The Influence Of Benign Envy And Malicious Envy On Risk Decision Making: The Moderation Effect Of Other People's Advantage Domains

Benign envy and malicious envy are two kinds of negative emotions generated after social upward comparison.They take "deservingness" as the core distinguish dimension.The difference lies in that when facing the gap,the benign Envy tend to improve their own performance,and the malicious envy tend to take the way of suppressing others to eliminate the gap.Since the generation of benign envy and malicious envy involves social comparison,we want to investigate whether there will be differences in the level of risk decision-making of these two kinds of emotions in different domains,and assume that when the benign envy person is frustrated in a certain domain,he will pursue success in this domain more and become more risky taking in the same frustrated domain.When a malicious envy person is frustrated in one domain,people pursue success in other domains instead of the frustrated one to reduce the psychological gap,which is manifested in becoming more risky in other domains.The study will test the hypothesis with two studies.Study 1 aims to investigate the role of the advantage domain of others in the influence of benign envy and malicious envy on risk decision-making.A mixed design of 3(emotion type: benign envy/malicious envy/control)× 2(decision domain: economy/leisure/society)is adopted,in which the emotion type is the inter-group variable and the decision domain is the intra-group variable.The situational domain was set as the economic domain,according to the "deservedness",the core distinguishing dimension of benign envy and jealousy,the subjects were divided into three levels of benign envy,malicious envy and control.Then,the risk decision level of the three dimensions of economy,leisure and social was measured by questionnaire as the dependent variable.The results showed that the advantage domain of others play a moderating role in the influence of benign envy and malicious envy on risk decision making.To be specific,when the decision-making field is the same as the advantage domain of others,the individuals under malicious envy will be more conservative than those under benign envy.When the decision-making domain is different from the advantage domain of others,the individuals under malicious envy will be more risky.The purpose of study 2 is to investigate that the result of study1 is due to benign envy makes individuals more focused on the pursuit of success in the same other's advantage domain,and malicious envy makes individuals more focused on the pursuit of success in the non-others' advantages domain,rather than because of specific emotions happen to be aroused in specific domains.On the basis of study 1,the independent variable in the domain of emotional induction was balanced,which was divided into two levels: scientific research and teaching.The study adopted 3(emotional type: benign envy/malicious envy/control)×2(other's advantage domain: scientific research/teaching)2(decision-making domain: scientific research/teaching)mixed design,in which emotional type and other's advantage domain were inter-group variables,and decision-making field was intra-group variables.Similar to study 1,the manipulation of emotional type is still divided into three levels: benign envy,malicious envy and control.Afterwards,subjects were asked to complete the risk decision-making questions in teaching and scientific research,and the risk level of the two domains was measured as the dependent variable.Try to replicate the results of study 1 in a balanced domain.The results confirmed that the results of study1 showed that the subjects were more risky in the domain of others' advantages,and the malicious envy was more risky in the domain of non-others' advantages,which was caused by the characteristics of benign envy and malicious envy.