Ever Felt Jealous of a Friend’s Accomplishment? Here’s How to Get Around It

The eternal war between pride and jealousy.

 

High school students work on a four-hour philosophy dissertation for the general baccalaureat exam for university entry in Strasbourg, France, this month.CreditFrederick Florin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

 

Tell me if this sounds familiar: Back in high school, a classmate you didn’t really know beat your score on an important test. Big deal, who cares.

But on that same test, your best friend beat your score. You’re happy for your friend, but for some indefinable reason, you’re also a little bitter that you were outscored, and then you felt guilty for being resentful over your friend’s success.

It’s O.K., you’re not a bad person. Our brains are programmed to feel that confusing mix of pride and jealousy, and we have the self-evaluation maintenance theory to thank.

This phenomenon was first studied by the social psychologist Abraham Tesser, who, in a 1988 study, wrote that our self-evaluation is threatened far more by loved ones who excel in areas we define ourselves by — like our work or a particular skill — than by strangers who excel in the exact same way. We instinctively compare ourselves more to people who are close to us, even though, paradoxically, it can engender bitterness.

In fact, our brains are so bent on those comparisons that in one experiment, subjects actively sabotaged their friends from succeeding.

The worst part? They weren’t even aware they were doing it.

What’s happening is this: When someone we love is successful at something we also want to be successful at, our brains subconsciously sets up a battle — fueled by our instincts for self-interest — between pride and jealousy, Shankar Vedantam writes in his fascinating book “The Hidden Brain.” We’re generally unable to say why we have these feelings, but nonetheless they are very real.

 

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