Inspiring or demoralizing? Deservingness perceptions help determine why emerging adults experience positive or negative effects from envy-inducing social media posts

Abstract This study extends pain-driven dual envy theory to explain why emerging adults who do not attend college might experience uplifting or hostile reactions to the social media posts of their college-attending peers. Employing a 2 × 2 experiment (N = 233; Mage = 21.87), we examined how deservingness perceptions (deserving versus undeserving) and social approval cues (high versus low) affect the type of envy emerging adults experience from viewing college success posts on social media. Results indicated that the more participants perceived the college success of their peers to be deserved, the more they experienced benign envy. Conversely, the more participants appraised the college success of their peers to be undeserved, the more they experienced malicious envy. Results also indicated that posts with higher social approval indirectly triggered more pain for participants. Overall, findings help clarify why social media users can experience both positive and negative effects from online social comparisons.