How social comparisons affect the classroom
Who doesn’t remember the roller coaster of emotions when the teacher returns graded tests? Confidently looking at the student sitting next to you or holding your breath with your best friend? Will the teachers return them in alphabetical order or start rather with the ones that failed? Will they make snide comments? Will the top student fail for once, or will the swots lose their smug smile? While being deeply human emotions, envy and schadenfreude are not socially accepted. Research has now been conducted for the first time into how motivating or resentful envy, as well as schadenfreude, affect the dynamics and atmosphere in classroom dynamics, and what role fairness, a safe-to-fail culture, and the goals pursued by teachers play in this context.
Educational psychology has focused for decades on emotions in connection with performance – for instance anxiety as a barrier to learning, or boredom. Over time, the focus shifted to individual emotions such as the joy of learning, shame, or anger. With its FWF-funded project, the team of principal investigator Marko Lüftenegger at the Center for Teacher Education at the University of Vienna is breaking new ground at the intersection of teacher training and social psychology.
The project examined for the first time the emotions of envy and schadenfreude in everyday school life. To this end, students and teachers were interviewed, and approximately 2,000 students also participated in a survey. Fairness emerged as the most significant influencing factor. The findings will help provide better support for adolescents in their school life and foster social relationships.
Documenting social emotions
“Boredom and joy are emotions that all students in a classroom can experience for themselves. But envy and schadenfreude are social emotions that are the result of social interaction, and their study is more complicated,” explains Lüftenegger. At the beginning of the project, doctoral students Flora Fassl and Maximilian Hofleitner developed and tested the methodology and age-appropriate measurement tools. In order to be able to track developmental processes, a total of 2,000 students from various types of school took part in an online survey at the beginning and/or end of a school year. In addition, 80 fifteen-year-olds at a Viennese school provided situational feedback. During eleven class sessions – including one where an English test was being returned – acoustic signals were activated and the students had to note down what they were feeling at that very moment (experience sampling).
The wide-ranging online survey has already been analyzed, and the full results of the three-year project will be available in the fall of 2026. In addition to traditional rating scales, the survey included realistic scenarios – so-called case vignettes – that had been developed beforehand with students and teachers. Half of the respondents were randomly and anonymously assigned vignettes on the topic of envy, while the other half received vignettes involving schadenfreude. Additionally, parameters related to personality structure, classroom climate, instructional goals, and mental state were collected and analyzed, such as the tendency to compare oneself with others.
“The strength of the project is that, for both emotions, we’re not just looking at general tendencies, but rather ask students to evaluate real-life situations from their own perspective. In addition to individual characteristics, this allows us to identify changes over time, the influence of environmental factors, as well as differences, and how all of this impacts well-being,” notes Flora Fassl, who was in charge of the topic of envy. The responses from 13-to-17-year-old students in 98 classes ultimately revealed some good news: envy and schadenfreude are neither dominant nor frequent in Austrian classrooms. Moreover, no differences were found between the genders.
Green with envy?
Envy has at least two facets – comparing oneself to others can be motivating or foster resentment. After analyzing all data points for approximately 2,000 students, the researchers identified fairness to be the most significant impact factor: “The fairer the teacher is seen to be by the students, the less envy they feel – I don’t need to compare myself to others if my performance is assessed in a transparent and fair manner,” says Flora Fassl. The tendency to engage in social comparison proved to be the strongest predictor of both types of envy at the individual level. The analysis of the data suggests that the form of envy depends on two factors: control and merit. Doctoral candidate Flora Fassl: “If I think that the other person deserves the good grade and that I need to put in more effort, the emotion is benign envy. But when students feel they have no control and that the other person doesn’t deserve the grade, they are more likely to experience malicious envy.”
A comparison can be a motivating factor or make someone want to strip the other person of their status. In this context, the data revealed a connection to schadenfreude and, by extension, to verbal sadism and bullying behavior. The cross-sectional study provides initial evidence of a kind of feedback loop: when students are not comfortable, struggle with depressive symptoms, or feel poorly integrated into the class, they rate their own academic performance more negatively. This makes them susceptible to developing a tendency toward malicious envy, which in turn can foster behavior aimed at harming classmates.
Defining goals and values
The team at the Center for Teacher Education refrains from making recommendations from the sidelines. However, it has become evident that teachers, by way of their attitude and instructional goals, set standards that students use as a guideline. Also, factors such as control, fairness, and a culture of learning from mistakes deserve attention. “Individualization is an important requirement for teaching, but it poses a major challenge under current classroom conditions. If one focuses on an individual’s personal development, social comparison with others automatically becomes less relevant. Future teachers are already taught about appropriately designing classroom instruction during teacher training – that’s not where the problem lies,” explains Marko Lüftenegger.
About the researcher
Marko Lüftenegger studied psychology at the Universities of Salzburg, Vienna, and the Instituto Politécnico de Lisboa. In 2021, he was appointed associate professor at the University of Vienna, where Lüftenegger heads the Developmental Psychology and School-Age Educational Psychology section at the Center for Teacher Education as well as at the Faculty of Psychology. Lüftenegger conducts research and teaches at the intersection of education, psychology, and society, focusing inter alia on the motivational and emotional conditions of teaching and learning, as well as the development and evaluation of interventions and programs. The research project “Envy and Schadenfreude in the Classroom” (2022–2026) has received funding by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).
Publications
Influence of friendship on benign and malicious envy among secondary school students, in: British Journal of Educational Psychology, May 2026
The mediating role of schadenfreude between malicious envy and bullying in school, in: Scientific Reports Vol. 16, 2026
