The Dispositional Benign and Malicious Envy Scale (BeMaS) & Translations
Benign and malicious envy
Envy is a frustrating emotion that can occur when people lack another’s superior quality, achievement, or possession. There are two forms of envy that differ in how people deal with this inferiority. Benign envy entails motivation to invest more effort to be as successful as the other person. In contrast, malicious envy motivates people to level the other person down. Distinguishing between benign and malicious envy allows to disentangle different motivational and behavioral consequences of envy-elicting situations.
Measuring dispositional benign and malicious envy
The Dispositional Benign and Malicious Envy Scale (BeMaS) is a dispositional envy scale designed to assess personality differences in people’s inclination to react with benign or malicious envy towards superior comparison standards. It consists of a benign envy subscale and a malicious envy subscale with 5 items each.
This site
Here we share the items of the English version of the BeMaS and its translations to other languages. The site also provides basic information on scoring and psychometrics of the scale.
Permissions and copyright
If you would like to use, adapt, or republish the BeMaS, you are welcome to do so. No permission is needed, as the scale is published under the permissive Creative Commons CC-BY license.
More information
For detailed information on the scale development and psychometric characteristics of the BeMaS, see:
-
Lange, J., & Crusius, J. (2015). Dispositional envy revisited: Unraveling the motivational dynamics of benign and malicious envy. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41(2), 284–294. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167214564959
-
The raw data, supplementary data, and study materials can be found in this OSF project: https://osf.io/v2c7m/
-
A preprint of the paper is available on PsyArxiv: https://psyarxiv.com/br39f
Contact
Please contact us if you have questions or feedback about the scale or this website.
Best regards, Jens Lange and Jan Crusius