Are egalitarian preferences based on envy?

• Dispositional envy implies envying a variety of objects.
• There is little correlation between dispositional envy and societal income distribution preferences.
• Envy does not seem to be a major cause of egalitarianism.

We investigated whether preferences for living in a society with equal (or unequal) incomes were related to individual differences in how envious people were. Four studies measured dispositional envy with a scale developed by Smith et al. (1999). The first study showed that dispositional envy correlated quite strongly with individual's ratings of how much they would envy another's success for a number of different objects of envy. Studies 2, 3 and 4 found little correlation between dispositional envy and rated preferences for living in a society with more equal incomes for five scenarios which were predicted to be productive of envy for samples of New Zealand students, East German students, and New Zealand general public respectively. Study 3 also found a similar result for an experiment in which distribution decisions implied corresponding money transfers to the participants. Overall, the four studies indicate that individual differences in envy are only weak predictors of preferences for egalitarian income distributions.