How Do People Respond to Threatened Social Status?

Envy can motivate us to strive for self-improvement, but it can also lead to hostile behavior. These divergent outcomes of upward comparisons reflect two kinds of envy: benign envy, motivating to level oneself up, and malicious envy, motivating to level others down. We argue that these pathways of envious responding relate to the pursuit of prestige and dominance as two ways of achieving social status, and posit that they can clarify determinants of benign versus malicious envy. We review evidence on envy moderators on the dispositional level related to reactions in the face of status threat, such as basic motivational tendencies and grandiose narcissism. Furthermore, we describe how status-related moderators on the social level, such as perceived pride in the superior other, may shape envious responding. We outline how a social-functional approach to envy—conceptualized as a status-related emotion—can contribute to a more complete understanding of the diversity of envious behavior.