Why do some people fail and want everyone around them to fail too?

People with a little life experience can easily think of an explanation, failure will produce a sense of frustration, awareness of the failure of people around, can alleviate their frustration. It's even like in the Indian film 3 Idiots: I feel bad if my friend fails, I feel worse if she comes first.

But we won't settle for an explanation that's too vague, not just "How does the failure of those around you make you feel good?" It's not solved, and it doesn't solve more questions like "Why are we happier when some people do better?" Such an interpretation is only in an instrumental sense. If psychology wants to prove a problem, can't rush to literature, rigorous degree is very important.

Three premises :(in no particular order)

1. Most people have a need for self-enhancement;

2. Almost all people conduct Social comparison theory in order to evaluate themselves.

3. Everyone tends to interpret the information consistently and don't settle for Attribution theory;

We were on the same mission, and I know I failed.

Failure is a message, so I try to figure out the cause of failure (attribution process), am I not competent enough? Is the task too difficult? Am I unlucky? At the same time, I compare myself to other people (social comparisons) because other people are doing the same task as me and have some kind of similarity.

In this case, the need to maintain a good opinion of ourselves (self-reinforcing) leads us to expect the failure of those around us. Because information about other people's failures and my own failures can be easily attributed to the task being too difficult for the sake of consistent interpretation, these reasons are conducive to a good opinion of myself (rather than a lack of competence).

It is worth mentioning that social comparison itself will directly affect their own evaluation. If the attributions to the difficulty of the task and the strength of the other person (both) maintain consistency, but the perception of the strength of the other person also leads to feelings of weakness, which contradicts self-reinforcement.

In many cases, we just choose similar people as the reference. Festinger once gave an example, go players do not choose a chess player to compare their own chess skills, but choose a go player with the same rank as possible. In 3 Idiots, all three people are on the same task. They all want to finish the task, and the better the other person does, the more upset they become. They feel sorry for themselves. In the same way, if other people do different tasks than we do, our expectations of their failure are diminished, because their failure doesn't have much of an effect on our attribution process.

Interestingly, Tesser also established a self-evaluation maintenance model based on these principles, which solved a very important problem: sometimes, the better the performance of people around us, the more frustrated we are; At other times, the better the people around us behave, the happier we are.

In a nutshell, this is because the tasks mentioned above are different, and can also be classified more fundamentally as different self-concepts.

The closer the relationship, the happier we are when other people's superior behavior has nothing to do with our self-concept. I consider myself a good physicist, and the higher my friend's artistic achievements, the happier I am.

The closer the relationship, the more frustrated we are when the behavior of others who perform well is related to our self-concept. I think I am an excellent painter, and my friend's painting is more popular than mine. The more I feel frustrated, this frustration is directed at myself.

Ps. (Envision problems)

1. There are individual differences, mainly because of self-reinforcing individual differences.

2. You can look at a related question which is also that other people are better than you, why sometimes jealousy, sometimes worship? - Tfifthe's answer, I believe you will have a better understanding of this psychological mechanism, Tesser's model also fills the hole.

3. Psychology has basic principles, not muddy waters. Be careful to distinguish between basic principles and inferences.