Mitigating Malicious Envy: Why Successful Individuals Should Reveal Their Failures
Mitigating Malicious Envy: Why Successful Individuals Should Reveal Their Failures
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DOI：
10.1037/xge0000538
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发表时间：
2019-04-01
影响因子：
4.1
通讯作者：
Hall, Brian
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Brooks, Alison Wood;Huang, Karen;Hall, Brian
当人们将自己与成功的同龄人比较时，他们经常会产生恶意的嫉妒，这是一种破坏性的人际关系情绪。在3个在线实验和企业家的实地实验中，我们确定了一种人际策略，可以减轻观察者的恶意嫉妒感：揭示自己的失败。尽管一般不愿意透露一个人的失败，因为他们正在发生，并在他们发生后，在四个实验中，我们发现，揭示成功和失败的道路上遇到的成功（相比只透露成功）减少观察者的恶意嫉妒。这种效应与自杀者的地位无关，不能用个人地位的下降来解释。然后，在一个企业家演讲比赛的现场实验中，骄傲的表现很常见，风险很高，我们发现了暗示性的证据，即了解成功企业家的失败减少了观察者的恶意嫉妒，同时增加了他们的良性嫉妒，并减少了他们对企业家傲慢的骄傲的看法（即，傲慢），同时增加他们对企业家真正自豪感的看法（即，信心）。这些发现与之前关于嫉妒和骄傲的社会功能关系的研究一致。总之，我们的研究结果强调了如何揭示失败的成功之路上遇到的可以是一个违反直觉的，但有效的人际情绪调节策略。
People often feel malicious envy, a destructive interpersonal emotion, when they compare themselves to successful peers. Across 3 online experiments and a field experiment of entrepreneurs, we identify an interpersonal strategy that can mitigate feelings of malicious envy in observers: revealing one's failures. Despite a general reluctance to reveal one's failures-as they are happening and after they have occurred-across four experiments, we find that revealing both successes and failures encountered on the path to success (compared to revealing only successes) decreases observers' malicious envy. This effect holds regardless of the discloser's status and cannot be explained by a decrease in perceived status of the individual. Then, in a field experiment at an entrepreneurial pitch competition, where pride displays are common and stakes are high, we find suggestive evidence that learning about the failures of a successful entrepreneur decreases observers' malicious envy while increasing their benign envy and decreasing their perceptions of the entrepreneur's hubristic pride (i.e., arrogance) while increasing their perceptions of the entrepreneur's authentic pride (i.e., confidence). These findings align with previous work on the social-functional relation of envy and pride. Taken together, our results highlight how revealing failures encountered on the way to success can be a counterintuitive yet effective interpersonal emotion regulation strategy.