Green-eyed monster or green-eyed mirage? A new procedure for telling when begrudging others’ success is or is not envy.

Begrudging others' success is a hallmark of envy. Understandably, this has made envy researchers keen to discover the variables that prompt people to begrudge successful others. However, not all negative reactions toward successful individuals stem from envy; for instance, one need not invoke the green-eyed monster to explain our desire to see immoral villains fail. While seemingly uncontroversial, this point poses a challenge to a large and growing body of research that has linked envy with (un)deservingness, finding that undeserved success prompts more ill will than deserved success: Are these negative feelings truly driven by envy or by some other emotion? To help resolve this issue, we introduce the third-party criterion-a novel method for ruling out false elicitors of envy. This criterion specifies that if a variable makes potential enviers and third parties (not in a position to experience envy) both begrudge someone's success to similar extents, that variable is unlikely to moderate envy specifically. We report eight studies (four in the main text and four in the Supplemental Materials, N = 1,507) involving participants recruited from online participant pools between 2022 and 2025 in which we use this procedure to probe variables purported to increase feelings of envy. Ultimately, we find that while some well-established variables do not pass the third-party criterion (e.g., deservingness), others do (e.g., audience valuation). Identifying the precise factors that elicit each emotion is a fundamental goal in emotion research. The third-party criterion offers a simple, widely applicable tool for helping meet that goal. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).