Intimate Rivalries: A Mixture of Pride and Envy

By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 3, 2008

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 very 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.

The question led Tesser to experiments that have broad significance, because many people form friendships at work and at school, and this leads inevitably to becoming close to others with the same interests and avocations.

In a place such as Washington -- equal parts global capital and small town -- it's not hard to find lawyers, consultants and journalists who are married to other lawyers, consultants and journalists. 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 : 'There is my cousin who is the first violinist in the symphony,' or 'There is my son, the doctor!' "

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. If the young woman who confided in Tesser had not been outshone by a friend, she would not have felt threatened. And if the friend had not excelled in the same exam that the woman considered important, again there would have been no conflict.

"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 of pride 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 meaningless game.

When Tesser later asked the defeated volunteers to take a seat in a room where the research assistant was already seated, 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.

We want to be close to people who are stars, in other words -- just as long as they excel in something that is not important to us.

Does all this mean friends and couples who are doing the same kind of work are doomed to unhappiness? Of course not.

John Trojanowski and Virginia Lee, co-directors of the Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research at the University of Pennsylvania, are an example of a couple who have successfully negotiated the psychological perils of being in the same profession. They clash regularly over matters of science and are tough on one another when it comes to work, but both believe they would be less successful if they were on their own -- and both are careful not to bring disagreements from their personal relationship into their work life, and vice versa.

Lee and Trojanowski said in an interview that although it appears to outsiders that they do everything together, they have actually figured out how to work in complementary ways. She takes the lead on bench science and biochemistry, and he does more of the clinical work and public outreach.

Tesser and Lockwood said that couples in the same line of work who are both successful and happy do what Trojanowski and Lee have done: They find different aspects in which to excel. If their skills complement each other, that's even better.

Trojanowski and Lee said they gravitated toward the domains where they felt the most skillful. But Tesser argued that just as unhappy couples and friends unconsciously fall into the trap of competing in the same domain, happy couples and friends unconsciously gravitate toward complementary ones.

In a revealing experiment, Tesser asked volunteers to do two tasks Let's say the volunteers found they were better at Task A than at Task B. When these volunteers were paired with friends who turned out to be even better at Task A than they were, Tesser found that the original volunteers unconsciously gravitated toward Task B as a way to avoid conflict and promote harmonious functioning.

"Partners pick their own domains of expertise," Lockwood agreed. " 'I will focus on success in athletics, and she will focus on our social life, and it is okay if I am successful in my domain, because it is no longer relevant to her.' If you pick your own domains, you don't have to make these comparisons."

The problem, she added, is that "there are some domains where you are not willing to cede expertise to the other person."