Envy

Benign versus Malicious Envy

Scholars are careful to point out two important definitional distinctions that are often a source of confusion about the nature of envy. First, the word envy has two meanings, one referring to a benign feeling akin to admiration, and the other referring to a hostile, more aversive state. As research by Niels van de Ven and others shows, people admit to benign envy, and the feeling seems relatively unconnected to ill will or aggressive behaviors. Hostile envy, scholars assume, is usually denied in public, and even in private, and is closely linked with a variety of aggressive inclinations. Benign, admiring envy is an important emotion to understand, but hostile envy is the prototypical variety and the kind that has been the focus of literary, philosophical, and religious scrutiny since antiquity.

Envy versus Jealousy

The second definitional distinction contrasts envy with jealousy. Generally, envy is dyadic. It involves two people and arises when one person lacks an advantage enjoyed by the other. Jealousy is triadic, and it arises when one person fears losing or has lost the attention of a second person to a third person. As studies by Gerrod Parrot and Richard Smith show, these situational differences associated with each emotion typically leads to distinctive affective experiences. Unfortunately, the word jealousy can be used to denote either the emotions of envy or jealousy, which encourages the sense that they are equivalent experiences.

Universal and Adaptive Nature of Envy

It is easy to understand why envy is such a prevalent, pan-cultural emotion. People who are superior on valued attributes reap greater power and attention as well as higher self-esteem. Inferiority leads to less power and attention as well as lower self-esteem. It would be bizarre for other people's consequential advantages to have no emotional effect on us. Furthermore, from an evolutionary perspective, as evolutionary psychologists Sarah Hill and David Buss argue, it would hardly be adaptive to be inclined to feel that another person's advantage is a fully satisfactory outcome. In this sense, a capacity to feel envy, although it has an unpleasant edge to it, serves a necessary adaptive function. If we, [Page 324]as evolving beings, had failed to develop an emotion designed to help us keep up with the Joneses, perhaps we would have withered away on the evolutionary vine.

When Do We Envy?

Envy is not an invariable reaction to noticing another person's advantage. Empirical work confirms the insights of Aristotle by showing that people envy those who are similar to themselves. Writers envy other writers rather than acclaimed athletes, for example. This similarity causes the offending comparison to hit home and enables people to imagine what having the advantage themselves might be like. Yet it is a frustrated sense of what is possible. The imagined taste is there but with no real sense that the desired advantage will actually come one's way. Now-classic empirical work by Peter Salovey and Judith Rodin also shows that people envy others who have advantages on domains that are linked to their self-worth.

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