Envy
The painful longing stirred by what someone else has.
What it means
Envy is a painful, often hostile emotion arising when one lacks a quality, achievement, or possession that another person has and either desires it or resents their having it. Researchers distinguish benign envy, which motivates self-improvement and 'leveling up' toward the envied standard, from malicious envy, which motivates pulling the other person down. It is rooted in upward social comparison and is sharpened when the advantage seems undeserved and the domain is self-relevant. Envy is closely related to jealousy, though jealousy properly concerns the fear of losing a valued relationship to a rival, a three-party situation, whereas envy is a two-party longing. Because it is socially condemned, envy is often hidden or rationalized, and it is a documented driver of schadenfreude.
What drives it
Envy begins with an upward social comparison: someone in a domain you care about has something you lack, and the gap stings. Its core is a pain of inferiority, not mere wanting. You can covet a stranger's lottery win without envy, yet a peer's raise in your own field lands hard. Two appraisals sharpen the feeling. When the advantage seems undeserved, the reaction tilts hostile; when it seems within reach, it tilts toward striving. Because the comparison threatens self-worth, envy is uncomfortable to admit and easy to disguise as a principled complaint. A practitioner should read it as a signal about what someone values and where they feel they fall short, not as a simple character flaw.
Two faces: benign and malicious
Researchers separate benign envy, which closes the gap by lifting yourself toward the other person, from malicious envy, which closes it by pulling the other person down. Van de Ven, Zeelenberg and Pieters showed the two carry different action tendencies: benign envy predicts effort and self-improvement, while malicious envy predicts hostility and a wish to see the rival fail. The split is not settled. One camp treats them as distinct emotions; a rival view holds that envy is a single hostile feeling and that so-called benign envy is closer to admiration or emulation. Both sides agree a pain of inferiority sits at the centre. The practical lesson is that one trigger can motivate or corrode, depending on which path a person takes.
Where it shows up
Envy concentrates where comparison is easy and status is visible: pay and promotions at work, follower counts and holiday photos on social media, prices and possessions between neighbours. Its most studied consequence is schadenfreude, pleasure at a rival's misfortune, which a meta-analysis by Lange, Weidman and Crusius ties to malicious envy in particular. Neuroimaging by Takahashi and colleagues found that reading about an envied person engaged the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, a region linked to social pain, while learning of that person's downfall engaged the ventral striatum, part of the brain's reward circuitry; the stronger a participant's envy, the larger that reward response tended to be. The pattern fits the everyday sense that envy hurts and that watching the envied stumble can feel, uncomfortably, like relief.
Measuring it and using it
Dispositional envy, the tendency to feel it across situations, is measured with the eight-item Dispositional Envy Scale from Smith and colleagues, which treats envy as a stable, painful sense of falling short. Two cautions apply. Self-report understates envy, because people are reluctant to confess it, so behaviour and indirect measures often reveal more than a questionnaire. And the benign-malicious distinction, useful as it is, remains contested, so treat the two as tendencies rather than fixed types. In practice the lever is appraisal: framing an advantage as attainable and deserved nudges people toward emulation, while framing it as unfair or fixed invites the hostile path. Designing comparisons with care, who is shown and how reachable their success looks, shapes which kind of envy you get.
Examples
A colleague's promotion can spur benign envy that pushes you to work harder, or malicious envy that makes you quietly hope she stumbles.
Scrolling a friend's holiday photos, benign envy has you pricing flights, while malicious envy has you noting the crowds and quietly hoping the weather turns.
Told a neighbour has bought a new car, you find yourself remarking on the debt they must be carrying — envy is condemned, so it comes out dressed as concern.
A rival lab publishes the finding you were chasing. Benign envy has you tightening your own study; malicious envy has you drafting a sceptical comment before you have finished reading the paper.
Your training partner shaves minutes off her marathon time. Envy can drive you toward a better plan of your own, or tempt you to hint that the course must have been short.
First described in van de Ven, Zeelenberg & Pieters (2009); long philosophical lineage.
Key references
- Crusius, J., Gonzalez, M. F., Lange, J., & Cohen-Charash, Y. (2020). Envy: An adversarial review and comparison of two competing views. Emotion Review, 12(1), 3-21. doi.org/10.1177/1754073919873131
- Lange, J., Weidman, A. C., & Crusius, J. (2018). The painful duality of envy: Evidence for an integrative theory and a meta-analysis on the relation of envy and schadenfreude. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 114(4), 572-598. doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000118
- van de Ven, N., Zeelenberg, M., & Pieters, R. (2009). Leveling up and down: The experiences of benign and malicious envy. Emotion, 9(3), 419-429. doi.org/10.1037/a0015669
- Takahashi, H., Kato, M., Matsuura, M., Mobbs, D., Suhara, T., & Okubo, Y. (2009). When your gain is my pain and your pain is my gain: Neural correlates of envy and schadenfreude. Science, 323(5916), 937-939. doi.org/10.1126/science.1165604
- Smith, R. H., & Kim, S. H. (2007). Comprehending envy. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1), 46-64. doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.133.1.46
- Smith, R. H., Parrott, W. G., Diener, E., Hoyle, R. H., & Kim, S. H. (1999). Dispositional envy. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25(8), 1007-1020. doi.org/10.1177/01461672992511008