Why do we feel jealous?
What experiments with infants, dogs and adults show about the ingredients of jealousy, and how it differs from envy.
Answer to the question
Why do we feel jealous?
We feel jealous when something we value, such as a bond or a place in someone's attention, seems to be moving toward a rival. In experiments, 32 infants aged 6 months showed more negativity when their mothers attended to a doll than to a book, and 36 dogs showed more jealous behaviour when their owners petted a stuffed dog.
Key takeaways
- In an experiment with 32 infants aged 6 months, negativity was greater when mothers attended to a lifelike doll than when they attended to a book, which the authors read as an early form of jealousy (Hart and Carrington, 2002).
- In a study of 36 dogs, owners' affection toward a realistic stuffed dog produced more pushing, touching and getting between owner and object than the same affection toward a pail or a book (Harris and Prouvost, 2014).
- Sara Protasi argues that envy is seeing a lack of a good one wants, while jealousy is seeing the loss, or possible loss, of a good one has.
- Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson, in The Elephant in the Brain, separate competition that is easy to acknowledge from competition among friends and within couples that is hard to acknowledge.
- In a study of social network sites and romantic relationships, need for popularity, trait jealousy and self-esteem shaped how site use related to jealousy and to relationship happiness (Utz and Beukeboom, 2011).
Babies show jealousy before they can speak. A mother turns her attention to a lifelike doll, and the infant on her lap shows more negativity than when she turns to a book. A dog watches its owner pet a stuffed toy dog and pushes in between the two. So why do we feel jealous at all? Experiments with infants, dogs and adults point to a short list of ingredients, and the same few appear in every case, from the cot to a partner chatting at a party, and each ingredient can be named and tested on its own before the three are put back together.
Jealousy begins as a guard on someone's close attention
In the doll study, run by Sybil Hart and Heather Carrington, 32 infants of six months watched their mothers attend in turn to a lifelike baby doll and a book. The design is useful because of what it removes. The infants could not follow a plot, compare salaries or read a message. The only thing that changed was where a mother's attention went, and the part of the change that mattered was the target: a social object drew more negativity than a book did. The authors read the result as an early form of jealousy by 6 months of age.
Three parts recur in this research, from the cot to adult relationships:
- Something valued, such as a parent's attention or a partner's regard.
- A rival, whether a real person or a stand-in for one.
- A signal that the valued thing may be moving toward the rival.
Dogs were tested on the same logic by Christine Harris and Caroline Prouvost. Each of 36 dogs took part in three one-minute conditions, in a counterbalanced order. In one, the owner petted and spoke sweetly to a realistic stuffed dog. In another, the owner did the same with a pumpkin-shaped pail, and in the third the owner read aloud from a pop-up book.
In the stuffed-dog condition the dogs pushed or touched their owners and the object more, and tried more often to get between the two. The authors argue that the emotion has a basic form shared by human infants and at least one other social species.
Envy reaches for a lack, jealousy protects a held bond
Everyday speech uses the two words as one, yet philosophers and psychologists have long separated them. Sara Protasi argues in a 2017 paper that envy and jealousy are distinct emotions that often occur together. On her account, envy involves seeing that one lacks a valuable good, while jealousy involves seeing that one is losing, or may lose, a good one has. A colleague's promotion is the classic trigger for envy. A close friend spending an evening with someone new is the classic trigger for jealousy, because the thing at stake is a place in the friend's attention and not a prize.
The split matters because envy has a research track of its own, including a benign form that pushes people to improve themselves, set out in Why do we want what other people have. Comparison with others feeds both feelings, and the choices people make about whom to compare themselves with are covered in Why do we compare ourselves to others. The second feeling adds the sense of an existing bond under pressure, and that is what sets it apart.
Our view is that this distinction earns its place in daily life. After a pang of it, the most useful question is what exactly feels at risk: a role in a group, a share of a partner's time, a plan that two people made together. The answer shows whether the feeling is about the other person at all, or about an arrangement that the other person happens to touch.
Quiet rivalry and social meaning decide when it shows
Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson, in The Elephant in the Brain, separate rivalry that people can name easily, such as games and markets, from rivalry that is hard to acknowledge, which includes status contests among friends and tensions inside couples. Their book also describes social norms of discretion around close relationships, which let people pursue what they want without announcing it. Read alongside the infant and dog findings, this suggests a reason the feeling is so often felt and so seldom said. The signal that a bond is under pressure arrives early in life and automatically, while the habit of keeping it private is learned later.
Digital life gives the feeling new material. Social network sites make information about a person's partner readily available and visible to friends, and Sonja Utz and Camiel Beukeboom studied what that does to jealousy and to relationship happiness.
They tested whether relationship satisfaction, trait jealousy and need for popularity predicted both outcomes, and whether self-esteem changed the picture. For people with lower self-esteem, need for popularity predicted both jealousy and happiness, which the authors link to building an idealised picture of the relationship. For people with higher self-esteem, using the sites to keep watch on a partner's profile was the main predictor. Information that did not fit the idealised picture was a threat to it, and people with a high need for popularity were especially likely to react with this feeling. The constant pull of the feed, described in Why You Cannot Stop Scrolling, means that signals of this kind are always a swipe away.
The reading of the rival decides how strongly it shows
The dog experiment carries one more lesson that applies to people. The owners' affection was the same in the stuffed-dog and pumpkin-pail conditions: same voice, same petting, same minute. What changed was whether the recipient looked like a social rival.
In the Harris and Prouvost data, about 86 percent of the dogs sniffed the stuffed dog's rear end, which suggests that many treated it as a real dog, and the roughly 14 percent that did not sniff it showed few of the pushing and touching behaviours. Even among the dogs that did treat the toy as a dog, the form of the response varied from one animal to the next. A feeling that depends on what the other party is taken to be will vary from one individual to the next.
The same holds for the infants, whose negativity rose when attention went to a social object and not to a book. The response follows how the rival is read, and the reading is made in a moment, before any deliberate thought. That is why the same event can leave one person unmoved and another unsettled: a partner chatting at a party, a friend's new group chat, a sibling praised at a family gathering.
Each is an ordinary scene, and each depends on who is judged to be a threat to something valued. The scene need not hold any real danger to the bond for the signal to fire. Seen this way, the feeling tells a person less about the other party than about which bonds, roles and shares of attention they currently count as theirs to lose, which is why naming the thing at stake is a more useful first step than judging the feeling itself.
Common questions
Why do we feel jealous?
Because something we value, such as a bond or a place in someone's attention, appears to be moving toward a rival. Infants as young as 6 months and pet dogs have both shown jealous behaviour in experiments built on this idea.
Is jealousy the same as envy?
No. Sara Protasi argues that envy is seeing a lack of a good one wants, while jealousy is seeing a loss, or a possible loss, of a good one has. The two often occur together.
Do babies and animals feel jealous?
Experiments report jealous behaviour in 6-month-old infants and in dogs when attention went to a social rival, so the pattern appears to have an early and basic form.
Can social network sites make people jealous?
A study by Sonja Utz and Camiel Beukeboom found that need for popularity, trait jealousy and self-esteem shaped how site use related to jealousy and to relationship happiness.
Sources
Simler, K., & Hanson, R. The Elephant in the Brain. Seed book; vault hub Books/The Elephant in the Brain.
Hart, S., & Carrington, H. (2002). Jealousy in 6-month-old infants. Infancy, 3(3), 395-402. doi:10.1207/s15327078in0303_6 https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327078in0303_6
Harris, C. R., & Prouvost, C. (2014). Jealousy in dogs. PLoS ONE, 9(7), e94597. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0094597 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0094597
Protasi, S. (2017). I'm not envious, I'm just jealous: On the difference between envy and jealousy. Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 3(3), 316-333. doi:10.1017/apa.2017.18 https://doi.org/10.1017/apa.2017.18
Utz, S., & Beukeboom, C. J. (2011). The role of social network sites in romantic relationships: Effects on jealousy and relationship happiness. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 16(4), 511-527. doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2011.01552.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2011.01552.x