Everyone knows what characterizes envy, social emotion with which we come into contact every day and, despite having a negative connotation in most cases, plays an important role, psychology teaches us that emotions are not good or bad (beyond pathological aspects), they can be simply pleasant or unpleasant. Besides, they always play a role.
Envy on its simplest side is represented by a triad of inequality, this relationship would be made up of two people and one object, and inequality comes from the fact that one of these people has the object and the other does not, but wants it. , we are faced with an emotion that arises from social comparison.
- We human beings live in complex societies.
- Where social status influences daily life.
- So it is logical.
- From an adaptive point of view.
- To worry about our social life.
- Hence the social comparison was born.
- To be better positioned and have better social resources.
Social comparison can take place in two ways: (a) upwards, comparing us to people who are or think we are better than us, or (b) down, comparing us to people who are or think they are worse than us. they play a role and have their reasons, but for the study of envy, we are interested in comparison from the bottom up: we envy people who have something we want.
Bottom-up social comparison usually aims to identify what sets us apart from the person with the most status, to match or outperform that person, this goal may vary depending on the content of the comparison and the person being compared, for example. , feelings of pride can arise when compared to a close person in an aspect that does not concern us.
Envy will play its part in trying to match or exceed the status in this upward comparison, our motivation will be to conquer the highest position due to the additional social resources that this would bring us compared to another person and to achieve it, envy can act in different ways, which we will then talk about.
Envy is a painful social emotion towards something that is the product of a relationship of inequality; as we have already mentioned, it relates to social comparisons and the evaluation of ourselves, so sometimes we can designate envy as a social thermometer that allows us to measure our social status and act if we are in a position that we do not like.
Even if in some situations, envy is openly expressed as a sign of admiration (?What desire !?), the most common thing is this hidden feeling. In this sense, hiding envy is part of our social protocol. This fact has two functions: on the one hand, it prevents the envious from making public his need, thus protecting himself from a possible devaluation of himself; and on the other hand, to prevent the envied person from feeling threatened.
The object of envy can be represented in a wide variety of elements, this can involve possessions, but also personal characteristics or recognitions, no matter what it is, will acquire the object characteristic of envy when desired by a person who does not. have it and who identifies it in another. Desire can arise, in large part, when trying to restore a position of inferiority or disadvantage. It is not what the object is, but what the object represents.
However, how can we react when the feeling of envy arises in us?This is where the two types of jealousy responses and their consequences come in, which we will discuss below.
We can say that there are two main aspects when it comes to defining what characterizes envy: one can speak of a benign and a bad one (also known as schadenfreude). Benign envy occurs when the envious feels uncomfortable for well-being or success. the other, but he doesn’t want negative things for each other. The behavior resulting from this type of envy will be to try to improve your social position. He can do so by acquiring the object of envy without acting against the envious. .
In the intelligent, on the contrary, in addition to the discomfort of success, there are bad desires in relation to the envied, so we will no longer see behaviors of improvement: there will be attempts to depreciate the value of the object of envy, or even try to reduce the status of the envied, removing the object.
Both types of envy seek the same thing, the envious wants to have a status equal to or greater than that of the envied, in the intelligent the goal is to overcome by decreasing the status of the envied and, in the benign, increasing the status of the envious. If the former has a prosocial character, we must not forget that schadenfreude is also a very present emotion in our lives.
A question to think: when you envy another person, what dominates us, a benign desire or schadenfreude?