14 DAY TRIAL // Everybody wants to be successful, but when they sense a risk of someone being jealous of them, they behave nicer than they would normally do, probably out of concern for their own person.
That's what a new research concluded after observing that the fear of being the subject of malicious envy, made people act more helpfully towards those who they thought could be jealous of them.
Niels van de Ven of Tilburg University and his colleagues Marcel Zeelenberg and Rik Pieters carried out several experiments during which they made people feel like they would be maliciously envied, by telling them they would receive an award of five euros—sometimes deserved based on the score they were told they'd earned on a quiz, sometimes not.
They thought that the deserved prize would trigger benign envy and the undeserved one – malicious envy, and they asked the volunteers to give time-consuming advice to a potentially envious person.
Subjects who believed they could be envied in a negative way were more likely to take their time when giving advice, than others.
Also, when an experimenter dropped a bunch of erasers as the volunteer was leaving (in another experiment), people who believed they'd be maliciously envied were more likely to help him pick them up.
“This sort of serves a useful group function,” van de Ven said.
In a previous research, the scientists had identified the two types of envy – benign and malicious, and when they studied people who manifested them, they concluded that benign envy led to personal improvement while malign envy made people want to bring others down.
Van de Ven said that “in anthropology, they say if you are envied, you might act more socially afterward because you try to appease those envious people,” like sharing something with others.
Most people think it's good to share things with others, “but that's not something we are inclined to do when we are better off,” say the researchers.
So, the fear of envy could actually improve social interactions within a group, by motivating people to be nice to each other.
The research was published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.