← all facts
emotion
You feel worse when your friend succeeds.
Self-evaluation maintenance theory explains why your self-esteem drops when a close friend performs exceptionally well.
When someone close to you excels in a field central to your identity, it creates a social comparison that threatens your self-view. You only feel happy for them if the domain is irrelevant to your own self-worth. You are essentially measuring yourself against their success.
Your joy for others depends on how you define yourself.
Where this comes from
- Study
- Tesser, 1988, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology
- What the check found
- The claim accurately reflects the 'comparison process' of Tesser's SEM model as defined in his 1988 work in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology.
- Confidence
- Well replicated
Related
One of these every day, and every one names the study it came from. When a finding is contested, it says so.