The Influence Of Envy On Advice Taking

Advice taking means the extent of people use the advice of others in the decision making process. It mainly research how people change their initial decision and form their final decision when received others’advice, and explore the influencing factors of this process. Studies have found the influence of some emotion on people’s advice taking, for example, anger will reduce the receptive of others’advice, gratitude can make people more willing to accept the advice from others, anxiety will reduce the self-confidence of people and thus make them more likely to take the advice of others. Currently, the effect of a lot of emotions has not been explored, meanwhile previous studies show that different emotions will have different impacts on individuals’advice taking, for example, different negative emotions, even if they have the same valence, will also let people have different or even opposite attitude to advices. Therefore, future researches still have to further explore our understanding of emotions impact on people’s advice taking.As a complex and negative emotion, envy follows from an upward social comparison and results in a variety of thoughts and feelings, such as a sense of inferiority, discontent and frustration, anger, ill will. Everybody has experienced or will suffer from envy in their daily life. Envy have complicated influences on people’s behaviors:On the one hand, desire that is a common component of many envy experiences will make people wish to have what another person has, and thus promote the individual effort to build himself/herself up; on the other hand, the reason of envy is people aware of the advantages of others and the disadvantages of themselves, it will bring themselves some feelings like the sense of inferiority and guilty, at the same time, let them feel strong hostility and resentment toward the better other, so as an very unpleasant and self-threat emotion, envy will make people want to destroy the better other’s advantage and do some disruptive behaviors. Envy is characterized by other-person control, Dunn and Schweitzer (2005) found that individuals misattributed emotions characterized by other-person control when they made judgments about other people. The research of advice taking involve assessing and relying upon the advice of others.Therefore, across2experiments, the current study explored whether or how envy impacts individual’s advice taking. By means of the estimation task, experiment1preliminarily explored the influence of envy on people’s advice taking. The researcher want to know whether through the sense of inferiority and guilty, envy reduce people’s self-confidence and thus let them more willing to take the advice of others, or because of the sense of hostility, discontent and resentment make people look down upon and thus less take the advice of others? The results shows that envy will reduce the receptive to the advice from others and bring down the accuracy of people’s estimates. The use of advice mediated the relationship between the emotion condition and the accuracy of people’s final estimates. On the basis of experiment1, experiment2explored how the assessment of the quality of advice influent the impact of envy on people’s advice taking. Whether envy has impact on individual’s assessment of the quality of advice, and in turn, affect people’s advice taking? The results shows that envy significantly reduces the individual evaluation of the quality of advice, and that in the influence of envy on advice taking, the low assessment of advice is a partial mediation.