What catches the envious eye? Attentional biases within malicious and benign envy

Abstract

We investigated how early attention allocation is biased in envy. Recent research has shown that people experience envy in two distinct forms: malicious envy, which is associated with the motivation to harm the position of a superior other, and benign envy, which is associated with the motivation to improve oneself by moving upward. Based on a functional account of the two forms of envy, we predicted that within malicious envy the cognitive system is geared more strongly toward the other person than toward the superior fortune of the other. In contrast, only within benign envy the cognitive system should be geared toward opportunities to level oneself up. We investigated these hypotheses with dot probe tasks. In line with our reasoning, Experiments 1 (N=84) and 2 (N=78) demonstrate that within malicious envy, attention is biased more toward the envied person than toward the envy object, whereas in benign envy, this difference does not occur. Experiment 3 (N=104) provides evidence that within benign envy, but not in malicious envy, attention is biased toward means to improve one's own outcome. The results suggest that within benign and malicious envy, early cognitive processing is tuned toward different stimuli and thus highlight the utility of functional and process-oriented approaches to studying envy.