TY - CONF A1 - Krause, Hannes-Vincent A1 - Baumann, Annika T1 - The devil in disguise T2 - ICIS 2021: user behaviors, engagement, and consequences N2 - Envy constitutes a serious issue on Social Networking Sites (SNSs), as this painful emotion can severely diminish individuals' well-being. With prior research mainly focusing on the affective consequences of envy in the SNS context, its behavioral consequences remain puzzling. While negative interactions among SNS users are an alarming issue, it remains unclear to which extent the harmful emotion of malicious envy contributes to these toxic dynamics. This study constitutes a first step in understanding malicious envy’s causal impact on negative interactions within the SNS sphere. Within an online experiment, we experimentally induce malicious envy and measure its immediate impact on users’ negative behavior towards other users. Our findings show that malicious envy seems to be an essential factor fueling negativity among SNS users and further illustrate that this effect is especially pronounced when users are provided an objective factor to mask their envy and justify their norm-violating negative behavior. Y1 - 2021 UR - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/63031 UR - https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2021/user_behaivors/user_behaivors/21 PB - AIS Electronic Library (AISeL) CY - [Erscheinungsort nicht ermittelbar] ER -