| Envy is a negative emotion which was elicited by upward social comparison.Recently,researchers found that envy emerges in two distinct forms,namely benign envy and malicious envy.The main difference between the two types of envy is the activated motivation.To be specific,benign envy is characterized by a motivation aimed at self-improvement,whereas malicious envy is characterized by a motivation aimed at tearing the envied person down.The two types of envy are linked to different consequences,mostly because of the different motivations.For instance,because of the moving-up motivation,benign envy is associated with performance increments in achievement tasks.In a malicious envy situation,the motivation to hurt the other person constitutes negative consequences.Research has found the experience of malicious envy is closely associated with more intense schadenfreude and a rise in unethical and hostile behaviors.Other studies have indicated that malicious envy is related to social isolation,which affects interpersonal relations negatively.Different fields of studies have established that malicious envy is more harmful than benign envy.Further research into the behavioral effects of malicious envy and their related possible mechanism is useful and helpful for identifying effective strategies that will minimize its harmful outcomes.Besides,because of these destructive behavior consequences,the maliciously envious are usually not liked by others.This leads the maliciously envious to disguise their envious feelings.In this case,the behaviors motivated by pull-down motivation are socially harmful.And they are risky for the maliciously envious.The maliciously envious should decide repeatedly whether they engage into socially costly behaviors.Thus,it is important to understand how the maliciously envious decide in such situations.Preliminary Experiment provided a test of the validity of experimental manipulation.This experiment examined whether malicious envy rather than benign envy was induced by the red envelope task.In the malicious envy condition,participants were believed that she got less money than her partners,whereas participants were believed that she got the same amount of money as her partners in the control condition.Results showed benign envy did not differ significantly between two conditions.However,for malicious envy condition,the rating of the malicious envy was higher than the control condition.The scores of perceived deservingness and perceived control in experiment manipulation condition were significantly lower than those in control condition.All the results indicated that the manipulations worked as intended.In Experiment 1,we investigated whether malicious envy would influence risky choices in a framing task.When the red envelope task was finished,an assessment of the feeling of malicious envy was used as a manipulation check.Then participants were asked to complete the monetary framing task individually.A significant interaction was found between emotional context and frame.Further analysis showed that the participants in the malicious envy group made more risk-averse choices in the gain frame than those in the control group,but these two groups of participants did not exhibit a behavioral difference in the loss frame.In Experiment 2,we further explored the possible behavioral mechanism of the effect of malicious envy on risky decision making under different frames.We hypothesized that malicious envy would have a significant effect on risky decision making under different frames through the mediating effect of an achievement motivation.To test these hypotheses,the achievement motivation scale which measures hope for success and fear of failure was added after the red envelope task.The other procedure was same as in Experiment 1.It was observed that fear of failure mediated the effect of malicious envy on risky decision making in the framing task,although malicious envy activated two types of achievement motivation. |
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