And so there’s this cultural and just systemic structural constraints on the kind of envy that we can feel. But I also, coming back to your initial question, Kim, I do think that parents, of course, and the culture in a home will have effects on even simply whether you have a growth mindset, you think you have an outlook on the world that is less zero sum. If you have parents who have taught you that it’s either you or them, you have to succeed at all costs, you have to be the first one, you’re probably going to be more likely to feel certain kind of envy.

Or if you feel like your parents are not supportive, they’re not making you feel self-confident. All of these things, I’m sure. I mean, again, this is somewhat speculative, but I hope it’s a reasonable speculation. And again, we just know that your context is going to affect the way you feel a variety of things and it’s going to drive some differences between people, I think.

Mills: Or if you have parents who say, why can’t you be more like your big sister or things like that?

Protasi: Exactly, exactly. Things like that. I do think that sibling rivalry, and there is some work on that is quite interesting. To some extent, I think it’s pretty widespread and unavoidable for a variety of reasons that have to do with the fact that you have this person who’s similar to you and you want your parents’ love and all of that. But some parents will exacerbate it and some parents might be able to alleviate it depending on how they do things. So definitely, maybe they should not say things like that, I think.

Mills: So let’s talk about a little bit more practical advice. So in addition to parents not saying, why can’t you be like your sister or your brother? I mean, if you yourself recognize that you tend to feel envious, what can you do with that emotion? How can you turn it into something that is more constructive?

Lange: In my opinion, there is no general need to turn malicious envy into benign envy or to suppress your envy in general because from a psychological perspective, envy has a social function, so it helps people deal with certain social situations, in this case being worse off in a domain of high relevance to the self. And that’s something that you shouldn’t suppress. Also, I think that benign/malicious are kind of misnomers. So benign envy can also be bad. So Sara always had this a nice example. I can also be benignly envious of a torturer for their torturer skills. And this would be something that’s not very nice. Also, malicious envy can kind of be good, for instance, when it motivates you to harm dominant others who initially oppressed subordinates or so on, that’s something that’s good. So that was also part of the paper that we wrote together, that there is no easy answer here.

So you shouldn’t suppress envy entirely. That would be my, and typically most psychologists’ perspective. Turning malicious envy into benign envy, if you consider that to be more constructive, would kind of require that you evaluate the situation differently. So if malicious envy results because you think that the other person doesn’t deserve their advantage and benign envy is more likely to occur when people think that they can actually obtain the envy good, then you would need to find an intervention that helps you to consider the object to be attainable. But I’m not aware of a strategy that actually works effectively. So maybe Sara knows.

Protasi: Well, I do think that here the philosophical and the psychological perspectives diverge the most. And that’s why I think when I talk about emulative envy, I agree it’s not quite the same as benign envy, even though some of the research on benign envy can support some of the things I say about emulative envy. But because in my taxonomy, I do integrate that moral perspective that you find strange. And so true emulative envy, especially when I talk about even virtuous envy, which is one version of emulative envy is when really the good that is sought after is actually good. And so in those cases, I think that’s something that I think we should cultivate. And I think it is important. When I feel envy, it tells me that I care about some things. And so that’s the start of an introspective analysis that I think is important from a prudential and moral perspective of like, okay, am I really disadvantaged in this situation? Why do I think that? Is that a correct perception of the situation? And is this really good? Maybe I’m envious for bad reasons. And in that case, I should work on my values and then see if I become less envious once I realize I envy someone because they have a more expensive watch. It’s like, maybe I should think more about whether this is actually a good thing to have or maybe I’m envious obviously status drives a lot of envy.

And I think I have to start from this kind of mindful self-awareness perspective of thinking, okay, what is this envy telling me and do I want to endorse this envy? And if it is an envy that could bring me towards something productive, then again, I can think about how can I work on obtaining this good? And if this is not achievable, maybe I can find something in the vicinity that I can pursue that is obtainable.

And then Jens and I have some disagreement about this idea of deservingness. I think philosophers are very careful in thinking that some of these cases that might be cataloged as envy are best characterized as resentment, which is a moral emotion. And so when we think about justice, so that’s a little bit of a different conversation where for instance, you can have resentment or indignation or some sort of righteous anger at the success of people who don’t deserve their success. And of course you can also envy them on top, but I think what’s doing the moral work is the moral emotion of resentment more so. But that’s I think again, and I do think that some of the ways in which the empirical evidence seems to show that envy is driven by resentment. I do think it can also be accounted by what I call focus of concern.

But anyway, that gets too technical. But I do think that this is where if someone, if a listener were interested in this kind of discussion, then I think they should look more into my book for instance, or the work of many philosophers on these topics in thinking about how sometimes we should try to develop moral approaches to this situation and separate it from our personal envy.

Mills: Well, speaking of resentment makes me think of the concept of Schadenfreude, which, Dr. Lange, you’ve studied. And I want to ask you first of all to explain what Schadenfreude is for some of our listeners who might know, but how does that relate to envy?

Lange: So what is schadenfreude? It’s when people laugh about other people’s failure. Let’s say someone experiences a mishap and you are laughing over what happened to them, then this will be schadenfreude. So schaden is harm, a German word for harm and, freude is joy. So enjoying others pain kind of. So there is evidence or meta-analytic evidence, overwhelming evidence I would say that schadenfreude is actually predicted by malicious envy. So if you think that someone else’s advantage is subjectively undeserved, that’s a psychological idea of it. So it’s not from an objective moral standpoint, but when I think I don’t want this person to be so successful, then this is more likely to lead to a malicious envy. And if you then subsequently see this person fail on another occasion, then laughing publicly about this person actually reduces this other person’s standing in the group. So if everyone is laughing, I’m laughing about this person and no one else disagrees, then this person can’t be so cruel.

So this is one way how malicious envy can help reduce the problem so the other person is no longer a social comparison standard of high standing. This person has been laughed at by me and ideally other people. So this process is most likely for what we call dominant others. So people who initially gained influence in a group by oppressing subordinates. So dominant others are more likely to be maliciously envied for their standing in the group and then publicly laughing about them reduces the fear everyone has towards them. So we actually argued that chaden for this social function is to reduce the standing of the dominant people. So yeah, from a functional perspective and whether that’s good or bad, that’s a philosopher’s question to answer maybe.

Mills: Well, let me just close with one question, which has to do with social media and whether that is leading us to feel more envious. Does seeing other people’s carefully curated lives online create some very distorted form of social comparison for us? Is it making us more envious?

Lange: So I mean there is evidence that social media can foster upward social comparisons. And there’s also evidence that being on social media can increase people’s envy. So there’s longitudinal evidence if you are more on social media, then you’re more likely to experience state envy and not the other way around. So envy is not predicting your social media news. But it is important to emphasize that this applies primarily to a specific form of using social media. So if you are passively browsing to other success stories, so let’s say Sara is again sharing news about her latest book or amazing envy paper on whatever social media, let’s say on Instagram, and I’m browsing through my content and I see this and this can lead to a social comparison and subsequent to envy.

But if people, for instance, passively browse through a news content or actively engage in social media by posting something on Instagram themselves, this is not making people envious. And also this relationship between passive use in highly self-relevant domains, whether this leads to more envy also depends on personality characteristics. For instance, a review found that social comparison orientation is a personality predictor of this relationships, which means that only for people who tend to compare a lot, passively browsing to other people’s success stories on social media actually leads to more envy. So as usual, the evidence is mixed and very nuanced. So claiming that these few more state envy experiences then produce kind of a general rise and disposition of envy, I think this conclusion is not warranted. So at least there is no direct evidence for this. So my personal impression is that social media is just one specific context in which envy can occur, but not that it increases people’s propensity to be more envious in general.

Mills: Well, I want to thank you both for joining me today. I think this has been very interesting and I really loved having the two perspectives, philosophical and psychological. Thank you so much.

Protasi: Thank you.

Mills: You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you've heard, please subscribe and leave a review. If you have comments or ideas for future episodes, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman.

Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I’m Kim Mills.