The young woman had done well in a recent exam, but was feeling awful because she had just found out that a close friend had done even better. When she confided in social psychologist Abraham Tesser, he immediately recognized that the woman was standing at the fault line of two emotions that each say something interesting about human nature.
When someone we know or love excels at something, we take pride in her accomplishment because we care about the other person and get to bask in some of her reflected glory. But when we are involved in the same activity as that friend or intimate partner – and feel bested by that person – we can simultaneously feel envious and threatened, in a way we would not if the star performer were a stranger.
Tesser realized that the woman had unintentionally given him a window into a touchy issue: how close friends and intimate partners who are engaged in similar work or activities compare themselves with one other.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) is just one high-profile example of a person who constantly endures comparisons with her spouse's outsize achievements in the same field.
“When people who are close to us do well, you get both responses. You get the response 'My sister got the boy, again,' or 'My brother made the team and I didn't – again!' ” said Tesser, professor emeritus at the University of Georgia at Athens. “At the same time, you are also basking in reflected glory.”
What makes the phenomenon interesting is that the conflict arises only if the star is both close to you and claims excellence in the same domain in which you wish to be seen as outstanding.
“People are happiest when they feel they are doing about as well as their spouse,” said Penelope Lockwood, a social psychologist at the University of Toronto who has extended Tesser's research. “It is more of a problem when you feel you are in the same league as your partner but are not achieving what your partner has achieved.”
Many couples and friends tell researchers they feel no envy or resentment toward a partner who does well, but controlled experiments show otherwise. In one, Tesser and his colleagues videotaped people as they were told that someone close to them had outperformed them. The volunteers said they were delighted, but impartial analysis of the video revealed that their expressions were leavened with dismay.
In another experiment, Tesser and his colleagues brought groups of four people into a lab, with each group consisting of two pairs of friends. The volunteers were asked to play a word game, where three of them in turn gave clues to the fourth. When people were told that the game revealed how intelligent they were, and they then did badly, they tended to undermine the friend by giving her difficult clues in the next round. But they gave easy clues to strangers.
When the players were led to believe the game was trivial, however, they were more likely to give easy clues to their friends; the game was unimportant, so it did not matter if the friend outperformed them.
In a third study, Tesser had participants compete in a quiz. They did not know that their competitor was really a research assistant who had memorized all the answers. The volunteers inevitably lost, of course, but some were told that the quiz was an important test of intelligence; others were told the quiz was just a game.
When Tesser later asked the defeated volunteers to take a seat in a room with the research assistant, Tesser found that people who were told the game was important seated themselves farther away from the “clever” competitor than did those who thought the game was trivial.
