Evil by Design: Interaction design to lead us into temptation

Envy

Neither shalt thou desire thy neighbor's wife, neither shalt thou covet thy neighbor's house, his field, or his manservant, or his maidservant, his ox, or his ass, or any thing that is thy neighbor's.

Deuteronomy 5:21

Envy is specifically forbidden in the Ten Commandments of the Christian Bible. Still, as a race we humans seem to be almost hard-wired to react to other people’s success with envy.

Sometimes envy can be benign. Seeing a famous musician playing in front of an admiring audience might be the inspiration that a child needs to practice her scales. However, as Mark Alicke and Ethan Zell point out in the book Envy: Theory and Research,“People who are more attractive, more popular, smarter, wealthier or more skilled cast other people’s own qualities in a disadvantageous light. There is a fine line, therefore, between admiring people’s superiors and basking in their accomplishments, and envying them and wishing them ill will.”

And that’s where envy gets nasty. Evolutionarily, to be seen as the most attractive mate, it’s not sufficient to have a lot of something; you have to have more than others around you. That makes us inequality averse to use a term from economics. In other words, we hate feeling like we’ve lost out. That feeling of deprivation, inferiority, or shame is the basis of destructive envy.

With destructive envy, it’s not just that we want the thing that someone else has; we also want that other person to not have it because their having it makes us feel ...