The effects of social comparison on social emotions and behavior during childhood: The ontogeny of envy and Schadenfreude predicts developmental changes in equity-related decisions

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Abstract

Social comparison can elicit emotions such as envy, which can affect social interactions. The emergence and development of such social emotions through ontogeny, and their influence on social interaction, are unknown. We tested 182 children from 7 to 13 years of age with a novel monetary reward-and-punishment task measuring envy and Schadenfreude (i.e., gloating or taking delight in someone else’s misfortune). Children were either rewarded or punished in a trial-by-trial evaluation of their performance on a speeded reaction time task. In a social condition, feedback of their own and a competitor’s performance was given for each trial. Afterward, children rated how they felt about the outcome. The ratings suggest that when children won, they felt better if the competitor lost instead of winning (i.e., Schadenfreude). Conversely, when children lost, they felt worse if the competitor won instead of losing (i.e., envy). Crucially, levels of envy and Schadenfreude decreased with age. We also studied how these emotions relate to social decisions made separately during three resource allocation paradigms. In each, children chose between two options that differed in the distribution of valuable tokens between themselves and an anonymous other. The combination of choices allowed the measurement of inequity aversion (i.e., equality for all) and spite (i.e., self-profit to maximal disadvantage of the other). We found an age-related increase in inequity aversion and decrease in spite. Crucially, age-related changes in both envy and Schadenfreude predicted the developmental change in equity-related decisions. These findings shed light on the development of social emotions and demonstrate their importance in the development of prosocial behavior in children.

Highlights

► Newly developed task successfully induces and measures social emotions in children. ► Age-related decrease in envy and Schadenfreude during childhood. ► Individual differences in social emotions predict spiteful decisions. ► Age-related decrease in social emotions mediates decrease in spiteful decisions.

Introduction

Comparing oneself with others happens universally across human cultures (Gibbons and Buunk, 1999, White and Lehman, 2005). From personal attributes such as beauty and intelligence to possessions such as cars and homes, social comparison processes can significantly influence how good one feels about oneself (Festinger, 1954). Think about how men compare the size of their vehicles; to improve their sense of self-worth, they compare themselves with those with smaller or cheaper cars or perhaps perform actions that sabotage those with larger or more expensive ones (see Taylor & Lobel, 1989, and Zizzo, 2003, for similar behavior in other domains). Particularly in competitive environments, it has been shown that social comparison leads to envy as well as Schadenfreude (i.e., gloating or taking delight in someone else’s misfortune) (Smith & Kim, 2007). It has been argued that envy and Schadenfreude are strongly linked emotional states (Smith and Kim, 2007, Smith et al., 1996), as indicated by an alleviation of envy when misfortune befalls the envied other, resulting in Schadenfreude (Smith et al., 1996, Takahashi et al., 2009). Furthermore, both envy and Schadenfreude have been linked to grossly antisocial behavior (Hein et al., 2010, Zizzo, 2003). Given these potentially detrimental effects of emotions resulting from social comparison, understanding their emergence and development during childhood is of particular interest. However, to date, little is known about the ontogeny of envy and Schadenfreude and how they relate to the development of prosocial behavior.

The literature on the development of social comparisons has focused predominantly on the age at which children begin to compare themselves with their peers and how these comparisons affect subsequent self-appraisal, motivation, and performance judgments during competitive tasks (Butler, 1989, Pomerantz et al., 1995, Rhodes and Brickman, 2008, Ruble et al., 1994). Between 5 and 10 years of age, relative failures typically lead to negative self-appraisals and decreased motivation (Boggiano and Ruble, 1979, Butler, 1989, Pomerantz et al., 1995, Ruble et al., 1980, Ruble et al., 1994, Ruble, Feldman, et al., 1976, Ruble, Parsons, et al., 1976). Given that the effect of social comparison on emotional states in adults is considerable (Smith & Kim, 2007), it is all the more surprising that only a few studies have investigated a direct link between social comparison and affective states in children (Carlson and Masters, 1986, Masters et al., 1985). Importantly, to our knowledge, only one study has addressed the direct effects of both upward and downward social comparison (i.e., comparison with someone currently better and worse off, respectively) on affective states in children (LoBue, Nishida, Chiong, DeLoache, & Haidt, 2011), and none has studied how these effects change with age.

Previous research has reported an increase in the extent to which social comparison occurs during middle childhood (Butler, 1989, Pomerantz et al., 1995, Ruble et al., 1994). Therefore, one hypothesis is that these increases should be accompanied by a rise in the associated emotions such as envy and Schadenfreude. At the same time, however, it has been shown that with age, children become increasingly aware of the negative aspects of social comparison (Pomerantz et al., 1995). Thus, an alternative hypothesis is that increases in social comparison lead to greater regulation of negative emotions, resulting in less envy and Schadenfreude during childhood. To directly address these hypotheses, we devised a novel experimental paradigm and studied whether and how emotions that arise out of social comparison change through development in children from 7 to 13 years of age. Even though previous studies have focused predominantly on younger ages, we were interested in further developmental changes right throughout middle and late childhood. In addition, piloting suggested that the paradigm was easily followed by 7-year-olds but less so by younger children. Pragmatically, this represented the lower bound of our age range. Because our focus was on the development of social emotions during childhood, the onset of adolescence, typically estimated to occur between 12 and 14 years of age, represented the upper bound. Using such an age range permits us to chart the development of emotions arising out of social comparison and whether an age-related increase in social comparison occurs with a concomitant increase or decrease in associated emotions.

Effects of envy are also interesting in terms of their putative influence on human social decisions. This is, for example, evidenced by the commonly displayed preference for dividing a resource into equal parts, also known as inequity aversion (Fehr & Schmidt, 1999). Numerous studies on the development of this preference provide evidence for age-related changes in behavior reflecting inequity aversion (Almas et al., 2010, Blake and McAuliffe, 2011, Fehr et al., 2008, Harbaugh et al., 2003, Moore, 2009, Shaw and Olson, 2012, Steinbeis et al., 2012, Thompson et al., 1997). It has been shown that with age, children increasingly reject unfair offers in the Ultimatum Game (Harbaugh et al., 2003, Steinbeis et al., 2012), which can be interpreted as resulting from increasing inequity aversion. Blake and McAuliffe (2011) further reported that whereas 4- to 7-year-olds reject offers that put themselves at a disadvantage, children of approximately 8 years of age also reject offers that put another at a disadvantage, a finding that was recently replicated (Shaw & Olson, 2012). In addition, inequity aversion develops through adolescence, as indicated by developmental changes in the explicit justification of inequality (Almas et al., 2010).

Using a set of three economic games, Fehr et al. (2008) showed that between 3 and 8 years of age, children increasingly choose sharing options that ensure equal pay-offs for all parties involved. In each game, a child needed to decide how a number of sweets were to be divided between himself/herself and an anonymous other and was faced with two options. One option divided the sweets equally, and an alternative option favored one of the two players. For the child making the decision, the alternative options could be either advantageous (i.e., one sweet for the child and none for the other) or disadvantageous (i.e., one sweet for the child and two for the other). These games provide a systematic test for how strongly children of a certain age prefer equality depending on the costs incurred to create it. The study found an age-related increase in strong inequity aversion, as indicated by a greater willingness to incur costs to one’s own pay-off to obtain equality. Similarly, there was an age-related decrease in spiteful decisions, namely those that always left the other disadvantaged, even when this did not incur any additional benefits to the child making the choice. In the current study, we employed the same measures to test for inequity aversion and spite. Given our tested age range, we modified the incentive structure and used age-appropriate toys instead of sweets as rewards. It has been shown that the type and value of the experimentally implemented currency can have a considerable impact on equity-related decisions in children (Blake & Rand, 2010). Therefore, we expected to replicate the pattern of an age-related increase in inequity aversion and decrease in spite, as reported by Fehr et al. (2008), given the use of salient and age-appropriate attractive rewards.

Importantly, we sought to test whether emotions associated with social comparison play a role in bringing about equity-related decisions. In spite of the evident wealth of studies on the development of inequity aversion, the mechanisms underlying age-related changes in this preference remain elusive and emotional development may constitute a plausible candidate. Whereas it has been shown that changes in explicit norm-related reasoning may play a role (Blake & McAuliffe, 2011), nothing is known of the possible involvement and development of emotional processes. So far, only few studies have addressed the role of emotions in social decision making (Gummerum et al., 2010, Kogut, 2012, LoBue et al., 2011) without providing a direct link between the emotions and decisions. Therefore, we were interested in whether age-related differences in social emotions (i.e., emotions that occur exclusively in real or imagined social situations), such as envy and Schadenfreude, could predict developmental changes in inequity aversion as measured by equity-related decisions. To address this, we linked our measures of envy and Schadenfreude with those of equity-related decisions derived from children’s choices in the economic games.

It has been shown that the emotional consequences of decisions can be anticipated, which in turn influences the decisions themselves (Coricelli et al., 2005, Loewenstein et al., 2001). Thus, it is likely that anticipated emotions affect decisions regarding the distribution of resources. For instance, individual differences in the experience of an emotion, such as regret, predict the extent to which that same emotion is anticipated to occur as a result of a decision (Coricelli et al., 2005). Therefore, we hypothesized that our measures of envy and Schadenfreude should constitute predictors of equity-related decisions. Specifically, we hypothesized that anticipating feelings of envy (i.e., feeling worse when the other has more than oneself compared with when both have equally little) should lead to decisions that aim to increase the other’s disadvantage (i.e., spiteful decisions). It has been argued that Schadenfreude and envy are tightly coupled emotional states (Smith and Kim, 2007, Smith et al., 1996). This appears to be due to the fact that the experienced envy is alleviated when seeing misfortune befall the envied other, something to result in Schadenfreude (Smith et al., 1996, Takahashi et al., 2009). Therefore, we predicted that anticipating feelings of Schadenfreude (i.e., feeling better when one has more than the other compared with when both have equally as much) should also lead to decisions that maximize the disadvantage of the other (i.e., spiteful decisions). Thus, we hypothesized that individual differences in our measures of envy and Schadenfreude would be predictive of spiteful decisions, as measured by the choices made in the context of economic games. Furthermore, we hypothesized that age-related changes in feelings of envy and Schadenfreude would mediate the observed age-related changes in equity-related decisions.

Section snippets

Participants

Participants were 182 children (105 boys and 77 girls, mean age = 10.07 years, range = 7.01–13.96). Of these children, 177 were Swiss, 2 were German, 1 was Thai, 1 was Swedish, and 1 was English. Parents of all participants gave their informed consent, and the study was approved by the ethics committees of the University of Zurich and the Canton of Zurich (E68/2008). Children were recruited from primary schools in the town of Rapperswil in the canton St. Gallen, Switzerland. All children were normal

Results

For the sake of comparability with previous studies using some of the same paradigms, we analyzed the data by age groupings used previously (Fehr et al., 2008).

Discussion

Using a novel experimental task, we demonstrated a marked decrease with age in both envy and Schadenfreude. Our findings show that these two social emotions are highly correlated in our sample of children, suggesting that Schadenfreude and envy are already closely linked emotions early in development. Crucially, individual differences in envy and Schadenfreude predicted whether participants behaved spitefully or inequity averse in their distribution of economic goods. Furthermore, we found that

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (“Neuronal and developmental basis of empathy and emotion control: fMRI studies of adults and children aged 6 to 12 years” to T.S.), and the University Research Priority Programs (URPP) of the University of Zurich. We also thank Cade McCall, Harriet Over and Jonathan Smallwood for critical comments on previous versions of the manuscript.

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