The workplace, with its pyramidal system and competitive incentives, is, today, one of those that arouses the most resentments, a field sown for envy among colleagues. A worker could face one of the following three situations in front of colleagues who do the same work: that they earn 40,000 euros per year while others receive 60,000, that everyone earn 35,000 or that they earn 30,000 compared to colleagues who only receive 20,000. In which of them would you feel happier?
When this question is honestly answered, many choose the third scenario. From a rationally selfish point of view, the first situation is the most convenient. From an approach that mixes solidarity and their own well-being, they should choose the second option. However, the possibility of arousing jealousy leads many people to choose the third.
Paul Krugman, professor of economics at Princeton University, has done numerous experiments in which people choose options of this type, in which they manage to avoid lint against others and promote envy towards them. This scientist explains that the paradox – we prefer to have less and that others are below to have more if others are above – is due to a comparative bias.
It also reminds us that our satisfaction does not only depend on the extent to which we achieve our objectives, but also on whether others have achieved less success in what we consider significant. When those around us lack what we have, we enjoy it more because the feeling is more intense as we have a point of comparison that makes us value the importance of our achievement.
The philosopher Francis Bacon reminded us: “Envy always arises with the comparison of oneself; if there is no comparison, there is no resentment.” It is a feeling that arises as an alarm: it allows us to verify our inferiority in some aspect and prompts us to counteract it.
Apes feel it too
This psychological mechanism is, in many moments, our main vital impulse. Therefore, natural selection has favored this feeling. Primatologist Frans de Vaal of Emory University in Atlanta found that our ape cousins also have fluff and do not value prizes as much if their peers are higher. In an investigation, he offered a piece of cucumber as compensation for a game to those capuchin monkeys who participated. And he discovered that, although in general it was a sufficient reinforcement, they refused to participate when the rest of the monkeys were awarded a bunch of sweet grapes, the most exquisite delicacy.
Currently, the human being has a biological hardware that produces feelings of envy in certain situations. Motoichiro Kato, a Japanese neuropsychologist at Keiō University in Tokyo, and her collaborators discovered these physiological bases in recent research. Using MRI, they verified how the anterior cingulate cortex – an area around the corpus callosum that raises heart rate and blood pressure in the face of an unsettling emotion – was activated when a person read that others had achieved successes or possessions in areas that were relevant.
Although this resentment against the success of others has a bad reputation – “Passions are often flaunted, even if they are the most criminal; but envy is a cowardly and shameful passion that no one ever dares to admit”, affirmed Rochefoucauld -, it is important to remember that it has stimulated many of the creations of the human being. We all know great rivalries between artists: Leonardo da Vinci versus Miguel Ángel, Mozart versus Salieri, Cervantes versus Lope de Vega… Some, like those of Rimbaud and Verlaine, were shot. But all, probably, have served as an incentive for the creativity of these authors: in the production of Quevedo and Góngora, for example, the role that jealousy played in both directions is clear.
That envy is a feeling that aims to stimulate our motivation is shown because we only envy what we want to achieve but we are not sure we have the means to achieve it. If something is on our list of objectives, but we are sure that we can achieve it, we do not care if someone else has it. A recent study published by Professors CR Harris and NE Henniger, from the University of California, San Diego, shows this phenomenon by studying how this uneasiness towards the successes of others changes with age. The data was clear: young people tend to have more fluff than older people, as they have less sense of control over their lives.
Juvenile fluff, adult control
At the beginning of our life journey we feel that we have very little acting power, and therefore it is easier for feelings of envy to arise. As we get older, we have a greater sense of being in charge of our lives. After a certain age, if we want something we will probably have already achieved it. And if we do not have it, it is because we have given up the effort involved in obtaining it. We are much less frustrated. And that lessens our envy. But, as the authors of the experiment recall, it also makes us less ambitious: envy is a strategy that serves to give the best of ourselves and seek improvement. If we did not have it, we would feel better but we would be less competitive.
All these investigations highlight the adaptive side of this feeling. However, envy does not always encourage self-production: sometimes it is simply “a poisoned dart that is fired at others and ends up wounding oneself.” The problem with this psychological mechanism is that it is difficult to distinguish healthy competition from simple joy at the evil of others. This last feeling is so present in the human psyche that, for example, in German there is a word for it: schadenfreude .
And perhaps it is not a coincidence that this term appears in the Germanic language (and that it has been so widespread in the Anglo-Saxon world). We live in an increasingly individualistic society. In these types of more egocentric cultures, which the psychologist Geert Hofstede – author of Software of the Mind (Software of the mind) – calls idiocentric, competitiveness is perceived as a way of life. And it is very common to feel good every time someone we dislike or who belongs to an enemy group fails: football fans know that sometimes the defeat of the rival club is much tastier than the victory of their own.
The pleasure of seeing the envied suffer
In his book The Joy of Pain , University of North Carolina psychologist Richard Smith explores the role of schadenfreude, that feeling we’ve all had but tend to deny. The universality of this joy for the evil of others is demonstrated by the number of examples that this author proposes. From the Nazi crimes produced by envy towards the Jews to the public humiliations offered by reality television shows are examples of the pleasure it gives us to see how people we envy end up having a bad time.
One of the people who probably suffered the most from the envy of others, the ill-fated Marilyn Monroe, said: “Success makes a lot of people hate you. I wish it wasn’t that way. It would be wonderful to enjoy success without seeing the envy in those around you ”. While we deny that we take pleasure in seeing those who stand out decline, the data is staggering: the most successful stories in any field are always those that include falls from grace. When a film director or an athlete fails, there are always many who smile at their failure. It is curious to note the universality of this phenomenon.
University of Virginia professor John Portmann, author of When Bad Things Happen to Other People , analyzes in his book the – according to him – “such an American tendency” to wish that the person who has Featured fail. But surely there are similar analyzes in many parts of the world where the author considers envy a national sport.
Network envy
There are, in fact, many authors who foresee that the pangs of satisfaction at the setbacks of others will increase throughout the world. The cause: the network envy call. The Internet has allowed certain attitudes of self-promotion and posture, which were previously impudent, now to be well seen. Today we can make each moment very important so that others feel that they have achieved less success than us. Not only is it allowed: it is even a good social strategy. Self-portraying in the most attractive way and in the most favorable situation and then sending the photo to social networks is very adaptive for the individual.
For those who observe him, however, this is not usually the case, as Envy on Facebook demonstrated: A Hidden Threat to Users’ Life Satisfaction? (Envy on Facebook: a hidden threat to the life satisfaction of users?), A study of two German universities from whose data it is deduced that one in three people feel more dissatisfied after visiting social networks because they see their envy increased . Inflating our self-image on Facebook or Twitter is positive for the individual, even if it is not for society.
University of Texas psychologists Sara Hill and David Buss have studied the role of envy in human evolutionary development. These researchers claim that this phenomenon is much more effective than we think. One of his experiments consisted of dividing the volunteers into two groups: the first had been forced to recall situations in which they had felt intense envy, the second, not. Afterwards, the two of them were asked to read writings from their classmates talking about their goals and dreams. Those in the first group, those who had been stimulated with “a good dose of envy”, had concentrated much more on reading. This experiment reinforces the authors’ hypothesis: envy serves to accentuate social attention. We pay more attention to the competitive strategies of others when we suffer this resentment and this allows us to learn.
An adaptive emotion
As these researchers remind us, in the first hundreds of thousands of years of fighting for survival, seeing the successes of others and learning from them prompted by such visceral emotion was the best way to evolve quickly in extreme situations. In the modern world, envy is still an intense feeling. Perhaps it is time to recognize it as part of our psychic life. We have already done it with psychic phenomena that have been considered negative in other times, such as sexual desire, the need to question authority or anger.
For this we will need to differentiate between healthy envy and toxic (or filthy) envy. That is the purpose of the research developed by Niels van de Ven, a psychologist at Tilburg University. In an experiment carried out in various countries around the world – in order to avoid the cross-cultural factor – people were asked to recall experiences in which they had felt envy.
Common characteristics appeared in all the stories: feeling of inferiority, frustration, resentment … But there were other factors that did not always appear, such as wanting or not the other person to fail or admiration for the person envied. From there, he defined two types of feelings: the first, healthy envy, included a feeling of frustration because the other person achieved goals that they longed for, but also respect for the winner and motivation to strive and overcome the other. However, on other occasions, the subjects described a feeling that we can call toxic envy and that led them to paralysis, helplessness (they believe that they will not achieve what others have achieved) and bitterness: they end up wishing the evil of others without this pushes them to improve themselves.
