Here’s an astonishing quote from Julius Caesar, one of history’s most renowned leaders:
Caesar is referring, of course, to Alexander the Great.1
Caesar lamented the fact that despite his immense accomplishments, he felt diminished when he compared himself to this earlier historical leader.
Interestingly, Caesar himself was a victim of this kind of social comparison, at least in the Shakespearean version of the story, which is based on the historian Plutarch’s account.
Caesar had a friend named Cassius, who was a Roman senator. Cassius told another senator named Brutus a story from his childhood. The story was that when they were young boys, Cassius saved Caesar from drowning.
Ever since then, Cassius felt superior to Caesar. However, Caesar had recently become the leader of Rome and became widely beloved by the masses. Cassius envied him for this. This motivated Cassius to set in motion the events that eventually led to Caesar’s assassination in the Roman senate.
Early in his career, Caesar felt he had not ascended high enough. And later, he was killed because others thought he had ascended too high.
I open with this story to illustrate the idea of social comparison orientation. Simply defined, it is the inclination to compare yourself with others, especially with regard to social status.
A couple of sample items in the social comparison scale are “I often compare myself with others with respect to what I have accomplished in life” and “I often compare how I am doing socially (social skills, popularity) with other people.”
Social comparison, by definition, is relative. Here is a question often used in these kinds of scales.
Suppose you are presented with two options:
A. You get 2 weeks of vacation; your coworkers get 1 week
B. You get 4 weeks of vacation; your coworkers get 8 weeks
A sensible, rational, objective person should choose B. One week of vacation versus 4 weeks is a no-brainer. But a surprisingly high number of people will choose A over B.
Consider the reality of working in an environment in which you know everyone gets twice as much vacation time as you. It’s unfair. And as we’ve discussed before, our preoccupation with the idea of fairness is in part rooted in concerns about status.
So what are some of the traits associated with social comparison orientation?
Unsurprisingly, social comparison orientation is associated with the Dark Triad personality traits (psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism), fear of failure, interest in exhibiting status, FoMo (Fear of Missing Out), utilitarian moral preferences, malicious envy, and benign envy. We’ll discuss the difference between these two forms of envy later.
The utilitarian finding is interesting. When you present trolley problems to people high on social comparison orientation, they are more likely to report that they would flip the switch to kill one person or push the fat man off the bridge in order to save five people. They seem to favor cold calculations for decision-making, which may be why they tend to score highly on psychopathy.
Narcissism is unsurprising. People who compare themselves with others are more likely to be preoccupied with their social image and want others to admire them and think highly of them.
This is of course related to fear of failure. Failure means that you come off looking comparatively worse than others. Social comparers are interested in status displays, that’s not a surprise given the link with narcissism.
In fact, some researchers have found that narcissistically-oriented people often report intense reactions to the perception of others’ envy. They experience a hidden sadistic satisfaction in causing a sense of inferiority and painful feelings in others.
Social comparers report greater levels of Fear of Missing Out, because if they are left out or excluded, this reflects poorly on them. Most people want to be a part of the excitement, but social comparers have an especially intense desire to be among those who are seen.
And this brings us to envy.
What is envy? Plainly, it is the emotional consequence of upward social comparison. Envy is an emotion that regulates the navigation of status hierarchies.
It is a painful emotion. People might say they will occasionally feel pride, or greed, or lust, but seldom do people confess to feelings of envy. To confess to envy is to acknowledge that you believe someone else has more status than you. Few people are eager to intentionally lower themselves in this way.
Envy is an unpleasant feeling, as many of your emotions are. But negative emotions are evolutionarily adaptive. Envy alerts you when you might be falling too low on the status ladder. It is a kind of status leveling mechanism.
Here’s how some psychologists have described it:
“At its core, envy is born out of the perceived danger to lose respect and social influence in the eyes of others…envy’s function may be to foster the motivations to re-gain status or harm the superior position of others.”
What does envy look like? Here’s a still from season 1 of the superb television series Mad Men.
Here, two advertising executives, Peter Campbell and Paul Kinsey, are reacting to their colleague Ken Cosgrove, who has just told them one of his stories was published in a prestigious magazine. Ken’s colleagues are smiling and congratulating him, but you can observe a bit of surprise, a bit of skepticism, and an attempt to show Ken that they are happy for him but also surprised that he had this talent for writing. It’s a way of being cordial while also communicating that Ken shouldn’t get too full of himself. This kind of contorted smile might be a uniquely American expression, because Americans are culturally conditioned to suppress envy and be happy for one another’s success. This is a good cultural practice, in my view.
There’s a term used in New Zealand and Australia called “Tall Poppy Syndrome.” The idea is that tall poppies, or people who rise too far up beyond others, get cut down because the smaller poppies are envious. Bids for status can incur envy in other people. If you try to achieve something, others might attack you or resent you or cut you down in some way. Some of you may be familiar with the crabs in the bucket metaphor, and this is similar to that idea of crabs at the bottom of the bucket pulling down the crabs higher in the bucket. People are often intuitively aware of this, which is why people conceal their desire for wealth or status or power.
The great seventeenth-century essayist La Rochefoucauld said, “It takes great talent and skill to conceal one’s talent and skill.” He means here that if you are gifted in some area, it can be natural to want to show it off. But often it is also a talent in itself to know when to show your skills and when to conceal them.
Here is an historical illustration of the dangers of envy:
Sir Walter Raleigh was one of the most brilliant men at the court of Queen Elizabeth of England. He was a talented poet, writer, scientist, entrepreneur, and sea captain. Moreover, he was a handsome, dashing courtier who charmed his way into becoming one of the Queen’s favorites.
Eventually, he suffered a fall from grace, leading to prison and, finally, the executioner’s axe. Raleigh could not understand the stubborn opposition he faced from the other courtiers who conspired against him. He did not understand that he had not only made no attempt to disguise the degree of his many talents, but he had also imposed them on others, making a show of his versatility. He thought it impressed people and won him friends.
The author Robert Greene has discussed this historical episode of Sir Walter Raleigh’s demise, writing:
“In fact, it made him silent enemies, people who felt inferior to him and did all they could to ruin him the moment he tripped up or made the slightest mistake. In the end, the reason he was executed was treason, but envy will use any cover it finds to mask it destructiveness.”
More on the dangers of envy. Here’s what is called “Jante Law” in Denmark. These are not actual laws in the legal sense, but they are widely known within Danish culture.
You’re not to think you are anything special.
You’re not to think you are as good as we are.
You’re not to think you are smarter than we are.
You’re not to convince yourself that you are better than we are.
You’re not to think you know more than we do.
You’re not to think you are more important than we are.
You’re not to think you are good at anything.
You’re not to laugh at us.
You’re not to think anyone cares about you.
You’re not to think you can teach us anything.
These laws were written several decades ago by a Danish author and satirist. Things have slowly changed with the spread of American culture and our habit of self-promotion. But these satirical laws get at something interesting here, they make you laugh because you can understand them.
You don’t like people thinking they are special, or at least more special than you, or that they are smarter than you are or better than you are that know more than you or that they are more important. We definitely don’t want people to laugh at us. It’s not that the Danes have especially sensitive egos. The point is that anyone can find some humor in these laws because we recognize a bit of ourselves in them.
We’ve spoken before about reverse dominance hierarchies among hunter-gatherers. They are extremely attuned to how others view them and some of these communities have devised clever ways to level the status hierarchy. Some engage in what is called “arrow swapping.” Each man takes turns delivering the meat from a hunting expedition to each of the families in the community. They “swap arrows,” so that each man gets a change to be the one to deliver the meat, which is considered to be a prestigious act. So even if one of the men is an especially talented hunter and scores most of the hunting kills, the other men get to take their turn to receive credit within the community and pass the meat around.
Here's a quote from an informant in one of these communities in the !Kung San tribe:
“When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can’t accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. In this way we cool his heart and make him gentle.”
Sometimes these hunter-gatherer societies do have leaders, and big men, and chiefs. But their power is soft and not domineering, and these leaders often display self-effacing behavior, and exhibit extreme modesty, in order to avoid attracting envy.
Interestingly, many of these leaders and big men are known to have fewer possessions than other men in the community. They exercise social power and are allowed to marry an extra wife, but in terms of material resources, they are expected to be austere and generous. It’s a sort of exchange—they get social power and perhaps extra wife or two, but they don’t get to have extra meat or tools or clothing, and often go out of their way to make a show of how many of their possessions they give away.
Envy takes on the form of the “evil eye” in many small-scale traditional societies. It is fascinating how often this concept of the “evil eye” has been found in various cultures. It is the look of envy, of someone who wants what another has or wants to destroy what others have.
Here’s how one anthropologist has described the evil eye:
“A belief complex based on the idea that an individual, either male or female, has the power to cause harm to another individual or to that individual’s property by simply looking at or praising that person’s property.”
Praising! How interesting is that? Even receiving compliments can be a sign of danger, because it means the other person is acknowledging that you have something desirable. Often, this look is subsequently accompanied by the envied person’s property being damaged or their child falling ill. In response, the person who expressed the evil eye is then condemned or punished in some way. People generally resist expressing the evil eye, and they try to avoid eliciting it from others as well.
Some defenses have been observed. People will conceal their good fortune, downplaying any kind of success or luck they might’ve received. They will disfigure their good looks, perhaps with piercings or body paint. And if they have a particularly good-looking child, they might rub soot on the child to obscure their attractive appearance.
I sometimes wonder if some of this is going on today, with many young people in western countries deciding to get tattoos and piercings and unique hairstyles and taking other unconventional and sometimes drastic measures to alter their appearance. One possible reason (not the only one) is that this is an unconscious maneuver to avoid envy.
We’ve so far been discussing envy from an evolutionary and cultural lens. Let’s turn for a moment to developmental psychology.
There is evidence of status-leveling from studies on children.
Recall that I opened with the question of whether you’d rather have more vacation time in an absolute versus a relative sense. Would you rather have more overall, or just more than others?
Well, most young children prefer to have more than others.
For instance, if you pair young children off into groups of two, and ask one of the children if they’d rather get 8 treats for themselves and 8 for the other kid, or 7 for themselves and 0 for the other, they’ll more often choose the second option.
This suggests that there seems to be some intrinsic desire to obtain a relative advantage. If you are surprised by this or lament it, that is, in my view, probably a good thing.
Many of us have been, to some extent, culturally conditioned to stigmatize envy and try to use an objective as opposed to a subjective rubric for rewards.
In his book, The WEIRDest People in the World, the evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrich argues that this suppression of envy and willingness to support successful people is why certain societies have become more materially prosperous than others.
There was an interesting finding some years ago about the game show “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?” Some of you may be familiar with the “Ask the Audience” lifeline. In America, when contestants ask the audience for help with a question, about 90% of the time, the audience gives the correct answer to help the contestant. But in Russia, participants often avoid using this lifeline, because audiences often provide wrong answers to thwart the contestant from earning money. I’m not sure if that is something inherent in Russian culture or if it is an relic of communism, but an interesting cultural difference, nonetheless.
Envy is a natural feeling that can be dialed up or down by cultural factors. Japan has no natural resources but is a rich country, in part because they have managed to tamp down envy. Then there are places like Russia and Venezuela, that have far more in the way of natural resources but are plagued with cynicism and corruption.
Oprah once asked Bono to explain the difference between the American and the Irish mindset. Bono responded with a story of a man walking with his son and pointing out a big mansion on a hill. In America, the father tells his son: “One day, I will have a mansion like this man.” In Ireland, he says: “One day, I will get that motherfucker.”
People often want to recruit “nature” or “reality” to their side when they make arguments about how societies should be.
But one of the reasons we develop social norms and laws and punishments is to combat aspects of our nature that we find objectionable or would rather not promote. Humans are complicated, and a lot of our desires and behaviors are “natural” in the sense that they are found universally and can be understood by just about anyone.
There are some elements of human nature that people and cultures want to cultivate and accentuate, and others they want to suppress and stigmatize. Which specific aspects to promote and subdue can be informed by science. But what features to promote or suppress is ultimately a philosophical question that can’t be answered with science.
We have to be careful to avoid the naturalistic fallacy. Just because something is natural or innate doesn’t mean we should accept it or promote it. Violence is natural, but that doesn’t mean we should promote it.
We also have to be careful to avoid the moralistic fallacy— the belief that just because we’d like things to be a certain way, that this is how they really are. We like peaceful people, but this preference doesn’t mean humans are naturally peaceful.
Envy is natural. Each culture chooses to deal with it in different ways. Stigmatizing it, or cultivating it, or ignoring it, and so on.
Okay, delving into the nuances of envy now. It’s not a catchall term that has only one meaning. Similar to how “status” has two components, so it is with envy.
Envy has two types.
The first type is benign envy. This refers to the longing for self-improvement in order to emulate the target of your envy. You might see someone really impressive and wish you could be like them, and become more determined to improve yourself as a result. This is benign envy; the goal is to level up.
Then there’s malicious envy. This is the kind of envy people might be more familiar with. It refers to hostile thoughts and intentions aimed at harming the person you are envious of. This is about the desire to take what they have for yourself, or destroying what they have so they can no longer enjoy it. You might see someone you find really impressive, and instead of responding by deciding to level up, you decide to force them into leveling down. Maybe you start a hostile rumor about them, or find a way to get their friends to betray them, or dig up an old tweet in which they posted something offensive and then launch a social media campaign against them. If you can get them to issue a public apology (not a private one!), then you have successfully leveled them down.
This kind of malicious envy isn’t just about material goods, though. We do not only feel envy toward other people’s goods and possessions. People can also feel envy about others’ happiness, relationships, and chances of future success. Some people, especially those high on dispositional envy or on the dark triad personality traits, will subsequently try to thwart those things and undermine the happiness or positive feelings of their rivals. Some people, for example, might feel envious of others’ happiness and intentionally withhold praise or warmth from them in order to bring them down a little.
Sociometric status (respect and admiration from peers) appears to be a stronger predictor of happiness than socioeconomic status, at least within developed countries. Other studies suggest that people experience more envy toward people who are held in great social esteem versus people who have lots of money.
This is interesting, because, as I mentioned in an earlier lecture, we hide our bank accounts, we conceal how much money we earn, but our social media followings and how many likes and shares we get are public knowledge.
The thing people don’t envy as much (money) is the thing they spend a lot of time concealing, and the thing they envy more (status, esteem, admiration) is associated with metrics (followers, likes, etc.) that are out in the public for anyone to see.
Malicious envy is still directed toward material wealth, however. A 2021 study found that malicious envy was by far the strongest predictor of coercive economic redistribution. It was a stronger predictor than self-interest, or fairness, or communal harm (the belief that it is okay to inflict costs on a smaller number of individuals to benefit a larger number).
Often you’ll find that the most vehement proponents of economic redistribution are individuals who themselves are well off in an absolute sense. Perhaps in the top quintile or top decile of the income distribution. But many of these people dislike those in the top one percent.
Here’s the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith on envy avoidance:
“The man who has had large and sudden success will realize envy makes it difficult for others to share in his joy. The successful man will mute his trumpeting of his good fortune. He will affect humility, probably unsuccessfully. But he will at least try.”
Smith described how successful men behave, or perhaps should behave, and I think it’s good advice generally.
Let’s turn to some of the consequences of envy.
There are historical cases of leaders firing their own advisors for being too good at their job. They felt threatened by them and subsequently had them ostracized or excommunicated or in some cases even killed in order to secure their own positions, even in cases where the advisor exhibited no desire to usurp the leader.
Some of you may be familiar with Robert Greene’s book The 48 Laws of Power. In that book, the very first law of power is “Never outshine the master.” Greene goes on to explain how humility and modesty can go a long way, and to be careful about looking better than your boss and those above you. And if you are more talented than your boss, you should attribute your successes to their mentorship and credit them with what you have achieved.
Returning to Adam Smith, he made the astute point that when other people’s joys are too great, we feel envy. And when other people’s sorrows are too small, we don’t take them seriously.
As a result of this, we are most likely to sympathize with other people’s small joys and great sorrows. It’s easier to be happy for someone when they achieve a small victory (compared with a big one). And it’s easier to feel empathy for someone when they experience a great misfortune (compared with a small one).
This is likely why people downplay their successes and embellish their misfortunes. They shrink their victories and magnify their defeats in order to secure social acceptance and belonging.
The nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer had a test for envy. He was a cranky old misanthrope. He recommended that if you want to test someone for envy, tell them some good news about yourself. If the person feels envy, you will notice a quick expression of disappointment, along with some tension and strain in their voice. Maybe a condescending “well done” or a patronizing “good for you.” Think of that Mad Men scene I mentioned earlier.
In contrast, you could tell them some misfortune of yours, and you’ll see their eyes light up momentarily, indicating some glee.
There’s an interesting link between envy and age. Who feels envy more, young people or old people? The answer isn’t exactly easy. You might think older people are more bitter or envious, especially of young people and their youth and vitality and health.
Turns out, though, that young people are, on average, higher on dispositional envy. One scale that measures this asks people how much they agree with statements like “I am troubled by my feelings of inadequacy” and “Frankly, the success of my neighbors makes me resent them.”
There is a relatively strong inverse correlation between dispositional envy and age, such that the younger you are, the more envy you feel. This study looked solely at adults aged 18 and above, for what it’s worth. It is an interesting question about whether children feel more envy than adults, but that’s beyond the scope of this study.
What’s also interesting about that study is that in that sample, the younger adult participants had higher incomes than older adults. So even though younger adults had more money, they still felt more envy in their everyday lives. They had more money, more youth, more years of life ahead of them, yet still felt more envy.
This may be linked to the Dark Triad traits we’ve spoken about. Being a bit high in those traits, along with feeling some envy, which can be adaptive in small to moderate doses, can enhance success. It can spur you to improve yourself, at least with respect to benign envy. It can highlight your inadequacies and make you improve yourself. With older people, they typically have different priorities, and feel less biological pressure to find romantic partners and have offspring. They’re in a different stage of life where status leveling is less of a concern.
Who are the targets of your envy?
Interestingly, similarity is one of the strongest predictors of whether you envy someone. The people you envy are those that you could imagine yourself being. The key components are similarity, and achievement in a domain that is relevant to yourself. So if you want to be a comedian, and you see someone of roughly your same age, sex, education level and so on achieve great acclaim as a standup comic, you will feel more envy than if it is someone of the opposite sex who is much older and comes from a completely different background than you.
The sociologist Helmut Schoeck has written that:
"Envy is above all a phenomenon of social proximity...Envy is always between neighbors. The envious man thinks that if his neighbor breaks his leg, he will be able to walk better himself."
Similarity and malignant envy are both in that quote. It also reminds us of that earlier study about how people will often prefer to be better off in a relative sense than in an absolute sense.
There’s an old Jewish folktale about a guy who’s walking along the beach and finds a lamp. A genie appears and tells the man that he will grant him whatever he wants, but the caveat is that the man’s neighbor will receive twice as much. The man pauses, thinks for a few seconds, and tells the genie “I want you to pluck one of my eyes out.”
There’s an Irish version of this folktale where the guy tells the genie, “I want you to beat me half to death.”
Some of you may be familiar with René Girard. His ideas have become popular over the last few years, not least because of the influence of Peter Thiel, along with Luke Burgis’s terrific book Wanting and Johnathan Bi and David Perell’s excellent YouTube series on Girard’s ideas.
One of Girard’s core ideas is that envy is an emotion that occurs between similar individuals. This is consistent with psychological research. We compete for status with those who are closest to us, and we feel envy toward them because we compete for the same things.
There’s a tension. When you are in a group of people who all want the same things, you are grateful to them for validating your choices. But you also resent them because they’re rivals competing for the same things. You’re grateful to them yet envy them.
One of Girard’s famous quotes is that “We don’t compete because we are different, we compete because we are the same.”
One of the dangers, Girard pointed out, of having an egalitarian, less stratified society, is that everyone is now a competitor of everyone else. In the past, members of each social strata only competed with one another. Peasants compared themselves with peasants, aristocrats with aristocrats, merchants against merchants, soldiers against soldiers, and so on. But now we are all playing a global status game, comparing ourselves with people we’ve never met.
Still, the feeling of status competition and envy are most pronounced among those who we could imagine ourselves being.
This, by the way, is one reason why weak ties are so helpful.
The idea of weak ties, first discovered by Mark Granovetter, is that people are most likely to receive help, whether useful social introductions, employment opportunities, and so on, from people who are on the periphery of our social circles. A friend of a friend, for instance, or a neighbor’s cousin.
Why is this the case? This is speculation on my part, but I think one reason we are more eager to help those who are just outside of our circle is that we are less likely to feel envious of them. We receive the benefit of having done something nice, but aren’t saddled with the burden of being frequently reminded of their successes the way we might be with those who we see more frequently.
Continuing on with the point that similarity drives envy, here’s another quote from Helmut Schoeck:
“The best means of protection against the envy of a neighbor is to drive a Rolls-Royce instead of a car only slightly better than his...overwhelming and astounding inequality arouses far less envy than minimal inequality.”
This is why, I think, relative to the poor and the working class, upper-middle-class people are angrier at the one percent. For a guy making ends meet at a minimum wage job, billionaires are so far outside of his reality that he feels no ill will toward them. But a professor or a highly educated journalist might be more envious toward the very rich, because the status gaps are narrower.
Small differences elicit stronger envy than large ones.
Let’s turn now to schadenfreude. This is a German term. I can actually speak a bit of the language because I was stationed there and later completed a language program in Berlin. When I lived there I had a German girlfriend who I dated for a few years. All that time immersed in the culture, and I can now converse at the level of an impaired toddler.
Schadenfreude means, literally, “shame-joy.” It means to feel pleasure at others’ misfortune. Unsurprisingly, envy predicts this feeling. Seeing the targets of our envy experience a downfall will likely elicit a bit of schadenfreude in us. This feeling of schadenfreude is also most pronounced for people who are similar to ourselves and perform in a domain that is relevant to us.
Here’s a study on schadenfreude with college student participants. Among male participants, upon learning that another male performed badly on a test, they reported much stronger schadenfreude than when they learned that a female performed badly on that same test. The same was true for female participants—they reported stronger schadenfreude when a female performed badly relative to a male.
Most of your envy and schadenfreude is directed at those similar to you. These are the people whom you perceive to be your direct competitors.
Interestingly, schadenfreude is also the strongest predictor of moral outrage in the context of social media. Schadenfreude a stronger predictor of moral outrage than concerns about social justice or perceptions of deservingness. Many people have wondered about how much of social media outrage and cancel culture is performative or driven by something other than concerns about social justice. This recent study seems to lend support to this suspicion.
In this study, the researchers suggest that, “People may experience schadenfreude first, before using claims about deservingness as a way of justifying one’s experience of malicious pleasure.”
There’s a related term to schadenfreude that is less well known: Gluckschmerz. This literally means “luck-pain.” This feeling arises when someone you dislike experiences good fortune. Upon seeing their good fortune, you experience a sting of pain. This can occur even when you feel no envy toward them. We won’t linger on this, but just something worth momentarily noting.
There are other status-related emotions. One of the more interesting theories I’ve seen recently is about anger. The idea is called the “recalibrational theory of anger” from Aaron Sell and his colleagues.
And what their research suggests is that anger evolved as a bargaining emotion. When you are being treated poorly, your anger module is activated, which leads you to either impose costs or relinquish benefits in order to recalibrate how others treat you.
So imagine your best friend is supposed to pick you up from the airport. Imagine he’s five hours late. You get angry at him. You yell at him. You make him feel bad. The underlying evolutionary mechanism is, “Hey, you can’t treat me this way. I’m making your life miserable right now by yelling at you so that you won’t do it again.” It’s unpleasant to be on the receiving end of someone’s anger, which is why it is so effective.
Anger isn’t just about inflicting direct costs, whether verbal or physical.
You can also express your anger by simply ignoring your friend’s messages and calls for a few weeks too. This is an example of the silent treatment, or withholding benefits as a form of punishment.
My guess is that angry men are more likely to impose costs, and angry women are more likely to withdraw benefits. Men are more likely to use direct verbal or physical aggression, and women are more likely to use indirect aggression by temporarily ceasing communication, or possibly by engaging in some subtle reputation destruction. The reason here is that women have evolved to be less prone to physical risk taking. Women are cautious because female ancestors that were cautious were more likely to survive to raise babies. Now, it’s possible that somewhere in our evolutionary past, there were some women who were extreme risk takers. They probably died, and were thus not around to raise their offspring. The women who stuck around and survived and raised their kids were the ones who were extra vigilant about physical dangers. There is plenty of individual variation, of course, but on average, men are far more willing to engage in reckless and risky behavior than women. They are more willing to be confrontational when they are angry, despite the accompanying risks.
Two other status-related emotions are shame and humiliation. Shame is thought to have evolved to track our social reputation. It motivates us to follow local social norms. When we transgress a norm, people will shame us, we will feel ashamed, and this painful feeling, and the anticipation of this painful feeling in the future, will lead us to avoid status-damaging actions.
There was a fascinating study some years ago which found that social pain lingers longer than physical pain. This is fascinating because in the moment, physical pain is generally worse than social pain.
What the researchers did was first ask people to recall their physically painful memories. Some people, for example, remembered breaking a finger or an arm or a leg, or being in a bad car accident, or getting injured while exercising or playing sports, things like that. Then they were asked to rate how painful these memories were. Then they were asked to recall socially painful memories. They thought about things like romantic breakups, being betrayed by a friend, being insulted by a trusted family member, and so on. Then they were asked to remember how painful these memories were. The result was that the socially painful memories were worse! This is interesting because if I asked you, would you rather have your leg broken right now or have your parents tell you that you’re a failure or have one of your friends deceive you, I think the prospect of having your leg broken would probably be worse.
Another study found that social devaluation alone is enough to trigger shame, even if you haven’t done anything wrong. That is, shame isn’t a response to actual wrongdoing, but to accusations of wrongdoing. If people you care about accuse you of doing something awful, there’s a good chance that even if you are completely innocent, you’ll feel a bit warm in the face and some pressure in your chest as you try to defend yourself.
There’s a great quote from Alain de Botton about how the absence of humiliation and the provision of status can lead people through immense suffering:
"Provided it is not accompanied by humiliation, discomfort can be endured without complaint... soldiers and explorers willingly tolerated privations exceeding those suffered by the poorest of their societies, sustained by awareness of the esteem in which they were held by others."
Many people would rather suffer and be admired than be materially prosperous yet detested by everyone around them. That’s how powerful status can be.
We’ll close this discussion of status-related emotions with pride. Pride too is an adaptive emotion that drives us to attain status. Pride is the feeling of being respected, admired, esteemed, and so on. It’s the emotion associated with receiving status.
There are two key components of pride. First, there’s authentic pride, which rests on valid accomplishment. It is associated with being outgoing, friendly, and oriented toward being a good social ally. People usually achieve authentic pride by attaining prestige.
In contrast, there’s hubristic pride. It has no solid foundation; it’s not necessarily grounded on actual accomplishment. It is associated with being hostile, manipulative, and self-centered. People who are oriented toward the pursuit of hubristic pride try to take the dominance route to status.
We’ll close out here by returning to great leaders of the past, with a quote from the British philosopher Bertrand Russell:
“You may envy Napoleon. But Napoleon envied Caesar, Caesar envied Alexander, and Alexander envied Hercules, who never existed. You can get away from envy by avoiding comparisons with those you imagine, perhaps falsely, to be more fortunate than yourself.”
Envy can be a difficult emotion to escape from. But if we stop focusing on those who have more than us and instead realize how fortunate we are, we can, at least for the moment, achieve a bit of inner peace.
We’ll end here. Next time we’ll discuss stories and status games.
CW had a great example! Scandinavians are very big on not being too full of yourself. However, they believe they are collectively superior to other groups, that Swedes (especially) have organised their society the correct way and all you others are wrong.
It is just one of the many complications about status and envy. It is interesting to see the research of what WEIRD people think and do, but individuals are generally more difficult to capture. They can burn with envy in one domain but be very pleased with the success of others in another. They can be aware of their envy and strive to moderate it (or deny it) or they can be oblivious. I find I do not wish anyone evil, or only seldom. But I wish to do a little bit better in status. I was happy when other musicians or students got praise - I just wanted a little more. And in romantic affairs, second place is no place, so it is hard to wish others success with mates we at least had on our list of possibles.
Moving up to a bigger pond can fill some with feelings of success, but others have trouble not being the most notable.
The upper Midwest of America is probably the most Scandinavian place in America both by genetic descent and with some cultural continuity. There is a sort of Jante Law light there at times. When I sold my house 15 years ago the buyer's realtor and home inspector were discussing a different realtor and his poor choice of coming to showings driving a BMW. It was very clear that he was sending inappropriate signals. Now that I live in Florida it very much appears that a realtor showing up in a BMW is a positive signal. It shows one is a good salesperson and can move product. If one were to show up in a more sedate vehicle here it might raise questions about one's status and abilities.