Can envy be good for you? With Jens Lange, PhD, and Sara Protasi, PhD

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0:32Jens Lange, PhD: Envy is a much maligned emotion. Our feelings about it are evident even in the language we use to describe it. 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?

1:16Jens Lange, PhD: 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.

1:35Jens Lange, PhD: 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 linked to envy, and the difference between benign and malicious envy. My next guest is Dr. Sarah Protassi. Dr. Protassi is a professor of philosophy at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, where she studies moral psychology and the philosophy of emotions.

2:22Jens Lange, PhD: 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. Langa, Dr. Protassi, thank you both for joining me. Thank you so much for having us, Kim. 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. Longa, why don't you take that one? So envy is initially a painful feeling resulting from an unflattering comparison with another person.

3:00Jens Lange, PhD: And so this higher rank person is superior in a domain of high personal relevance to the lower rank person. So I'm, for instance, or I can be envious of Sarah's amazing book on envy, right? 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. Dr. Portasi, you've written about four different types of envy.

3:40Jens Lange, PhD: What are they and what do they tell us about the different ways that envy can show up in our lives?

3:47Sara Protasi, PhD: So it's funny because I was also planning to use my envy for Jens as an example. So he stole my idea and now I'm very envious of that. So let's take the example of, you know, professional envy, right? And as Jens, you know, beautifully explained, envy is this unpleasant, an aversive response to some kind of perceived inferiority or disadvantage vis-a-vis a similar other. So Jens and I are roughly, you know, the same age, the same occupation. And so he's, even though, you know, he's a man, I'm a woman, there's going to be some other differences, but I can perceive him as similar to me. And I can envy him with regard to a good that is relevant to my sense of identity and such as, for instance, academic success, right?

4:36Sara Protasi, PhD: So I envy the fact that he is a renowned expert on envy and he's all this public he has many more publications than me i may have a book but he has many many publications right but now um there are some other conditions that so this is that kind of the background that just envy in general situation right 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 society is my, like Jens and I, my 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.

5:19Sara Protasi, PhD: 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 Aristotle would say, it's a reproach to me, why I haven't 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 Jan's generosity in, you know, 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.

6:05Sara Protasi, PhD: And so I feel what I call emulative envy, which is still painful, right? 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 in my institution and I start fretting and I'm like, oh no, oh 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.

6:47Sara Protasi, PhD: 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 like baby envy, where there is someone who wants to have a biological child. And that's really tough sometimes, right? Sometimes it's just a matter of like what your body can and cannot do. And it's not like you want other people to lose their children, God forbid, right?

7:21Sara Protasi, PhD: But maybe you stop hanging out with your friends with children because it's a little too painful now imagine instead that uh you know maybe i've known yans for a long time maybe we're childhood friends and i've always kind of he was always so successful when i wasn't that's kind of irritating why is yans always good at everything right and and so for whatever reason i developed this rivalry with this person it's 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, right? I want him to do less well, rather than improve myself.

8:01Sara Protasi, PhD: And so maybe I will engage in these 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, right? 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, you know, sabotage it and maybe, you know, I get to, you know, take his place in a grant application somehow, but not because I've become a better researcher, right? 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 Jens' behavior.

8:42Sara Protasi, PhD: And so people don't invite him to conferences or don't invite him to participate in symposium 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 call that spiteful envy. And that, again, might be because I don't feel confident in like, you know, 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 so that we can move from the worst kinds of envy to the better kinds of envy.

9:23Jens Lange, PhD: Dr. Long, I want to ask you if psychological research draws similar distinctions among the different types of envy. 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, also envy, 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, right?

10:05Jens Lange, PhD: Then problem solved. This is what psychologists often call benign envy. Or they can try to pull the other person down, so 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 is the nine malicious distinction kind of misses especially in not envy right in general like my personal opinion is that envy is like doesn't occur in different types or in different categories right so in my opinion emotions and also envy are kind of processes that unfold in particular social situations so in the in the case of envy people encounter a higher rank person they experience pain because situation 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 envy good themselves, then the situation is more likely to unfold towards self-improvement.

11:34Jens Lange, PhD: So benign envy. So I find these types to be interesting and inspiring, right? And if it would occur in data, then that 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 experienced 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 help 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.

12:22Jens Lange, PhD: 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. In your research, do you find that everybody admits to feeling envy at some point or are there people who never feel envy? I think that people often say they don't experience envy but in my opinion the truth is everyone does you know 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 we 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 right let's say in your job for instance and then you you know were either motivated or you you gossiped about the other person.

13:17Jens Lange, PhD: So I 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 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.

13:39Sara Protasi, PhD: I do like to think that metaxonomy has at least some empirical support, partly because 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.

14:20Sara Protasi, PhD: So I do think that the framing is really important, more so than the words we use.

14:26Jens Lange, PhD: Yeah, true. Does envy only apply to people or could I envy a thing like your beautiful car or your expensive house?

14:36Sara Protasi, PhD: 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 is perceived as 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. Right. But in the logical sense, there's always three things. the envier, the envied, and the object, the good object, something that is perceived as good that I don't have and the other person has, I would say.

15:13Jens Lange, PhD: 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. 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?

15:37Sara Protasi, PhD: Yeah, so Jets and I met in 2019 at a conference organized by Timo Breyer, who had this wonderful idea of this conference that was titled Hostile Emotions, Perspectives from Philosophy and Psychology. And he invited, he thought about a set of emotions. It was disgust, contempt, envy, antipathy, ressentiment, 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.

16:23Sara Protasi, PhD: And then, you know, an outcome of the conference was, Thimo 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, you know, there might be some ways in which, you know, the methodologies are different to some extent, the kind of things and, you know, 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 as sins or vices really ought to take into account the available empirical evidence.

17:10Sara Protasi, PhD: And I also think that sometimes psychologists can benefit from more nuanced conceptual distinctions.

17:17Jens Lange, PhD: Yeah, what I found very interesting about this conference 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 nonjudgmental. So we just take a concept just 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.

17:49Jens Lange, PhD: And this is where I felt we have actually complementary value, right? So we try to identify what envy leads to, what it includes, what this process is, and so on. And 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 kind of never think about, so they cannot answer it because they don't have the means to do so. But this is something where philosophers are actually extremely good at. So we thought that 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.

18:33Jens Lange, PhD: We're going to take a short break. When we return, we'll talk about why we are so often envious of the people closest to us.

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19:32Jens Lange, PhD: When travel, expense, and AP are connected with a single AI-supported solution, SAP Concur keeps you ahead of problems. Visit concur.com to learn more. Well, Dr. Portassi, 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, And why can someone else's success be so much harder to celebrate when we know that person well?

20:08Sara Protasi, PhD: 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 is uninteresting 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? There is in the religious tradition especially and in some philosophical approaches, envy and love are seen as complete opposites, incompatible, right? Both descriptively and normatively. But again, that's because one, I think there are two things happening.

20:51Sara Protasi, PhD: 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 envy thrives in similarity, in conditions of similarity, and because we often are similar in different loving relationships, the similarity is different, right? For instance, fathers and children will be similar in some obvious ways, right?

21:32Sara Protasi, PhD: Or people who are genetically related will be similar in some obvious ways. And also, you know, maybe they grew up in similar, you know, friends, childhood friends will grow up in similar environments. But even romantic partners, we know from actually scientific evidence that we, you know, similars attracts, you know, 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 want to, you know, 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.

22:14Sara Protasi, PhD: 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, you know, 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 um and so the trick there and you know i talk a little bit more about some philosophical discussions of it we don't have to go we don't have the time to go into but for me the key is on the one hand to understand that you know 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.

23:03Sara Protasi, PhD: And it might be hard to confess and stigmatize, but it happens. And if we all normalize it, then, you know, we don't feel monsters 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, you know, 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.

23:40Sara Protasi, PhD: And so, you know, it's important to find oneself in a kind of growth mindset and think about, okay, how can I emulate the person? How can I, you know, 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, you know, 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.

24:17Sara Protasi, PhD: 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 and being a loved one is part of the human condition. And, and so we have to kind of love, love wisely and be able to, you know, forgive and forget when appropriate, but also simply just have frank conversations, you know, be mindful about our hostile feelings when they arise and try to, to kind of not shove them. Because I think a lot of relationships, like my experience personal and, and also otherwise, when relationships break down is often because we're not able to talk about these things in the open.

24:59Jens Lange, PhD: Dr. Longa, 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? So, as I said, people experience envy when they compare to someone else, right, 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. So most obviously social comparison orientation. So if people tend to compare a lot, then they're also more likely to experience envy. And all kinds of predictors of people preferring to deal with standards of excellence.

25:45Jens Lange, PhD: So for instance, achievement motivation, approach and avoidance motivation, narcissism. right so also narcissism and people are kind of dealing standards of excellence so they want to have an excellent self or they want to they don't want to go short of certain standards and so on and also other dark traits such as machiavellianism psychology entitlement or greed right and and we was also predicted by circumstances that intensify kind of personal relevance of the situation most obviously the self-relevance of the comparison domain so as i said if a certain domain it's very go to my own identity, then I'm more likely to experience envy.

26:23Jens Lange, PhD: 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 self-relevance of the domain and can make people more envious. Or other kinds of signals that and 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 is seeing that they are very prestigious or very dominant or they gain influence and this can intensify envy.

27:04Jens Lange, PhD: 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. I want to ask if envy is kind of baked into us as humans, or is it something that we're taught either advertently or inadvertently or overtly by, say, our parents or caregivers? And is there an age when it begins to manifest itself? so my first boss Thomas Musweiler always used to say social comparisons are ubiquitous so it is very hard to imagine a world in which you don't compare yourself like let's say even if you want to say that 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 So everything is kind of relative.

28:03Jens Lange, PhD: So people always compare. But as far as I know, there is no behavior genetics research showing how much variance in dispositional envy is accounted for by variance in genes or so on.

28:16Sara Protasi, PhD: I mean, surely there's going to be cultural influences, right? Like with anything else, you know, different cultures at different times have shaped the way we feel these social comparison emotions, right? So in honor cultures, we know that like 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, you know, there is some overlap between the two. It is much harder to find examples of that in cultures where resources are very limited.

28:51Sara Protasi, PhD: There's a lot of competition just for sheer survival. all. And so, and that's also why in some of those cultures, there is this superstition of the evil eye, right? Where if someone looks at you or look at your children or your cattle, then misfortune happens, right? 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 to find yourself in a situation where you can improve, you know, how you're doing.

29:28Sara Protasi, PhD: And so, 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, on even simply, you know, whether, you know, you have a growth mindset, you think like, you know, you have an outlook on the world that is less zero sum, if you have parents who have taught you that, you know, it's either you or them, you have to succeed at all costs, you have to be the first one, right? You're probably going to be more likely to feel certain kind of failure if you feel like your parents are not supportive, they're not making you feel self-confident, like all of these things, I'm sure, I mean, you know, again, I don't, this is somewhat speculative, but I hope it's a reasonable speculation.

30:17Sara Protasi, PhD: 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. Or if you have parents who say, why can't you be more like your big sister or things like that? Exactly. Exactly. Things like that. I mean, that's, 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 very person who's similar to you and you want your parents' love and all of that.

30:52Sara Protasi, PhD: 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.

31:03Jens Lange, PhD: 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? In my opinion, there is no general need to turn malicious envy into benign envy or to suppress your envy in general, right? 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.

31:39Jens Lange, PhD: And that's something that you shouldn't suppress, right? Also, I think that benign and malicious are kind of misnomers, right? So benign envy can also be bad. So Sarah also always said this is 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, right? Also, malicious envy can kind of be good, for instance, when it motivates you to harm dominant others who initially oppressed subordinates or so 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 you shouldn't you shouldn't suppress envy entirely that that would be my and typically most psychologists perspective right 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 and we resolve because you think that the other person doesn't deserve their advantage.

32:33Jens Lange, PhD: And benign envy is more likely to occur when people think that they can actually obtain the envied 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 we tried a few things, but it's never successfully. So maybe Sarah knows.

32:52Sara Protasi, PhD: Well, it's more like, I do think that here the philosophical and the psychological perspectives diverge the most. And that's why I think, you know, 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, right? And so true emulative envy, especially when I talk about even like virtuous envy, which is one version of emulative envy, is when really the good that is solved after is actually good.

33:28Sara Protasi, PhD: 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 something. 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, right? 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 like I envy someone because they have a more expensive watch.

34:06Sara Protasi, PhD: It's like, maybe I should think more about whether this is actually a good thing to have or maybe, you know, 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, right? And then, you know, Jens and I have some disagreement about this idea of deservingness.

34:43Sara Protasi, PhD: I think philosophers are very careful in like 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.

35:27Sara Protasi, PhD: 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, you know, the work of many philosophers on these topics in thinking about how sometimes we should try to develop moral approaches to this situation and kind of separate it from our personal envy.

35:54Jens Lange, PhD: Well, speaking of resentment, it 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? 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 at what happened to them then this would be schadenfreude so schaden is harm, a German word for harm and freude is joy so enjoying others yeah, 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, right, then this is more likely to lead to 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, right?

37:08Jens Lange, PhD: So if everyone is laughing, if I'm laughing about this person and no one else disagrees, then this person can't be so cool, right? 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, right? 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.

37:52Jens Lange, PhD: So we actually argued that Schadenford's social function is to reduce the standing of dominant people. So yeah, from a functional perspective, and whether that's good or bad, that's a philosopher's question to answer. 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? So, I mean, there is evidence that social media can foster upward social comparisons, right? And there's also evidence that being on social media can increase people's envy.

38:40Jens Lange, PhD: 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 through other success stories so let's say and Sarah is again sharing news about her latest book or an amazing envy paper on whatever social media let's say on Instagram you know then and I'm browsing through my content and I see this and this can lead to a social comparison and a substitute to envy.

39:19Jens Lange, PhD: But if people, for instance, passively browse through news content or actively engage in social media by posting something on Instagram themselves, this is not making people envy. 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 these relationships, which means that only for people who tend to compare a lot, passively browsing through to other people's success stories on social media actually leads to more envy.

40:00Jens Lange, PhD: So as usual, it is, you know, the evidence is mixed and very nuanced. So claiming that these few more state envy experiences then produce kind of a general rise in 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 kind of increases people's propensity to be more envious in general. 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.

40:35Jens Lange, PhD: Thank you so much. Thank you. 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 us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future episodes, you can email us at speakingofpsychology at apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lee Weinerman. Thank you for listening to the American Psychological Association. I'm Kim Mills.

41:13Thank you.

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