Benign and Malicious Envy Scale

Abstract

The Benign and Malicious Envy Scale (BeMaS) is a psychometric instrument developed by Jens Lange and Jan Crusius (2015) designed to differentiate between two distinct functional facets of dispositional envy: benign envy and malicious envy. Historically conceptualized as a unitary, strictly destructive, or taboo emotional state, envy has undergone significant theoretical refinement within contemporary social, personality, and organizational psychology. The BeMaS addresses historical measurement limitations by operationalizing envy as a dual-construct emotion elicited in upward social comparison contexts where an individual lacks another person’s superior achievement, possession, or personal quality. The instrument comprises 10 self-report items evenly distributed across two distinct subscales: Benign Envy (5 items) and Malicious Envy (5 items). Participants respond using a 6-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 6 (strongly agree). Psychometric investigations across diverse cross-cultural samples demonstrate robust construct validity, high internal consistency (with Cronbach’s alpha and McDonald’s omega coefficients typically exceeding .80 for both dimensions), distinct nomological networks, and stable two-factor orthogonal or modestly correlated factor structures established through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. The scale exhibits strong convergent validity with motivation, achievement orientation, self-improvement, and benign schadenfreude, as well as discriminant validity against general neuroticism, core self-evaluations, dispositional resentment, and dark triad traits. As an open-access, psychometrically validated tool, the BeMaS provides researchers and clinicians with a standardized methodology to investigate the divergent behavioral, affective, and cognitive trajectories of social comparisons.

Keywords

Benign and Malicious Envy Scale, BeMaS, dispositional envy, social comparison, upward comparison, benign envy, malicious envy, schadenfreude, psychometrics, self-improvement

Authors

The BeMaS was created and validated by social psychologists Jens Lange and Jan Crusius at the University of Cologne, Germany.

• Jens Lange, Ph.D. — Professor of Social Psychology and Behavioral Science, Department of Psychology, University of Hamburg, Germany (formerly at the Social Cognition Center Cologne, University of Cologne, Germany). Lange’s research focuses on social comparison processes, achievement motivation, positive and negative emotions, and competitive behavior.
• Jan Crusius, Ph.D. — Professor of Social Psychology, Institute of Psychology, University of Greifswald, Germany (formerly Senior Researcher at the Social Cognition Center Cologne, University of Cologne, Germany). Crusius specializes in motivation, automatic processing, economic psychology, and the emotional dynamics of envy, jealousy, and social status hierarchies.
• Corresponding Address / Academic Inquiries: Social Cognition Center Cologne (SCCC), University of Cologne, Richard-Strauss-Str. 2, 50931 Cologne, Germany.

Purpose

The fundamental purpose of the Benign and Malicious Envy Scale is to provide an empirical, psychometrically sound, and theory-grounded mechanism to operationalize and distinguish between the two functionally disparate forms of dispositional envy. For decades, empirical investigations into envy suffered from conceptual ambiguity and measurement contamination. Traditional dispositional envy instruments—most notably the Dispositional Envy Scale (DES; Smith et al., 1999)—primarily operationalized envy as an exclusively negative, resentful, and hostile emotional construct. Consequently, these earlier scales failed to capture the leveling-up, motivational, and inspirational aspects of upward social comparisons that had long been recognized in linguistic anthropology, evolutionary psychology, and philosophical treatises.

Lange and Crusius (2015) designed the BeMaS to capture the complete functional spectrum of envy-eliciting situations. When individuals encounter superior comparison standards, two divergent motivational trajectories emerge:

• Leveling-Up Dynamic (Benign Envy): A motivational drive oriented toward self-improvement, constructive emulation, and goal-directed effort to elevate one’s own standing to match or exceed the standard of the envied target.
• Leveling-Down Dynamic (Malicious Envy): A destructive, hostile, and resentful urge oriented toward degrading the advantage of the superior other, wishing them misfortune, or actively seeking to pull them down to one’s own standing.

In research settings, the BeMaS enables behavioral scientists to dissociate the functional mechanisms through which social comparisons shape economic decision-making, workplace rivalry, educational attainment, athletic performance, and interpersonal relations. For instance, in organizational contexts, benign envy fosters constructive striving, knowledge seeking, and task performance, whereas malicious envy drives workplace incivility, social undermining, counterproductive work behaviors, and schadenfreude. In clinical and counseling applications, the BeMaS assists practitioners in dissecting maladaptive interpersonal tendencies, narcissistic vulnerability, depressive rumination, and relational distress stemming from chronic, unresolved upward social comparisons.

Psychological Construct

The BeMaS measures dispositional envy, defined as a stable personality trait reflecting an individual’s chronic tendency to experience specific affective, cognitive, and motivational reactions when confronted with the superior qualities, possessions, status, or achievements of other individuals. Rather than viewing envy as a homogeneous affective state, the construct is bifurcated into two qualitatively distinct sub-constructs:

1. Dispositional Benign Envy

Dispositional benign envy is an upward social comparison orientation characterized by constructive ambition, inspiration, and striving toward personal growth. When observing another individual’s superior advantage, an individual characterized by high benign envy experiences frustration regarding their own relative deficit but channels this negative affective tension into positive motivational energy. Key features of benign envy include:

• Appraisal of Deservingness: The envier typically perceives the comparison target’s success as legitimate, earned, or attainable through effort, generating admiration blended with personal discontent.
• Focus of Action: Attention is centered upon the self and the mechanisms required to attain similar outcomes (e.g., skill acquisition, sustained effort, deliberate practice).
• Behavioral Consequences: Elevated academic performance, persistence in the face of failure, competitive drive, and proactive career advancement without interpersonal hostility.

2. Dispositional Malicious Envy

Dispositional malicious envy is an upward social comparison orientation dominated by resentment, ill will, hostility, and a desire to dismantle the superior target’s position. This facet represents the conventional, historically condemned conception of envy. When confronted with another’s superiority, the individual high in malicious envy experiences profound personal inadequacy coupled with externalized antipathy. Key characteristics include:

• Appraisal of Undeservingness and Unfairness: The envier frequently perceives the other’s advantage as unfair, illegitimate, or unearned, or feels that their own relative disadvantage is unjust.
• Focus of Action: Cognitive and behavioral attention is aimed externally at the envied target, focusing on diminishing the other’s status, rejoicing in their setbacks (schadenfreude), or seeking to strip away their advantage.
• Behavioral Consequences: Covert sabotage, social exclusion, destructive gossip, hostility, interpersonal alienation, and emotional distress characterized by bitter rumination.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical framework underpinning the BeMaS is grounded in the Pain-driven Dual-Pathway Model of Envy formulated by Lange, Blatz, and Crusius (2018), which integrates classical Social Comparison Theory (Festinger, 1954) with modern appraisal theories of emotion (Frijda, 1986; Roseman, 2001; Scherer, 2001). Festinger posited that humans possess an innate drive to evaluate their opinions and abilities through comparison with others. When these comparisons are upward (comparing oneself to someone better off), the immediate psychological outcome is a painful threat to the self-concept, experienced subjectively as a social-evaluative blow.

The Pain-driven Dual-Pathway Model posits that this initial unpleasant emotional sting is common to all envy experiences. However, cognitive appraisals determine whether the emotional trajectory diverges into benign or malicious pathways:

1. Appraisal of Control and Attainability: If an individual perceives that personal control over the outcome is high and that the target’s standard is attainable through dedicated effort, the unpleasant affective state transforms into benign envy. The action readiness associated with this pathway is moving oneself upward.
2. Appraisal of Low Control and Subjective Injustice: If the individual perceives that they lack the capability or systemic opportunity to achieve parity (low subjective control), or if they appraise the advantage as fundamentally undeserved, the affective state shifts toward malicious envy. The corresponding action readiness is leveling the other person down.

This theoretical conceptualization is further bolstered by linguistic evidence. In several languages, distinct lexical items represent these two emotional variants (e.g., German beneiden vs. missgönnen; Dutch benijden vs. afgunst; Russian belaya zavist’ vs. chernaya zavist’). In English, the single term “envy” historically conflated both processes, leading to conceptual conflation in early empirical research. The BeMaS provides an operational methodology aligned with this appraisal-based dual-pathway architecture, allowing researchers to measure both distinct phenotypic expressions.

Validity

The validity of the BeMaS has been rigorously corroborated through extensive empirical studies spanning cross-sectional, longitudinal, experimental, and cross-cultural psychometric designs.

Construct and Structural Validity

In their seminal validation paper comprising four comprehensive studies with over 1,500 participants, Lange and Crusius (2015) confirmed that a two-factor model demonstrated superior structural fit over a unidimensional model. The two latent factors—benign envy and malicious envy—showed low to moderate correlations across multiple samples (ranging from r = -.06 to r = .24), supporting their conceptual independence rather than polar-opposite status.

Convergent Validity

The two subscales exhibit distinct, theoretically predicted patterns of convergence across the Five Factor Model of personality and related motivational constructs:

• Benign Envy Convergences: Positively and strongly correlates with hope for success (r ≈ .45), mastery and performance-approach achievement goals (r ≈ .35 to .42), self-esteem (r ≈ .20 to .28), optimism, and conscientiousness (r ≈ .22). It correlates moderately with positive dispositional affect and the disposition to experience admiration.
• Malicious Envy Convergences: Strongly correlates with the traditional Dispositional Envy Scale (DES; r ≈ .65 to .75), fear of failure (r ≈ .40), neuroticism (r ≈ .38), dispositional resentment, hostile attribution bias, Machiavellianism (r ≈ .35), narcissism (particularly vulnerable narcissism, r ≈ .48), and schadenfreude (r ≈ .45 to .55).

Discriminant and Predictive Validity

Discriminant validity is evidenced by the near-zero correlations between malicious envy and positive achievement strivings, as well as the absence of positive correlations between benign envy and dark triad traits or malicious schadenfreude. In predictive behavioral experiments conducted by Lange and Crusius (2015), benign envy uniquely predicted participants’ increased willingness to exert cognitive effort on complex verbal reasoning tasks (e.g., anagrams) and physical grip-strength tasks after reading about a superior peer. Conversely, malicious envy uniquely predicted the spontaneous derogation of a superior student, the assignment of unpleasant tasks to high-performing competitors, and the covert celebration of their subsequent failures.

Reliability

The BeMaS has demonstrated robust internal consistency and temporal stability across diverse populations, languages, and settings.

Internal Consistency

Across the original validation samples (Lange & Crusius, 2015), the internal consistency estimates were consistently high for both 5-item subscales:

• Benign Envy Subscale: Cronbach’s alpha (α) values ranged between .79 and .89 across university and adult community samples; McDonald’s omega hierarchical (ω_h) values typically range from .81 to .87.
• Malicious Envy Subscale: Cronbach’s alpha (α) values ranged between .83 and .89 across all validation cohorts; McDonald’s omega values mirrored this reliability with parameters between .84 and .89.

Subsequent international validation studies in languages such as Spanish (α = .82 for benign, .86 for malicious), Chinese (α = .85 for benign, .88 for malicious), Turkish (α = .81 for benign, .84 for malicious), and Italian (α = .83 for benign, .87 for malicious) have uniformly corroborated these internal reliability metrics.

Test-Retest Reliability

Temporal stability over time has been verified across various test-retest intervals:

• Over a 4-week interval, test-retest reliability coefficients were r_tt = .81 for Benign Envy and r_tt = .83 for Malicious Envy, demonstrating strong trait-level temporal stability.
• Longitudinal evaluations spanning up to 6 months maintain significant stability indices (r_tt > .70), indicating that the scale captures enduring dispositional tendencies rather than fleeting emotional episodes.

Factor Analysis

The internal dimensionality of the BeMaS has been rigorously scrutinized using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA).

Exploratory Factor Analysis

In the initial development phase, exploratory factor analysis (Principal Axis Factoring with Promax and Varimax rotations) performed on an initial pool of candidate items extracted a clear, two-factor solution based on Kaiser’s criterion (eigenvalues > 1.0) and scree plot inspections. The first two factors accounted for the majority of common variance (typically exceeding 58%). All selected benign items loaded heavily onto Factor 1 (factor loadings between .62 and .84) with cross-loadings onto Factor 2 remaining well below .20. Conversely, all malicious items loaded strongly onto Factor 2 (loadings between .65 and .86) with negligible cross-loadings on Factor 1.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Model Fit

Confirmatory factor analytic evaluations demonstrate that the hypothesized correlated two-factor model provides an exceptional fit to the data, decisively outperforming competing unidimensional models (where all 10 items load on a single envy factor) or single-bipolar models. Standard fit indices across validation cohorts consistently meet stringent psychometric thresholds:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): .96 to .99 (threshold > .95)
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): .95 to .98 (threshold > .95)
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): .038 to .058 (with 90% confidence intervals bounded below .07)
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): .031 to .049 (threshold < .08)
• Chi-Square / Degrees of Freedom (χ²/df): Typically < 2.50

Measurement invariance testing across gender, age cohorts, and linguistic translations has consistently supported strict or scalar invariance, verifying that the BeMaS assesses equivalent constructs across distinct demographic groups.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The BeMaS is a brief, self-administered psychometric tool engineered for rapid administration and clear factor interpretability.

• Instrument Type: Self-report psychological questionnaire.
• Construct Assessed: Dispositional benign envy (leveling-up motivation) and dispositional malicious envy (leveling-down hostility).
• Total Number of Items: 10 items.
• Subscale Composition:
  • Benign Envy Subscale: Items 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 (5 items).
  • Malicious Envy Subscale: Items 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 (5 items).
• Authentic Response Scale: 6-point Likert scale:
  • 1 = Strongly disagree
  • 2 = Moderately disagree
  • 3 = Slightly disagree
  • 4 = Slightly agree
  • 5 = Moderately agree
  • 6 = Strongly agree
• Scoring Protocol:
  • No items are reverse-scored.
  • The Benign Envy Score is calculated by computing the arithmetic mean of items 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9.
  • The Malicious Envy Score is calculated by computing the arithmetic mean of items 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10.
  • Scores range from 1.00 to 6.00 for each subscale, with higher numerical averages indicating higher levels of the corresponding dispositional envy facet.
• Administration Time: Approximately 2 to 4 minutes.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Dispositional Benign and Malicious Envy Scale was officially published in 2015 in the peer-reviewed journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. The authors, Jens Lange and Jan Crusius, published the instrument under the open-access Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY 4.0) license.

• Commercial Fee: None. The instrument is completely free to use.
• Research and Clinical Use: Researchers, educators, and clinicians are permitted to use, adapt, translate, and share the scale without requiring explicit prior written consent from the authors, provided that appropriate academic attribution is given to the original 2015 publication.

References

• Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7(2), 117–140. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872675400700202
• Frijda, N. H. (1986). The emotions. Cambridge University Press.
• Lange, J., Blatz, L., & Crusius, J. (2018). The pain-driven dual-pathway model of envy. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 58, 65–118. https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.aesp.2018.04.001
• Lange, J., & Crusius, J. (2015). Dispositional envy revisited: Unraveling the motivational dynamics of benign and malicious envy. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41(2), 284–294. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167214564959
• Roseman, I. J. (2001). A model of appraisal appraisal dimensions and emotional divergence. In K. R. Scherer, A. Schorr, & T. Johnstone (Eds.), Appraisal processes in emotion: Theory, methods, research (pp. 68–91). Oxford University Press.
• Scherer, K. R. (2001). Appraisal considered as a process of multilevel sequential checking. In K. R. Scherer, A. Schorr, & T. Johnstone (Eds.), Appraisal processes in emotion: Theory, methods, research (pp. 92–120). Oxford University Press.
• Smith, R. H., Parrott, W. G., Diener, E. F., Hoyle, R. H., & Kim, S. H. (1999). Dispositional envy. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25(8), 1007–1020. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167299258008
• van de Ven, N., Zeelenberg, M., & Pieters, R. (2009). Leveling up or down: The expansion of investment and consumption through envy. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 97(3), 419–429. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015669

Items of the Scale