The .Plan

A warning to heed the trail of tears:

In another experiment, [psychologist Abraham] 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?
–Shankar Vedantam, “Intimate Rivalries: A Mixture of Pride and Envy”, Washington Post, March 3, 2008