To Help or To Harm? Assessing the Impact of Envy on Prosocial and Antisocial Behaviors

Abstract

Two studies examined how envy influences prosocial and antisocial behavior. In Experiment 1, participants in an envious state (relative to a neutral state) were less helpful: They picked up fewer dropped pencils in their immediate vicinity. We expanded upon these findings by examining how envy affected both helping and harming behavior in a competitive scenario. In Experiment 2, individuals in envious or neutral states assigned puzzle tasks to another student in a prisoner’s dilemma style scenario. Prosocial and antisocial behaviors were assessed via the difficulty of the assigned puzzles (easy puzzles were considered helpful and difficult puzzles were harmful). We hypothesized that experiencing envy would result in greater motive to harm as well as greater likelihood of engaging in harmful behavior. The hypothesis was supported, suggesting that envy has detrimental ramifications that go beyond the individual and extend to interpersonal relationships.

Keywords

emotion envy prosocial antisocial helping aggression

In the film Amadeus (if not necessarily in real life), the composer Antonio Salieri was consumed with envy regarding Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s superior musical talent. Envy greatly influenced Salieri’s life, making him a less helpful mentor and actively aggressive toward his younger colleague. Might his envy also have had broader interpersonal ramifications, tarnishing Salieri’s relationships with pupils, servants, and friends? In short, might envy lead individuals to engage in less prosocial and/or more antisocial behavior even toward non-envied others?

Envy is a powerful emotion that involves negative, discontented feelings directed toward a superior outside source. Envious individuals wish to attain another person’s attractive qualities, achievements, or possessions for themselves (Miceli & Castelfranchi, 2007; Parrott & Smith, 1993). This sense of privation is sometimes accompanied by other negative affective components, such as hostility (Smith & Kim, 2007) and feelings of inferiority (van de Ven et al., 2015). Envy also has additional negative effects on those who experience it, such as lowered self-esteem, increased tendency toward social comparison, reduced well-being (Appel et al., 2015), and increased motivation to engage in unethical behavior like cheating (Gino & Pierce, 2009).

Research on the distinct but related emotion of jealousy has revealed that it can be damaging both to the individual and to the target of the jealousy. Like envy, jealousy arises when we feel an external threat, whether real or imagined, but this typically is in the context of interpersonal relationships. Feeling one’s status with a romantic partner is in danger diminishes well-being and elicits hypervigilance to these threats, which ironically damages the relationship (Salovey & Rodin, 1986, 1988). Similarly, it is likely that envy hurts more than just the person experiencing it, further underscoring why we need to know more about this emotion.

There is an ongoing debate in the literature regarding whether there are two distinct types of envy (i.e., benign and malicious; Lange et al., 2018; van de Ven et al., 2009) or not (Cohen-Charash & Larson, 2017). Benign envy focuses on the desire for an object or attribute and includes feelings of aspiration toward attaining that object or attribute, whereas malicious envy focuses on a specific person and includes feeling ill will toward them (Crusius & Lange, 2014; Lange et al., 2018). Furthermore, proponents of two types of envy have articulated that benign and malicious envy are the result of different situational appraisals and thus result in different emotional and motivational states (van de Ven, 2016). One significant weakness of the envy literature is that virtually all the work has been correlational. Another weakness is that almost no research has examined the interpersonal consequences of experiencing envy: “How does envy influence a person’s communication and behavior toward others?” Thus, our primary aim was to address both of these missing elements in the envy literature by examining experimentally some interpersonal outcomes of envy. Thus, for both theoretical and empirical reasons, we induced in two experiments a general state of envy using a new method.

Research regarding the negative intrapersonal effects of envy has accumulated recently, but only a few studies have focused on the interpersonal ramifications of envy. In one such study, participants reported envying those who were perceived to be wealthier, and therefore saw them as less deserving of help, though envy was not manipulated and no actual helping and harming behaviors were measured (Gino & Pierce, 2010). More recently, another study found that envy elicited spiteful behaviors when resources were distributed unequally (Wobker, 2015). Thus, our research aim was to focus directly on how envy might influence interactions between individuals, specifically regarding their prosocial and antisocial behavior, by manipulating envy. We wanted to expand on previous work by examining behavior in both competitive and noncompetitive scenarios. We also sought to test a stronger version of our hypothesis, going beyond the source of the envy (the most likely target of negative interpersonal behavior) and assessing whether “innocent” third parties (those who were not the source of the envy) might be treated poorly by an envious individual, which has not yet been empirically examined.

In Experiment 1, we chose to compare an envious state to a neutral affect condition as well as to gratitude. Although gratitude and envy may seem at first blush like polar opposites, principally due to their opposing valence, these affective experiences also share important elements. Gratitude serves as a positive affirmation that we are benefiting from goodness in the world. Second, gratitude is also an externally focused emotion because it stems from a recognition that this goodness comes from external sources (Emmons & McCullough, 2003). There are a number of favorable outcomes to experiencing gratitude that directly oppose those we hypothesize are associated with envy. Gratitude is strongly associated with positive effect, overall psychological well-being, and life satisfaction (Froh et al., 2011; Lin, 2015). Gratitude increases relationship satisfaction and feelings of connectedness in romantic couples (Algoe et al., 2010), indicating that this emotion plays a role in our perceptions of others, as well as in the interactions that follow. Interestingly, recent work has noted that there are opposing effects of gratitude on the two subtypes of envy, such that gratitude is positively related to benign envy, but is negatively related to malicious envy (Xiang et al., 2018). In short, gratitude is an apt additional comparison condition and comparing gratitude and envy might reveal insights regarding both states.

Although ample research has linked gratitude positively to prosocial behavior (Algoe et al., 2016), a causal relationship between envy and prosocial behavior has not been established. Some correlational work hints at a negative relationship; for example, malicious envy correlates with schadenfreude—taking pleasure in the misfortune of others (van de Ven et al., 2015), such that individuals higher in dispositional malicious envy more strongly disliked a person who had previously wronged them as well as felt that this individual deserved to suffer a setback. It is highly possible that a person might act upon these feelings if presented the opportunity, causing mental, physical, or emotional harm to another. Furthermore, these feelings are recognized not only by the envious individual but also by the envied target: high-performing university employees reported feeling victimized in the workplace as a result of being envied by their colleagues (Kim & Glomb, 2014). Envy also is associated with social loafing in groups, suggesting a decreased desire to contribute when one feels relative deprivation (Duffy & Shaw, 2000). Finally, gratitude and envy were negatively correlated with one another (Froh et al., 2011) and displayed opposite correlations for outcomes such as anger and well-being (Poelker et al., 2017) in the only such studies of which we are aware, further bolstering our reasoning for wanting to compare gratitude and envy. In summary, there is no experimental work on envy and prosocial behavior, a gap we intended to fill. We did so by first testing whether envy would reduce helping, and then by assessing whether envy would lead to active harm. We used a novel method for inducing envy in two experiments. For both theoretical and empirical reasons, we deemed that it would be nearly impossible to induce separately malicious or benign envy, so we developed a manipulation of general envy.

Experiment 1

The purpose of Experiment 1 was to explore whether envy promotes or inhibits prosocial behavior. Although many negative affective states reduce helping, others have been found to have no impact on helping or even increase helping behavior under some circumstances (e.g., as a means of mood repair; Cialdini & Kenrick, 1976). More to the point, virtually all research to date linking envy to helping behavior has been correlational. Moreover, past inductions arguably have been less potent or potentially confounded because they have manipulated envy indirectly, such as via repeatedly losing random drawings, which could elicit other emotions such as frustration and anger (Wobker, 2015; Even some research on trait-level envy has merely inferred the experience of envy, such as via identified wealth disparities; Gino & Pierce, 2010). The paucity of published manipulations of envy suggests a challenge with such inductions, so we wanted to develop a straightforward and potent manipulation to test our hypotheses. We chose an immersive thinking and writing task centered on re-experiencing a past envious state. We compared induced envy to a neutral affective state as well as gratitude and assessed helping via an ecologically valid behavioral measure. We operationalized “prosocial” in this study as helping to pick up pencils that a nearby stranger had dropped. We tested two hypotheses in Experiment 1:

Hypothesis 1a/1b: Envy would inhibit helping behavior relative to the (a) neutral and (b) grateful affective states.

Hypothesis 2a/2b: Gratitude would promote helping behavior, relative to the (a) neutral and (b) envious conditions.

Method

Participants

A power analysis conducted using G*Power software (Faul et al., 2009), using the smallest previously found correlation between gratitude and helping behavior (r = .23), revealed that 117 participants should be sufficient to detect an effect (power ≥ 0.8, α ≤ .05), and we sought to exceed this number to ensure an adequately powered test of our hypotheses.

Data were collected from 143 participants, all of whom were English-speaking undergraduate students at a large, urban university in the eastern United States. All participants received partial course credit for their participation. A small number of participants had to be excluded because there were issues with the pencil drop scenario that directly influenced the participants’ ability to help, such as the pencils not falling out of the cup (n = 14). The final sample consisted of 129 participants (70.5% women). The sample was diverse: 49.6% of participants identified as Caucasian, 24.8% African American/Black, 14.7% Asian, 8.5% Hispanic/Latino, and 1.6% identified as Other.

Procedure

Participants were told that the study involved three separate components: personality questionnaires, an individual emotion writing task, and a writing task with a partner (the confederate). Confederates were the same sex as their matched participants because greater perceived similarity increases the likelihood that participants would view the confederate as a target for social comparison, making the hypothesized envy and gratitude effects more salient.

Participants and confederates were first asked to sit in separate rooms to complete survey items that included four trait measures. First was the Gratitude Questionnaire Six-Item Form (GQ-6, α = .69; McCullough et al., 2002), which included items such as “I have so much in life to be thankful for.” Second was the Benign and Malicious Envy Scale (BeMaS; Lange & Crusius, 2015), which asked participants to respond to items reflecting benign (α = .74, “I strive to reach other people’s superior achievements”) and malicious envy (α = .83, “Envious feelings cause me to dislike the other person”). Third was a six-item scale to assess prosocial attitudes (adapted from Osgood & Muraven, 2015, α = .89), that asked participants to respond to items such as “The needs of others are important.” Finally, participants completed the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (R-SES, α = .91; Rosenberg, 1965), including items such as “I take a positive attitude towards myself.”

Participants were then randomly assigned to one of three affect conditions: envy (n = 45), neutral (n = 42), or gratitude (n = 42). The experimenter told participants that the researchers were interested in how vividly people could recall emotional events. As with previously validated emotion inductions (Green, Sedikides, & Gregg, 2008), participants were then asked to close their eyes and visualize the details and experiences of a specific event related to their assigned condition. After visualizing for 1 min, the experimenter had participants write down a description of the memory, using as much detail as possible.

In the envy and gratitude conditions, participants were given the following instructions: “Close your eyes and take one full minute to reflect on an event that caused you to feel very envious/grateful. Focus on your emotional reaction to the situation.” Participants in the envy condition read the following definition of envy to ensure a common understanding of the term: “Envy is a negative feeling or emotional state that results from a desire to have the possessions, achievements, or qualities of another for yourself” (adapted from Barrows, 2002), and participants in the gratitude condition read the following definition of gratitude: “Gratitude is a positive feeling or emotional state that results from recognizing sources of goodness in others and the benefits you have received from others” (adapted from Emmons & McCullough, 2003).

In the neutral condition, participants were told,

We tend to have many interactions each day. Close your eyes and take one full minute to reflect on the last time you had a normal interaction with a salesperson. This should be a typical interaction, and not one in which anything out of the ordinary happened. Focus on your reactions during the interaction.

This prompt was intended to have participants recall and write about a similar social event without invoking a specific emotion.

All participants were given 1 min to reflect on the scenario, and then were given additional instructions to heighten the affective experiences: “Please spend the next ten minutes writing about that time, providing as many details about the situation as possible.” Research assistants ensured that participants remained engaged and on task for the full 10 min.

Following the writing task, participants were given an opportunity to spontaneously help someone they thought was a fellow participant but was a confederate. The experimenter informed participants that they would now be completing a task with the other participant. The room was set up so that there was a cup of pencils on the desk where the second participant (the confederate) would be directed to sit. When both participants were seated, the experimenter left the room under the guise of retrieving forgotten forms. The confederate had been trained to knock the cup of 30 pencils over and then begin to pick them up rather slowly, providing ample time for the participant to provide help, but still quickly enough to be realistic (adapted from Twenge et al., 2007).

When the experimenter re-entered the study room, he or she handed the confederate and participant each a separate packet of forms to complete that were ostensibly part of the writing task. The confederate recorded the participant’s helping behavior (how many pencils were picked up, if any) on these forms. Meanwhile, the participant completed six manipulation check items that assessed how much envy or gratitude they felt after thinking/writing about the scenario. The gratitude manipulation check was previously used by Bartlett and DeSteno (2006), and we chose the three envy questions to ensure parallel item content and structure for both emotions. The questions were as follows: (a) “How bitter/resentful did you feel regarding the scenario you wrote about?” (b) “How envious did thinking about the scenario make you feel?” (c) “How negatively did you feel when thinking about the scenario?” (d) “How grateful did thinking about the scenario make you feel?” (e) “How appreciative did you feel regarding the scenario you wrote about?” and (f) “How positively did you feel when thinking about the scenario?” All items were rated on a scale of 1 (Not at all) to 5 (Extremely). Manipulation check items were administered at this time rather than immediately after the manipulation so that participants would not be suspicious about the purpose of the pencil task. Demographic items including age, sex, and race were also included in this packet. There was no actual partnered writing task that took place. After these final measures, the experiment ended and participants were debriefed.

Results

Manipulation check

We confirmed the success of the manipulation in two ways. First, we calculated the mean of three envy items of the manipulation check (α = .89) and the three gratitude items (α = .94). We tested differences for both affect composites across the three conditions as well as within groups via multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA). Participants differed significantly on both the envy F(2, 124) = 113.63, p < .001, η² = .65 and gratitude F(2, 124) = 47.95, p < .001, η² = .44 subscales. Furthermore, post hoc results of our manipulation check indicated that our emotion inductions were successful when assessed both between and within groups, and that participants felt the emotion most appropriate to their respective conditions. We present the full results in Tables S1a and S1b (see supplemental material). In addition, there were significant correlations between the number of pencils participants picked up and the reported level of state envy (r = −.26, p = .003) and gratitude (r = .20, p = .026).

As a supplemental manipulation check, two condition-blind independent raters coded each of the written narratives, using an adapted version of the same scale that participants had completed. The same six items from the two original scales were included, but were written such that they asked the raters to assess how much the participant seemed to exhibit each feeling in the narrative. The items were again rated on a 1 to 5 scale. The raters’ scores were averaged and calculated into two separate scores (envy and gratitude) for each participant. A very high degree of reliability was found between raters on each of the manipulation check subscales. For the envy subscale (M = 1.97, SD = 0.22), the Interclass Correlation Coefficient (2, 2) = .93, 95% CI = [0.90, 0.95], F(126, 126) = 27.89, p < .001. For the gratitude subscale (M = 2.26, SD = 0.24), the ICC (2, 2) = .95, 95% CI = [0.93, 0.97], F(126, 126) = 33.66, p < .001. In addition, raters’ scores mirrored the patterns reported by participants on the manipulation check questionnaires. From these analyses, we can conclude the affective state manipulations were successful. We present these full results in Table S2 (see supplemental material).

Principal dependent measures

To test our hypotheses, we analyzed helping as a continuous variable (number of pencils picked up) via one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA). The omnibus test was significant, Brown Forsythe’s F(2, 119.72) = 3.49, p = .034, η² = .05:¹ (All participants were included in this analysis, even those who did not help, consistent with Study 3 of Twenge et al., 2007, the paper from which this helping scenario was adapted).

Planned contrasts were used to assess differences in helping behavior between conditions (see Figure 1). Participants in the envy condition (M = 10.36, SD = 7.14, 95% CI = [8.21, 12.50]) helped significantly less than those in the neutral (M = 13.48, SD = 6.80, 95% CI = [11.36, 15.60]), t(84.96) = −2.09, p = .040, and gratitude groups (M = 13.50, SD = 5.16, 95% CI = [11.89, 15.11]) group, t(80.11) = −2.37, p = .020. The neutral and gratitude conditions did not differ significantly, p = .99.

Figure 1.

Differences between emotion conditions on the measure of helping behavior (number of pencils picked up, ranging from 0–30).

As a more stringent test of our hypothesis, we used a one-way analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) to determine whether the effects would hold when controlling for baseline levels of benign and malicious envy, trait gratitude, prosocial tendencies, and self-esteem. The omnibus test was still significant, F(2, 121) = 3.16, p = .046, η² = .05. None of the covariates was significant, suggesting that there was no difference among groups on those traits. Once again, our pairwise comparisons produced the same pattern of results, even with group means adjusted to account for our covariates. Participants in the envy condition (M = 10.43, SE = 0.97, 95% CI = [8.52, 12.34]) helped significantly less than those in the neutral group (M = 13.58, SE = 1.02, 95% CI = [11.57, 15.60]), p = .028 and the gratitude group (M = 13.31, SD = 1.01, 95% CI = [11.32, 15.29], p = .041). Once again, the neutral and gratitude conditions did not differ significantly from one another, p = .85.

Discussion

Individuals who experienced envy engaged in significantly less helping behavior than individuals in either a neutral or grateful affective state. Thus, our primary hypothesis (Hypothesis 1) was confirmed: Envious individuals were significantly less likely to pick up pencils for another person, and those who did help provided less of it (i.e., picked up fewer pencils), relative to those in a neutral state as well as those in a grateful state. Moreover, these effects held even under the more stringent test of controlling for trait-level envy, gratitude, prosociality, and self-esteem. This research provides the first experimental evidence that feeling envious may not only influence cognition and emotion but also may have a detrimental effect on relationships, as envious individuals were less helpful toward others. Moreover, the targets were not the source of the envy, a stronger test of our hypothesis.

It is important to consider how this might translate to real-world interactions among romantic partners, friends, colleagues, and strangers. An individual envious about one co-worker may be less charitable to and more competitive with other co-workers, even when such behavior potentially hurts their own outcomes (e.g., bonus). It is possible that this reduced likelihood of helping could potentially result in an individual being perceived as less agreeable or cooperative. Furthermore, chronic envy leading to less prosocial behavior could inhibit one’s long-term ability to create a strong and supportive social network. These possibilities await future empirical attention. Envy has been found to correlate with negative states including feelings of depression and inferiority (Appel et al., 2015; van de Ven et al., 2015), and the link to reduced prosocial behavior conceivably could explain these links to some extent, as negative mood states are known to inhibit helping (Cialdini & Kenrick, 1976).

Hypothesis 2, that those in a grateful state would help more than those in the neutral control condition, was not supported in this sample. One possible explanation is that our envy manipulation was more potent than the gratitude manipulation, as negative emotions typically are more impactful than positive ones (Baumeister et al., 2001). Another is that participants in the neutral condition may have been in a somewhat positive affective state, and therefore did not differ enough in terms of affect from those in the gratitude group. Previously research has cataloged the challenges of inducing a truly neutral affective state, versus a mildly positive state (Diener & Diener, 1996). This was supported by the fact that participants in our neutral condition reported scores above the midpoint on the gratitude subscale of our manipulation check. This indicated that they felt generally positive about the neutral memory they wrote about, and thus, the condition may not have been truly emotionally neutral.

Although being in an envious state reduced helping behavior, in the context of our experimental design, choosing not to help could be considered a neutral or default behavior because participants did not cause the cup to fall and had to leave their seat to render assistance. Thus, they might have felt relatively little social impetus to help. We wanted to extend our investigation and understand whether people would purposefully make the choice to engage in active, antisocial behavior as consequence of their envy. Therefore, we conducted a follow-up experiment to examine how envy might influence behavior when individuals were given the opportunity to actively harm a partner (as in Experiment 1, not the source of envy) in a mixed-motive scenario. We also addressed potential limitations of Experiment 1 in the following ways in Experiment 2: First, we controlled (via ANCOVA) for affect in addition to the Experiment 1 dispositional variables as a stronger test of our hypotheses. Second, we developed an improved neutral prime to allow us to better assess potential differences among all conditions.

Experiment 2

The intent of Experiment 2 was to replicate and extend the results of Experiment 1 by addressing whether the influence of envy would extend beyond prosocial behavior and influence antisocial behavior. Experiment 1 found that envious people were less likely to help another, but does envy extend to increasing the desire to harm another as well as the likelihood of enacting such behaviors? This is an important distinction, as a reduction in a motivation to help does not necessarily mean an increased motive to harm. For example, in some cases, the emotional experience of sadness leads to a reduction of prosocial tendencies, as an individual may become more withdrawn (Grusec et al., 2002), but not to an increase in antisocial behavior (Saleem et al., 2015). Similarly, it likely is not merely the valence of envy that may lead to a reduction in helping, as other negative emotional states such as embarrassment have been used as contrasts to envy conditions, and have produced markedly different outcomes (Lange et al., 2018). However, given the discontentedness and sense of inferiority of envy, an increase in motivation to harm, even to a target that is not the source of envy, is a distinct possibility worthy of empirical attention. The scenario in Experiment 1 only offered participants the options to engage in an active helping behavior or remain neutral by simply choosing to remain passive. In Experiment 2, a tangram puzzle task, also known as the Tangram Help Hurt Task (THHT; Saleem et al., 2015), was chosen because it can distinguish between choosing to actively harm, help, or behave neutrally toward another individual when placed in a competitive scenario. That is, the tangram task measures helping and hurting as two distinct outcomes and explicitly neutral puzzles are a third selection option. In the tangram task, assigning easier puzzles is viewed as an active form of helping because they are fairly easy to solve, whereas assigning more difficult is viewed as inflicting a frustrating and negative task, and thus a more antisocial action (Saleem et al., 2012, 2015). The neutral puzzles are considered a moderate and default choice, neither actively helpful nor harming.

One possible explanation for the hypothesized effect is that positive emotions engender a broader focus of attention, whereas negative emotions engender a narrower focus (Fredrickson, 2013; Fredrickson & Branigan, 2005; but see Harmon-Jones et al., 2013). Positive emotions also tend to elicit approach behaviors (Cacioppo et al., 1999), causing individuals to focus more outside the self, and thus making them more likely to notice and offer help to others when it is needed. Given this relationship, we included the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) in Experiment 2 to assess levels of affect to address one of the aforementioned potential limitations of Experiment 1.

We predicted that participants in an envious state would exhibit a higher rate of hurtful behavior than their (a) neutral and (b) grateful counterparts, as indicated by the number of difficult tangram puzzles they assigned to another student (Hypothesis 1a/1b). We also predicted that participants in a grateful state would exhibit more helpful behavior relative to the other two groups, as indicated by the number of easy puzzles they assigned (Hypothesis 2a/2b), replicating Experiment 1.

In addition to the expected behavioral differences, we also predicted that participants’ intentions toward the other student would differ based on the emotion condition.

Hypothesis 3a/3b: More specifically, we predicted that participants in an envious state would report a decreased desire to be helpful to the other student than their (a) neutral and (b) grateful counterparts, as indicated by their self-reported intent to help.

Hypothesis 4a/4b: We also predicted they would exhibit a stronger desire to reduce the other student’s chances of success, as indicated by their self-reported intent to harm.

Our primary interests were surrounding the harmful behavior and intent to harm; however, we again included predictions about differences between the gratitude and neutral states. Although there were no differences between these two groups in Experiment 1, we believed we might see differences in Experiment 2 due in part to the modified/improved neutral condition manipulation, and based on previous research which suggests that gratitude produces prosocial behavior, even at a cost to oneself (Bartlett et al., 2012).

Method

Participants

An a priori power analysis using G*Power software (Faul et al., 2009) to determine the sample size that would be needed for Experiment 2 found that 117 participants should be sufficient to detect an effect (power ≥ 0.8, alpha ≤ .05). Data were collected from 154 participants. Of these, 15 reported suspicions about the hypotheses, four were removed for failing inattention checks that were built into the survey items or not following directions during the writing task, and eight were removed because the computer did not properly register the survey responses. The final sample consisted of 127 (69% female) English-speaking undergraduate students at a large, urban university in the United States. All participants received partial course credit for their participation. Once again, participants’ self-reported racial identification yielded a diverse sample: 41.5% White, 22.8% African American/Black, 13.8% South Asian, 6.5% East Asian, 6.6% as multiracial, and 8.8% as Other/unknown.

Procedure

Participants were told at the beginning of the session that the study involved three components: a series of personality questionnaires, an imagination task, and a puzzle task that was intended to assess cognitive ability. Trait gratitude, trait envy, general prosocial attitudes and self-esteem were assessed using the same measures from Experiment 1. Participants also filled out three new measures that might theoretically be correlated with our outcomes. We were purposeful in our inclusion of these items, as we wanted to avoid over-controlling for variables (Spector et al., 2000), while still accounting for possible confounds by running an even more conservative test of our hypothesis.

The first additional measure was the hostility subscale of the Buss-Perry Aggression Scale (BPS; α = .84; Buss & Perry, 1992) because envy is associated with increased hostile feelings toward others (Poelker et al., 2017). The second was the agreeableness subscale of the Big Five Inventory (BFI; John & Srivastava, 1999) which consists of nine self-report items such as “I like to cooperate with others.” We also included the 20-item PANAS (α = .87 for the positive subscale and α = .84 for the negative subscale; Watson et al., 1988) to control for baseline affect.

After completing the preinduction trait measures, participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups—envy (n = 43), neutral (n = 44), or gratitude (n = 40)—and completed the emotion-recall writing task as in Experiment 1. The envy and gratitude inductions remained the same. However, the neutral state instructions were modified, due to the possibility that participants in Experiment 1 may have defaulted to remembering a positive interaction with a salesperson. Participants in this condition heard the following instructions: “Please take one minute to look at the room around you, taking note of as many details as possible.” Participants were then provided the following instructions: “Please spend the next ten minutes writing about the room around you, providing as many details about it as possible. The experimenter will let you know when ten minutes has passed.”

After 10 min, participants stopped writing and completed the first manipulation check form, the same six items used in Experiment 1, worded to measure participants’ current emotions.

THHT

Participants next completed the THHT (adapted from Saleem et al., 2015). We wanted to employ a task that provided a full range of responses toward another: helpful, neutral, and hurtful behavior. Tangram tasks have been used successfully as a measure of both helping and hurting behavior in a number of studies involving prejudice, aggression, and prosociality, while also allowing neutral response options. Gentile et al. (2009) measured prosocial behavior using the tangram task in a study of the influence of cooperative video games. Participants were told that if their partner completed at least 10 of 11 puzzles within 10 min, the partner would win a US$10 gift certificate. Similarly, Saleem et al. (2012) used tangrams to examine the effects of prosocial video games on prosocial behavior in children; participants were told that another participant to whom they were assigning the puzzles was eligible to receive a US$10 gift certificate, so assigning easier tangrams was a helpful behavior (participants themselves experienced no benefits).

In these past studies, participants were incentivized to help their partner. However, we wanted to examine the link between envy and harmful behavior, so our instructions described a competitive scenario rather than a prosocial one. In keeping with the incentive-based paradigms that have been used previously, we offered partial course credits as a prize, leading participants to believe that the credits earned would be directly linked to their performance on the puzzle task.

The experimenter introduced participants to the tangram task via a detailed instructional video to help them understand how the game works, and how puzzle difficulty corresponds to the number of pieces. They also showed participants three example puzzles, each of varying difficulty (easy, medium, and difficult). The experimenter then told participants as follows:

Another participant has selected a set of 11 puzzles for you to complete, and you will now select some for them. If both you and the other participant are able to complete the puzzle sets in less than ten minutes, you will each receive an additional .25 credits for the study. However, if one or both of you are unable to complete the puzzles in the required amount of time, the winner will be whoever completes the puzzles first. As the sole winner, this person will receive an additional .5 credits for participating in the study.

Participants made selections for the other participant, choosing 11 puzzles from 30 possible options (10 each of easy, medium, and difficult). The experimenter then asked them to complete Motivations for Tangram Assignment items (Saleem et al., 2015) before working on their own tangrams. These were two questions that assessed a desire to help (“I wanted to help the other participant win the credits”) or harm (“I wanted to make it difficult for the other participant to win the credits.”)

Participants then completed a manipulation check a second time, with the original items re-worded to capture participants’ feelings in the current moment rather than how they felt when writing the narrative. This second assessment allowed us to determine whether the effectiveness of the affect manipulation had endured throughout the experiment. Finally, participants completed the same demographic information as in Experiment 1. Participants also answered one new question on a scale of 1 (Totally Disagree) to 7 (Totally Agree): “It was very important for me to receive the additional [course] credit during the puzzle task.” This question was added to confirm that the credits were a sufficiently potent incentive for participants. Finally, participants were debriefed. Participants did not actually complete any puzzles, and received the full 1.50 credits regardless of their performance on the tangram task.

Results

Manipulation checks

As with Experiment 1, we calculated envy (α = .88) and gratitude composite scores (α = .93) for all participants. The one-way MANOVA examining both gratitude and envy scores across the three conditions was significant: participants differed significantly on both the envy, F(2, 124) = 30.51, p < .001, η² = .33, and gratitude subscales, F(2, 124) = 54.02, p < .001, η² = .47. Once again, post hoc results of our manipulation check indicated that our emotion inductions were successful and that participants felt the emotion appropriate to their respective conditions. The envy manipulation elicited significantly more envious feelings than either the neutral or gratitude conditions, whereas participants in the gratitude condition reported feeling significantly more grateful than their envious and neutral counterparts (all ps < .001). We present the full results in Table S3 (supplemental material).

Two condition-blind independent raters coded each of the narratives written by the participants to provide a second manipulation check on the affect inductions. Once again, a very high degree of reliability was found between raters on both measures. For the envy manipulation, the Interclass Correlation Coefficient (2, 2) = .93, 95% CI = [0.89, 0.95], F(126, 126) = 13.39, p < .001. For the gratitude manipulation, the ICC (2, 2) = .95, 95% CI = [0.93, 0.97], F(126, 126) = 21.40, p < .001. We present the full results in Table S4 (see supplemental material).

Finally, our participants reported that receiving the additional research credit was highly important to them (M = 6.22 on 7-point scale, SD = 1.08). This did not differ across groups, F(2, 124) = 2.14, p = .12, indicating that our manipulation was a sufficient incentive in our experimental scenario.

Manipulation Check 2 (post dependent variable)

An additional manipulation check was added to assess whether participants still felt the induced affective state following the puzzle dependent measures. This was the same as the original manipulation check used in Experiment 1 that contained a three-item envy subscale and a three-item gratitude subscale. As with the previous manipulation check, we conducted a MANOVA. Participants differed significantly on both the envy, F(2, 124) = 57.06, p < .001, η² = .48, and gratitude, F(2, 124) = 38.41, p < .001, η² = .38, subscales across the three conditions. Thus, the affect inductions elicited the intended emotional responses, and we succeeded in making the control prime more explicitly neutral. Moreover, the inclusion of the second manipulation check provided evidence that the effects of the induction lasted throughout the duration of the experiment. Envy is not a fleeting, momentary experience (for full results see Table S3b in supplemental materials).

Principal dependent measures

We first conducted a one-way MANOVA to analyze our four outcomes across the three conditions: the number of puzzles selected per difficulty (easy and difficult), and the motivation items assessing self-reported intent to help and intent to harm. There was a significant difference only on the intent to harm measure, F(2, 124) = 3.40, p = .037, η² = .05. Pairwise comparisons revealed that participants in the neutral condition (M = 2.18, SD = 0.99) reported significantly lower intent to harm relative to both the envy (M = 2.74, SD = 1.38, p = .034) and gratitude conditions (M = 2.85, SD = 1.30, p = .018). Interestingly, the latter two conditions did not differ significantly from one another (p = .71), and there were no significant differences between groups on either puzzle outcome or the intent to help measure.

We then conducted a one-way multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) to see whether participants differed on these same outcomes across the three conditions when controlling for our trait measures. The covariates included in this model were the participants’ baseline levels of dispositional envy, trait gratitude, prosocial tendencies, self-esteem, agreeableness, hostility, and affect. Thus, this was a rather stringent test of the hypothesis.² There was a significant difference across groups when all covariates were accounted for, Pillai’s trace = .15, F(8, 226) = 2.34, p = .020, η² = .08. This was a slightly larger effect size than the previous analysis, and the test achieved a power of β = .88.

The univariate F test results were as follows: The groups differed significantly on both the difficult puzzle measure, F(2, 115) = 3.68, p = .028, η² = .06, and self-reported intent to harm, F(2, 115) = 3.84, p = .024, η² = .06, so follow-up pairwise comparisons were conducted. The means used in these comparisons are listed in Table 1 (which reports adjusted means with all covariates included in the model). Participants in the envy condition (M = 4.35, SD = 0.34) assigned significantly more difficult puzzles relative to their neutral (M = 3.09, SD = 0.33, p = .010) and grateful counterparts (M = 3.35, SD = 0.35, p = .050). The neutral and gratitude groups did not differ significantly (p = .59). Thus, Hypothesis 2 was largely supported (see Figure 2).

Table 1.

Outcome Measures: Estimated Group Means and Descriptive Statistics.

Dependent variable	Group	M	SE	95% confidence intervals
Dependent variable	Group	M	SE	Lower bound	Upper bound
Easy puzzles	Envy	2.73	0.40	1.93	3.53
	Gratitude	3.59	0.41	2.77	4.41
	Neutral	3.50	0.39	2.73	4.27
Difficult puzzles	Envy	4.35	0.34	3.67	5.03
	Gratitude	3.35	0.35	2.66	4.05
	Neutral	3.09	0.33	2.43	3.74
Intent to help	Envy	2.62	0.19	2.24	3.00
	Gratitude	2.59	0.20	2.20	2.98
	Neutral	2.95	0.19	2.59	3.32
Intent to harm	Envy	2.89	0.20	2.50	3.28
	Gratitude	2.72	0.20	2.31	3.12
	Neutral	2.16	0.19	1.78	2.54

Figure 2.

Differences between emotion conditions on the harm scores (number of difficult puzzles assigned, ranging from 0–10) and self-reported intent to harm (ranging from 1–5).

Participants’ self-reported intent to harm was consistent with the assignment of difficult puzzles, with one exception involving the gratitude condition (see Figure 2). Participants in the envy (M = 2.89, SD = 0.20) group reported a significantly higher desire to harm relative to the neutral group (M = 2.16, SD = 0.19, p = 0.010). However, there was no significant difference between the envy and gratitude conditions (M = 2.72, SD = 0.20, p = .55). Thus, Hypothesis 4 was supported regarding the envy versus neutral conditions.

There was no significant difference among groups for the number of easy puzzles assigned F(2, 115) = 1.28, p = .28, η² = .02, and thus not enough evidence to support Hypothesis 1a/1b. Intent to help scores also did not differ significantly, F(2, 115) = 1.17, p = .32, η² = .02, indicating a lack of support for Hypothesis 3a/3b.

Discussion

The results of Experiment 2 extend the evidence for negative interpersonal effects of envy into hurtful behavior. The hypothesis that those in an envious state would be motivated to harm another as well as choose to hurt another when given the opportunity was confirmed. Envious participants assigned more difficult tangrams than individuals in a neutral state, thus making it more likely that their interaction partners would earn less course credit. Envious individuals also reported greater intent to harm their interaction partner. It is noteworthy that envy led participants to engage in this behavior, despite the fact that all participants felt that earning additional credits was important and that cooperation was another avenue of earning additional credit. In addition, these harmed individuals were not the source of the envy. These findings are consistent with previously reported correlations between envy and schadenfreude and hostility, but this is the first experimental investigation into the causal influence of envy on hurtful behavior.

Although the prediction regarding envy and actively choosing to engage in harmful behavior was supported, there was not sufficient evidence to support some of the other hypotheses, as envious participants did not actively choose to help significantly less. One plausible explanation regarding the null helping behavior effect (and concomitant motive to help) is that because participants were placed in a competitive scenario, helping was simply a less relevant potential behavior to consider. Although the paradigm contained mixed motives (i.e., inducements to both cooperate and compete), the competition element likely was more salient. This is somewhat analogous to Study 1, in which envious participants opted to remain passively neutral rather than actively provide help. However, in this more competitive context, it was the other two groups that opted for passive neutrality rather than take the opportunity to actively harm another individual. This was notable, as previous work has only incentivized participants to cooperate rather than providing simultaneous helpful and harmful options. In our experiment, participants who did not experience envy still did not choose to help. Future research should investigate the role of activation and inhibition tendencies (Anderson & Berdahl, 2002).

A second possible reason for this finding was that being in either an envious or a grateful state—essentially anything other than an affectively neutral state—motivated participants to strive to win the puzzle game to repair their negative mood, or to extend an already positive mood (Cialdini & Kenrick, 1976; Fredrickson, 2013). However, the findings were corroborated by converging results on both the self-reported intent to harm measures and participants’ actual behavior in the puzzle selection task.

General Discussion

Across two experiments, envy elicited less helping behavior and more harmful behavior. In Experiment 1, envious individuals were significantly less likely to help another person in a spontaneous and ecologically valid helping scenario (picking up spilled pencils) relative to individuals in a neutral state. In Experiment 2, envious individuals were significantly more likely to harm another person by assigning more difficult tangrams (and thus making it less likely that the other person would earn additional research credit). Envious individuals also reported a significantly greater intent to harm, suggesting that this emotional experience motivated participants to thwart another person’s chances at success rather than achieve a mutually beneficial outcome in our mixed-motive scenario. In both experiments, the targets of the helpful and harmful behavior were not the sources of envy, suggesting potentially wider-ranging interpersonal effects of the affective state of envy.

Why does envy elicit such negative orientation to others? Future research should investigate potential mediators. One might be the breadth of attention (Fredrickson & Branigan, 2005; Mathews & Green, 2010); a related possibility might be sensitivity or attention to empathic cues (Pickett et al., 2004). Gratitude interventions might be useful in improving people’s moods, thus allowing them to refocus their attention to the needs of others (Aknin et al., 2018).

Given that the negative implications of envy are rather widespread, greater attention should be given to how we can effectively reduce this emotion and its negative intrapersonal and interpersonal effects. However, our results suggest that gratitude alone may not refocus the sense of inferiority that comes along with malicious envy. Recent meta-analyses also suggest that gratitude interventions may not be as effective as previously thought, in that they can promote increased happiness but offer limited positive benefits beyond that for the individual (Davis et al., 2016; Dickens, 2017). In this vein, self-compassion may be a promising avenue to explore. Self-compassion involves treating oneself with kindness, and remembering that all people are fallible (Neff, 2003). Therefore, it is possible that interventions employing self-compassion might be effective at reducing negative self-judgments and feelings of inferiority. Furthermore, self-compassion may have the additional benefit of transforming the self-critical malicious envy into the more aspirational and goal-oriented benign envy. Relatedly, self-affirmation may inoculate individuals to some extent from the experience of envy (Cohen & Sherman, 2014).

An additional potential reason for envy’s effect on helpful and harmful behavior might be affect valence: People sometimes help others more in positive than negative moods. However, the link between affect and helping actually is rather complex and individuals have also been found to help more when in some negative affective states, particularly when they feel that helping will repair that negative state (Batson et al., 1989; Cialdini & Kenrick, 1976). However, negative affect (as assessed by the PANAS) in Experiment 2 did not correlate with choice of difficult puzzles or intent to harm. This suggests that envy may be unique in its effects and is distinct from a general negative affective state.

We also obtained some correlational support for the proposition that there may be two types of envy, a recent debate in the literature (Cohen-Charash & Larson, 2017). It was not until recently that research on envy revealed two distinct components—malicious and benign (van de Ven et al., 2009). These constructs were moderately correlated with one another, as we found in Experiment 2 (r = .34). Cohen-Charash and Larson (2017) argued that benign and malicious envy are not separate constructs, and that considering them as such is confounding the emotions with their outcomes. We add that these two constructs are separable in part because they produce different motivational states, which in turn result in different behavioral outcomes. Evidence for considering benign and malicious envy to be separate constructs has been further corroborated by research showing that students who exhibit high levels of benign envy as a personality trait had a propensity to set higher goals for themselves, and thus tended to perform better academically relative to their counterparts who had higher levels of malicious envy (Sawada & Fujii, 2016). We found that gratitude was negatively correlated with malicious envy, but showed no such relationship with benign envy. In fact, the correlational findings indicated that malicious envy and gratitude were related to almost all of the model covariates in opposing ways.

However, we emphasize that we did not manipulate malicious and benign envy separately, though we believe a strength of our studies came from the way we approached the experimental manipulation. More specifically, we provided participants with a broad description of envy that did not specify benign or malicious, allowing them to recall and describe any relevant event fitting the definition. Furthermore, even with this more conservative method of emotional priming, we still detected an effect of envy on helping and harming behaviors. More impressively, it appears that the negative effects of envy were strong enough to be transferred to an innocent third party, as our target in both studies was a stranger, and not the source of the participants’ envious recollections.

Additional experimental research would, of course, provide more definitive evidence of the differences between benign and malicious envy one way or another, though this task may prove challenging, as the differences between them are rather subtle (i.e., they may feel somewhat similar, but motivate different appraisals and behaviors). Other similarly overlapping pairs of psychological states (e.g., shame and guilt) are viewed as conceptually distinct, with divergent interpersonal consequences, but difficult to manipulate separately (de Hooge et al., 2008; Tangney, 1996).

In closing, although the negative intrapersonal effects of envy have been studied before, this was the first major experimental work to look at the interpersonal processes associated with envy. Two experiments demonstrated that envy can reduce one’s willingness to help others, and increase motivation to engage in antisocial behavior. If Antonio Salieri had not been so envious of Mozart’s towering genius, not only might Mozart have lived longer, but Salieri’s relationships with friends and family might have been healthier due to greater benevolence on his part, and he might not have died bitter and isolated (in the film, if not in real life).

Supplemental Material

Behler_Online_Appendix – Supplemental material for To Help or To Harm? Assessing the Impact of Envy on Prosocial and Antisocial Behaviors

Supplemental material, Behler_Online_Appendix for To Help or To Harm? Assessing the Impact of Envy on Prosocial and Antisocial Behaviors by Anna Maria C. Behler, Catherine S. J. Wall, Adriana Bos and Jeffrey D. Green in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

Footnotes

Authors’ Note

Anna Maria C. Behler is currently affiliated with North Carolina State University and Catherine S. J. Wall is currently affiliated with Cornell University.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Anna Maria C. Behler

Notes

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material is available online with this article.

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