Bi-Annual Conference of the International
Society for Research on Emotion
July 8-10, 2015
The Janus face of dispositional envy: Disentangling benign and
malicious forms of the envious personality
Jan Crusius
University of Cologne
People differ in their propensity to react with envy toward other people who
surpass them with regard to important achievements, characteristics, or possessions. Previous research has conceptualized differences in the inclination
towards envy along a single dimension focusing on hostility and resentment as
central components (Smith, Parrott, Diener, Hoyle, & Kim, 1999). At the state
level, however, recent research (Crusius & Lange, 2014; Van de Ven, Zeelenberg, & Pieters, 2009) has revealed that envy exists in two qualitatively distinct forms: benign and malicious envy. Even though both forms of envy are
negative emotions marked by high levels of frustration, they differ in their
motivational consequences: Benign envy motivates people to attain the superior fortune, but is not characterized by the hostility of its malicious counterpart. In contrast, the goal of malicious envy is to level the other person down.
Across several studies employing the newly developed Benign and Malicious
Envy Scale (BeMaS, Lange & Crusius, in press), we show that dispositional envy
also exists in two distinct forms—benign and malicious envy—and provide evidence for their distinct motivational profiles. In particular, dispositional benign
envy is linked to hope for success and predicts the superior performance of
marathon runners mediated by higher goal setting. In contrast, malicious envy
is linked to fear of failure and predicts goal avoidance. These results underline
the value of conceptualizing dispositional envy in two dimensions. We discuss
how this distinction can be used to unravel the diverse motivational and behavioral outcomes of envy and its relationship to other personality characteristics
such as narcissism.
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