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.

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:

Contact

Please contact us if you have questions or feedback about the scale or this website.

Best regards, Jens Lange and Jan Crusius