Why Is the Stress of Outperformers Hard to Voice? Evidence on Displaying Competence, Being Envied, Hiding Success, and Invisible Effort

The “silence tax” as a question

Kawagishi (2026) wrote an essay on X about the stress of people who are good at things. According to the essay, the moment such people mention their stress, they are accused of talking down to others, of acting superior, or of abandoning the weak, so they stay silent. As a result, one side becomes the side that is understood and the other becomes the side that endures without recognition, and this imbalance is then called kindness. The essay calls this a “silence tax” that capable people keep paying. The essay also describes the frustration of having years of effort dismissed with the remark “lucky you, you are a genius,” and irritation at people who insist “I just cannot do it” without much effort. It concludes that friendships between people at different levels wear both sides down, so that drifting apart is evidence that both have moved forward. It also describes the suffering of the less capable side, including upward comparison, inferiority, envy, and finding it hard to meet the more capable friend.

The essay is a personal opinion piece, and this note does not use it as evidence for any academic claim. However, the essay states that what it describes “is neither laziness nor arrogance, but something that happens as a structure.” If it happens as a structure, the structure should be observable. How displayed competence is received, what envied people do, how silence reaches others, how effort is estimated, and to whom work flows have each been examined as separate questions in social psychology and organizational behavior.

This note divides the essay’s claims into seven mechanisms and examines, for each, what has been demonstrated and where the essay goes beyond the evidence. We trace where the stress comes from to evaluation processes and situational arrangements, without reducing it to personality or attitude. The tension between effort and talent at the center of the essay conflicts with the question examined in Is the Ability to Make an Effort Also a Talent? The Heritability of Grit, Self-Control, and Motivation to Learn, and How Far These Traits Can Be Changed, namely whether the ability to make an effort is itself a talent. This note does not settle that tension in either direction and instead treats it as a question about how observers attribute achievement.

Scope and method

• Target: the interpersonal burdens borne by people whose ability or results exceed those of others (hereafter outperformers; the literature also uses “high performers”). These include displayed competence being read as bragging or coldness, being envied, hiding success, effort being reinterpreted as talent, work and expectations flowing to them, being targeted at work or school, and relationships drifting apart. As counterpoints, we included biases in how outperformers see others, gender differences in backlash, and cultural differences.
• Period: from classic work (Foster, 1972) to 2021.
• Corpus: 42 sources (source/review/outperformer-stress/papers.md). We added one related study (Hinds et al., 2001) to the 50 candidates returned by source-researcher, and paper-screening-agent screened them. We excluded two books whose text could not be checked (Sandel, 2020; Young, 1958) and five sources on peripheral topics (for example, the neural activity of envious people and a meta-analysis of workplace envy in general). For two sources (Tesser, 1988; Feather, 1994), both the abstract and the full text were unavailable. These were not listed as references, and Tesser’s self-evaluation maintenance model was treated through the summary in the full text of Fiske et al. (2002).
• Verification: for 9 sources, we obtained the full text (copies of the published version, accepted manuscripts, or author manuscripts) and checked numbers and mechanism claims against the relevant passages. For the remaining 33 sources, the full text could not be obtained through three or more routes, and we used them only within the scope of their abstracts. The routes were the publisher page, OpenAlex OA, Unpaywall and Semantic Scholar OA, and title searches on the web together with author and institutional pages. For two of these (Sezer et al., 2018; Lange & Crusius, 2015), we obtained a working paper version or a manuscript included in a dissertation, but because we could not confirm that it matched the published version, we used only the abstract. When a source is used only through its abstract, the first mention says so.
• Terms: upward comparison means comparing oneself with someone who is better off. Appeasement means behavior by the advantaged party, such as yielding, helping, or self-deprecating, intended to soften envy or resentment.

Why does displayed competence look cold?

What the essay calls being accused of talking down to others refers to displayed competence being read as an act of placing others below oneself. Findings that people’s judgments move along two dimensions offer one explanation of this reading.

The stereotype content model of Fiske et al. (2002) identified competence and warmth as the two primary dimensions along which people evaluate groups. In nine samples rating groups defined by gender, ethnicity, class, age, and disability, many evaluations were mixed, with competence and warmth pointing in opposite directions. Groups seen as high in status were rated competent, and groups seen as competing with one’s own were rated cold. Fiske et al. called the response to groups seen as competent but cold envious prejudice. In the full text, this prejudice combines envy with a grudging admiration, and because high status is seen as the result of the group’s own control, such groups are held responsible for their position. In this model, a judgment of coldness is predicted by the perception that the target is a competitor. Groups seen as high in status but not competitive, such as the in-group and close allies, receive admiration rather than envy.

However, this model concerns judgments of groups. For individuals, the picture differs. According to the abstract of Judd et al. (2005), competence and warmth tend to be positively related in judgments of traits and individual persons, and negatively related in group and cultural stereotypes. When four studies manipulated a target’s position on one dimension, the other dimension generally moved in the opposite direction. Kervyn et al. (2010) reported this compensation effect as a phenomenon that occurs when two targets are compared (abstract). When one target is judged more positively on one dimension, the other target is judged more positively on the other dimension. A situation in which a capable person and a less capable person are placed side by side and compared is close to the condition under which the compensation effect was reported. The judgment “that person is capable but cold, and this person is less capable but kind” can arise even without any observation of the two people’s personalities.

The speaker’s own estimates are also biased. In three experiments by Scopelliti et al. (2015), self-promoters overestimated how proud and happy their listeners would feel and underestimated how annoyed they would feel. In the full text, self-promoters adjusted their predictions of listeners’ feelings away from their own feelings, but the adjustment fell well short of listeners’ actual feelings. When people tried to make a favorable impression, they promoted themselves excessively, and listeners then liked them less and saw them as braggarts. According to the abstract of Sezer et al. (2018), across nine studies, bragging disguised as a complaint or as humility (humblebragging) reduced liking, perceived competence, and compliance with requests more than straightforward bragging did, because it was seen as insincere.

Taken together, the mechanism behind such accusations has two sides. On the listener’s side, competence tends to be read as coldness when people are compared. On the speaker’s side, people tend to underestimate how their words will land. The latter suggests that part of the hostile reaction the essay describes can also arise from the speaker’s misjudgment. Both have been reported as systematic biases in how people evaluate and predict.

This reading also depends on who is speaking. According to the abstract of Rudman (1998), in three experiments, women who promoted themselves gained in perceived competence but lost in likability and hireability, except when the evaluators were men whose own outcomes depended on the judgment. According to the abstract of Heilman et al. (2004), women who succeeded in jobs regarded as male were liked less and were more personally derogated than equally successful men, and this dislike extended to overall evaluations and recommendations for rewards. Even among outperformers, the cost of displaying competence differs by social category.

What do envied people bear?

The essay describes the silence of capable people as neither laziness nor arrogance. Research on being envied has treated this silence as behavior arising from concern about others’ reactions.

Exline and Lobel (1999) noted that outperforming others, “although privately satisfying, can be a source of interpersonal strain,” and proposed the framework of sensitivity about being the target of a threatening upward comparison (STTUC) (abstract). For STTUC to arise, a person must believe that another person is making an upward comparison against them and feels threatened by the status gap, and must also be concerned about some facet of the other person’s response. The concern may focus on the other person, on the self, or on the relationship. According to the abstract, the framework connects findings on fear of success, envy, self-presentation, and self-evaluation maintenance. The essay’s “silence tax” can be read as a cost paid in response to this concern.

Being envied also has pleasant sides. According to the abstract of Rodriguez Mosquera et al. (2010), two studies with Spanish and American participants found that being envied had both positive consequences, such as increased self-confidence, and negative consequences, such as fear of others’ ill will. Both the positive and the negative consequences were stronger among the achievement-oriented American participants than among the Spanish participants. According to the abstract of Lee et al. (2018), in two field studies at work, perceiving oneself as envied lowered work engagement and performance through unpleasant mood and anxiety, while a second path through pleasant mood raised both. Being envied is an ambivalent experience in which stress and pride arise together. The chapter abstract of Parrott and Rodriguez Mosquera (2008) lists conditions that shape the experience of being envied, including whether the advantage is deserved, whether it is flaunted or concealed, and whether the culture values achievement.

Perceiving oneself as envied involves inference. The abstract of Puranik et al. (2019) proposes a theory in which, because envy is a hidden emotion, employees come to believe they are envied by attributing ambiguous coworker behavior to envy. The envy that outperformers perceive does not necessarily match what others actually feel.

The fear of being envied changes behavior. According to the abstract of van de Ven et al. (2010), in three experiments, people in a superior position who could be envied were more likely to give time-consuming advice to a potentially envious person or to help that person pick up scattered erasers. Helping increased only when the envy was likely to be malicious, and it did not increase toward people in general. The authors interpreted this as an appeasement strategy. In anthropology, Foster (1972) reported a culturally prescribed sequence of evasive behavior in situations where envy is feared (abstract). People first try to conceal their good fortune, then deny that there is reason to envy them, then share symbolically, and only as a last resort share in fact.

One study examined outperformers in the workplace directly. Henagan and Bedeian (2009) surveyed 121 real estate agents who had received awards for their sales performance, together with their coworkers. In the full text, award recipients used modest self-presentation when their coworkers experienced externally focused threat, such as resentment. This modesty did not depend on whether the recipients felt discomfort about being the target of comparison, and the authors pointed to social expectations about protecting others’ self-esteem as one possible reason. By contrast, avoiding the topic of the award was used only by recipients who felt such discomfort, and only when their coworkers experienced internally focused threat, such as shame or disappointment. When coworkers felt resentment, recipients neither avoided the topic nor lowered their performance. Modesty was used independently of the recipients’ own discomfort, which the authors read as a social expectation, whereas under resentment the outperformers did not appease others to the point of lowering their performance.

This research shows that the silence and consideration the essay describes correspond to behavior that studies of being envied have described as appeasement. Appeasement can keep envy from turning malicious (van de Ven et al., 2010). However, we found no study in this corpus that measured how much burden appeasement places on whom, or who notices it. Evidence on whether the labor of appeasement is recognized, which corresponds to the essay’s “without recognition,” is missing.

Does silence reach others as kindness?

The essay criticizes people who call silence kindness. Whether silence actually reaches its recipients as kindness has been examined experimentally.

According to the abstract of Roberts et al. (2021), across eight studies (N = 1,687), people often hid their successes from others, and hiding carried relational costs. People from whom a success was hidden felt less close to the communicator and more insulted than when the success was shared. Relationships were harmed both when the hiding was later discovered and when it was not. In the studies on mechanism, targets inferred that the communicator had hidden the success out of paternalistic motives, a wish to protect them, and this inference produced the feeling of being insulted. This inference was more likely in private settings, after direct questions, and in close relationships. In contrast to earlier research that emphasized the negative consequences of sharing accomplishments, the abstract concludes that sharing is superior to hiding for maintaining relationships. However, the emotional and impression-management consequences were mixed.

Words of appeasement also fail to land as intended. According to the abstract of Zell and Exline (2010), in two experiments, when the winner (a confederate) offered to share the prize, outperformed participants liked the winner more and viewed the winner more positively, but felt less pleased with their own performance. Self-deprecating comments did not increase liking and reduced the extent to which participants attributed the winner’s performance to skill.

These two studies support part of the essay’s claim in a stronger form than the essay itself. Staying silent, hiding, and self-deprecating do not always reach recipients as kindness, and can even be received as condescension. At the same time, as the previous sections showed, speaking carries the cost of being seen as bragging. The difficulty of voicing stress consists of an arrangement in which both speaking and staying silent carry costs.

However, Roberts et al. examined hiding the fact of a success, whereas the essay’s silence concerns not mentioning one’s stress. The two are not the same. We found no study in this corpus that directly examined how others react when outperformers voice their burdens.

When effort is reinterpreted as talent

What the essay calls the worst moment is when something acquired through effort is dismissed with “lucky you, you are a genius.” This reinterpretation has been studied as a bias in observers’ judgments.

Tsay and Banaji (2011) asked professional musicians to evaluate two pianists with equal achievement, described either as a “natural” with early evidence of high innate ability or as a “striver” with early evidence of high motivation and perseverance. In the full text, the musicians explicitly stated the belief that strivers achieve more than naturals, yet their actual judgments showed the reverse pattern: they rated the natural as more talented, more likely to succeed, and more hirable. This naturalness bias appeared among experts but not among nonexperts. According to the abstract of Tsay (2016), entrepreneurs with equal achievement were also judged differently: the natural and his business proposal were rated superior on multiple dimensions, and people tended to pass over better-qualified individuals in favor of apparent naturals.

These results shift the content of the essay’s claim that effort is erased. Being read as a natural does not lower one’s evaluation. With equal achievement, being read as a natural leads to higher estimates of talent and future success. What is lost is not the evaluation but the visibility of the effort and time that went into the achievement. Combined with the finding that self-deprecation reduced attributions to skill (Zell & Exline, 2010), it is difficult for outperformers to steer observers’ attributions as they intend, whether they talk about their effort or play it down.

The visibility of effort may also affect the kind of envy that arises. van de Ven et al. (2012) distinguished benign envy, which aims at improving one’s own position, from malicious envy, which aims at pulling the superior other down. In the full text, the more an advantage was appraised as undeserved, the stronger the malicious envy, and benign envy was strongest when the situation was appraised as both deserved and controllable. According to the abstract of Lange and Crusius (2015), benign and malicious envy also form two independent dimensions as dispositions; dispositional benign envy predicted faster marathon times through higher goal setting, and dispositional malicious envy predicted disengagement from race goals. From this, one may infer that achievements whose effort is invisible are less likely to be appraised as deserved and more likely to invite malicious envy. However, this corpus contains no study that directly examined how attributions to talent change appraisals of deservingness. This inference remains a hypothesis.

At this point, the note conflicts with the results of Is the Ability to Make an Effort Also a Talent? The Heritability of Grit, Self-Control, and Motivation to Learn, and How Far These Traits Can Be Changed. That note showed that traits related to effort, such as self-control and grit, are as heritable as other traits. The essay’s account of building something through effort and the finding that being able to make an effort is partly a talent can both hold. What this note examines is what observers attribute achievement to, and how that attribution affects the burden on the outperformer. The naturalness bias is a bias in attribution, whereas the heritability of effort concerns whether such attributions are accurate.

Work and expectations flow to capable people

The essay describes capable people as enduring without recognition. For this lack of recognition, there is experimental evidence in the form of biased estimates of effort.

According to the abstract of Koval et al. (2015), across six studies, observers expected higher performance from people with high self-control and assigned them more work. Observers judged that people with high self-control expended less effort than people with low self-control, but the actors themselves did not. People with high self-control reported greater burden from the reliance of coworkers and romantic partners, and this burden lowered their satisfaction with their relationships. In the essay’s terms, observers underestimate the effort of capable people, and work flows to them accordingly. This research supports the essay’s claim about the lack of recognition as a gap between observers’ and actors’ estimates.

Research on voluntary contributions at work points in the same direction. According to the abstract of Bolino and Turnley (2005), in a sample of 98 couples, higher levels of individual initiative, as rated by the spouse or partner, were associated with higher role overload, job stress, and work-family conflict, and the association with work-family conflict was stronger among women. Bolino et al. (2015) called the state of being worn out by voluntary behavior on behalf of the organization citizenship fatigue (abstract). In data from 273 employees and their peers, the relationship between such behavior and citizenship fatigue was strongly positive when perceived organizational support was low, and negative when the quality of team-member exchange was high and the pressure to engage in such behavior was low. Citizenship fatigue was negatively related to subsequent voluntary behavior. Bolino et al. (2013) reviewed research that questions the view that such behavior is inherently positive (abstract).

The results on citizenship fatigue indicate where the burden comes from. Whether people become fatigued depends on situational conditions, namely organizational support, team relationships, and pressure, as well as on personality. The flow of work to capable people cannot be dismissed as a matter of their inability to say no.

Being targeted at work and at school

High ability has also been studied as a factor that makes people targets of mistreatment. According to the abstract of Kim and Glomb (2010), people with higher cognitive ability were more likely to be victimized at work, and this relationship was strengthened by agentic personality traits and weakened by communal traits. According to the abstract of Kim and Glomb (2014), a sample of 4,874 university staff in 339 work groups showed that high performers were more likely to be targets of victimization. Multisource data collected at two time points from 217 employees in 67 work groups showed that coworkers’ envy mediated this relationship and that identification with the work group weakened it. According to the abstract of Jensen et al. (2014), in data collected at three time points from 576 individuals in 62 work groups, high performers tended to experience covert victimization, such as being ignored or having information withheld, while low performers tended to experience overt victimization. These relationships were stronger when performance differences within the group were salient and weaker when the target was high in benevolence (equity sensitivity). Victimization was also associated with later performance impairment. According to the abstract of Campbell et al. (2017), in a field study of 936 relationships among 350 stylists in 105 salons and an experiment with 204 management students, peers directed both more support and more undermining toward high performers. Cooperative work contexts proved socially disadvantageous for high performers.

In these four studies, the conditions that weaken victimization include the target’s communal traits or benevolence and identification with the group. Reading this as a prescription that capable people should simply be kinder would reproduce the arrangement that the essay criticizes. Because the mitigating factors are located in the target’s own behavior, the burden of appeasement may return to the outperformer. This is the interpretation of this note, not a finding of the literature.

Attitudes of taking pleasure in the fall of high achievers have been studied in Australia as the “tall poppy” phenomenon. According to the abstract of Feather (1989), 531 high school students were more pleased about the fall of a high achiever than about the fall of an average achiever. In a sample of 361 university students, participants were more punitive toward a high achiever than toward an average achiever who cheated on an examination. Among 205 adults, negative attitudes toward high achievers were more common among people with low self-esteem, people who placed less importance on achievement and social power, and people with more left-leaning political preferences. In a comparison with Japan, according to the abstract of Feather and McKee (1992), the prediction that people would be more pleased by a high achiever’s fall was not supported in either Japan or Australia. Japanese students saw the high achiever as more assertive relative to the average achiever than Australian students did.

At school, there is research on gifted children. According to the abstract of Coleman and Cross (1988), interviews with 15 gifted high school students indicated that many, but not all, experienced giftedness as a social handicap, and that some managed information about themselves to minimize their visibility as gifted. According to the abstract of Cross et al. (1991), a questionnaire completed by 1,465 students showed that, in school situations in which giftedness might mark them out, the strategy of placating others was the most frequently used. Gross (1989) argued that gifted children face a forced choice between pursuing excellence and seeking intimacy with age peers, and that choosing intimacy may lead them into deliberate underachievement (abstract). According to the abstract of Peterson and Ray (2006), 67% of 432 gifted eighth graders in 11 U.S. states had experienced at least one of 13 kinds of bullying, and 11% had experienced repeated bullying. However, this study had no comparison group of non-gifted students, so it cannot show that gifted children are bullied more than others.

Friends at “the same level” and relationships that drift apart

The essay concludes that “the people we become friends with are people at the same level.” Relationships between people at different levels wear both sides down the more they try, and drifting apart is “evidence that both have moved forward.”

The idea that the success of close others can threaten one’s own self-evaluation is known as the self-evaluation maintenance model of Tesser (1988). Citing this model, the full text of Fiske et al. (2002) summarizes that people feel positive about the successes of close others as long as the domain is not one reserved for the self. The full text of Henagan and Bedeian (2009) cites earlier research showing that people who experience self-conscious emotions such as shame or resentment during upward comparison psychologically distance themselves from the comparison target. The essay’s observation that relationships tend to drift apart when a gap opens in a domain that matters to the self is consistent with this direction.

Homophily, the tendency of similar people to form ties, is also consistent with the essay’s observation. McPherson et al. (2001) reviewed evidence that homophily structures every kind of tie, including marriage, friendship, work, and advice, and that personal networks are homogeneous in education and occupation as well. Ties between dissimilar people also dissolve at a higher rate.

However, the same review shows that homophily arises from social settings as well as from personal choice. In the full text, geographic proximity, families, organizations, and similar positions in social systems create the contexts in which homophilous ties form. The authors distinguished homophily created by the composition of the available pool of contacts (baseline homophily) from homophily beyond that opportunity set (inbreeding homophily). Homophily in education also arises through settings such as schools, workplaces, and voluntary associations. People at similar levels tend to become friends partly because people of similar ability tend to be placed in the same settings. Drifting apart can result from belonging to different settings, rather than from a difference in how far each person has moved forward.

How relationships are handled also varies with culture and with the type of relationship. Muramoto and Yamaguchi (2003) showed that Japanese respondents tended to be self-effacing within social groups such as the workplace or school, and self-serving within their families. Modesty is used differently depending on the relationship.

Accordingly, the essay’s claim that people become friends with others at the same level is consistent in direction with findings on self-evaluation maintenance and homophily. In contrast, the claim that drifting apart is evidence of moving forward is an evaluation that does not follow from the literature. We found no longitudinal study in this corpus on whether friendships in which a gap in ability or achievement has opened represent a loss or a release for either side.

Outperformers’ view of others is also biased

The essay expresses irritation at people who insist “I just cannot do it” without much effort. This irritation presupposes an estimate of how difficult the task is for the other person. That estimate becomes more biased the more capable the person making it.

According to the abstract of Hinds (1999), in two studies, the more expertise people had, the shorter they predicted novices would take to complete a complex task, and techniques intended to reduce this underestimation did not work. People with an intermediate level of expertise predicted novices’ completion times more accurately. According to the abstract of Hinds et al. (2001), experts used more abstract statements when instructing novices, and novices instructed by beginners performed better on the same task, although novices instructed by experts did better when transferring to a different task.

Kruger and Dunning (1999) are known for showing that people with low ability overestimate themselves. The same paper also reported that people in the top quartile underestimated their own rank. On the logical reasoning test, top-quartile participants scored at the 86th percentile but estimated themselves at the 68th. In the full text, what the top performers misjudged was not their own performance but the performance of others. They assumed that others would answer as correctly as they did (the false-consensus effect). After seeing others’ answers, top-quartile participants raised their estimates of their own rank.

What is easy for capable people tends to be assumed to be easy for others as well. The judgment that someone “has not made much effort” may also result from projecting one’s own ease onto the other person. In Koval et al. (2015), observers underestimated the effort of people with high self-control. In Hinds (1999) and Kruger and Dunning (1999), capable people underestimated the difficulty that others face. Biased estimates of effort and difficulty have thus been reported in both directions. The heritability of the tendency to make an effort (Is the Ability to Make an Effort Also a Talent? The Heritability of Grit, Self-Control, and Motivation to Learn, and How Far These Traits Can Be Changed) also weakens the view that attributes not making an effort solely to personal choice.

Cultural differences are a further limitation. Heine et al. (1999) argued that the need for positive self-regard is rooted in North American culture and that a self-critical focus is more characteristic of Japan. According to the abstract of Kitayama et al. (1997), American situations were relatively conducive to self-enhancement and Japanese situations to self-criticism. Most of the literature in this note uses North American and European samples, and we found no study that measured how much burden appeasement and silence place on outperformers in Japanese workplaces.

How far is the essay supported?

An answer about the stress of outperformers

Hypothesis 1: The stress of outperformers is hard to voice not because of individual personality or attitude, but because of an arrangement in which both speaking and staying silent carry costs. When people are compared, competence tends to be read as coldness (Judd et al., 2005; Kervyn et al., 2010), and speakers tend to underestimate how their words will land (Scopelliti et al., 2015). Envied people anticipate this, and they hide, present themselves modestly, and help others (Exline & Lobel, 1999; van de Ven et al., 2010; Henagan & Bedeian, 2009). However, hiding reaches the recipient as paternalism and makes the relationship more distant (Roberts et al., 2021). This hypothesis would be weakened if studies in workplaces and friendships accumulated showing that, when outperformers speak openly about their burdens or successes, judgments of coldness and envy do not increase in comparative settings and relationships are not harmed.

Hypothesis 2: The erasure of effort takes place not by lowering evaluations, but by making effort and burden invisible to observers. Being read as a natural actually raises evaluations (Tsay & Banaji, 2011; Tsay, 2016), whereas underestimating effort increases the work assigned and the burden carried (Koval et al., 2015). Whether invisible effort invites malicious envy has not yet been tested (an inference from van de Ven et al., 2012). This hypothesis would be weakened if showing the process of effort changed neither observers’ estimates of effort nor the allocation of work.

Taken together, the two hypotheses indicate that much of the essay’s diagnosis has corresponding empirical support. What the essay calls a structure can be described as a combination of two elements. One is biases in evaluation (the compensation between competence and warmth, the naturalness bias, and the gap in estimates of effort), and the other is situational conditions (settings of competition and comparison, organizational support, and identification with the group). In contrast, the essay’s prescriptions, associating only with people at a similar level and regarding drifting apart as evidence of progress, do not follow from the literature. Outperformers also tend to underestimate the difficulties others face (Hinds, 1999; Kruger & Dunning, 1999). Others may underestimate the effort of outperformers, and outperformers may underestimate the difficulty others face. Whether these biases can be reduced on the side of settings, through evaluations that make the process of effort visible, the design of settings in which people are compared, and organizational support that does not rely on appeasement, remains an open question.

Gaps

• Reactions to voicing stress: we found no study in this corpus that directly examined how others react when outperformers voice their burdens or stress, as distinct from their successes. Research on humblebragging (Sezer et al., 2018) shows that bragging wrapped in a complaint is disliked, but it does not distinguish such bragging from legitimate complaints about burdens.
• Visibility of appeasement labor: no study has measured how much burden appeasement (hiding, self-deprecating, helping) creates or whether others recognize it.
• Japanese workplaces: research on being envied, victimization of high performers, and citizenship fatigue has mainly used samples from North America, Europe, Australia, and Chinese-speaking regions, and the only Japanese sample here is the student comparison of Feather and McKee (1992).
• The course of relationships with widening gaps: no study has followed friendships in which gaps in ability or achievement widen, to examine what drifting apart means for each side.
• Comparisons in gifted research: many studies of bullying among gifted children lack a comparison group of other children (Peterson & Ray, 2006).
• Cumulative advantage: the mechanisms, causal identification, and limits of the process by which initial advantages produce further advantages (cumulative advantage and the Matthew effect) are discussed in Do Those Who Have Receive More? Mechanisms, Causal Identification, and Limits of Cumulative Advantage and the Matthew Effect in the Academic Literature.
• Attributing success to luck: the tendency of successful people to attribute exogenously determined success to effort (self-serving bias), and people’s judgments about differences due to luck, are discussed in Is the First Advantage Luck? Option Luck and Brute Luck, Ex Ante and Ex Post, and the Evidence on Initial Advantages and Fairness Judgments in the Academic Literature.

Unverified items

• The following 33 sources could not be obtained in full text through three or more routes and were used only within the scope of their abstracts. In the body, claims from them are attributed to their abstracts: Judd et al. (2005), Kervyn et al. (2010), Sezer et al. (2018; we obtained the authors’ working paper version, but because the number of studies differs from the published version, numbers follow the abstract of the published version), Rudman (1998), Heilman et al. (2004), Foster (1972), Exline and Lobel (1999), Rodriguez Mosquera et al. (2010), Parrott and Rodriguez Mosquera (2008), van de Ven et al. (2010), Lee et al. (2018), Puranik et al. (2019), Roberts et al. (2021), Zell and Exline (2010), Tsay (2016), Lange and Crusius (2015; we obtained the dissertation that includes the manuscript), Koval et al. (2015), Bolino and Turnley (2005), Bolino et al. (2015), Bolino et al. (2013), Kim and Glomb (2010), Kim and Glomb (2014), Jensen et al. (2014), Campbell et al. (2017), Feather (1989), Feather and McKee (1992), Coleman and Cross (1988), Cross et al. (1991), Gross (1989), Peterson and Ray (2006), Hinds (1999), Hinds et al. (2001), and Kitayama et al. (1997).
• A correction to Fiske et al. (2002) was published in 2019 (JPSP 126(3), 412), but we could not confirm its content. This note uses the abstract and the theoretical parts of the full text, not the numerical values in the tables.
• Kruger and Dunning (1999) were checked against a reprint in another journal (2009), whose page numbers differ from the original.
• Scopelliti et al. (2015) were checked against the accepted manuscript in an institutional repository.
• For Tesser’s (1988) self-evaluation maintenance model, both the full text and the abstract were unavailable; we treated it through the summary in the full text of Fiske et al. (2002) and did not list it as a reference.

References

All accessed on 2026-10-09.

Starting point

• Kawagishi, K. (2026, October 7). Dekiru gawa no sutoresu ni tsuite kaite mitai [I want to write about the stress of capable people] [Article on X] (in Japanese). https://x.com/OnebookofMAG/status/2107934188867662210

Displaying competence and warmth

• Fiske, S. T., Cuddy, A. J. C., Glick, P., & Xu, J. (2002). A model of (often mixed) stereotype content: Competence and warmth respectively follow from perceived status and competition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82(6), 878–902. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.82.6.878
• Judd, C. M., James-Hawkins, L., Yzerbyt, V., & Kashima, Y. (2005). Fundamental dimensions of social judgment: Understanding the relations between judgments of competence and warmth. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89(6), 899–913. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.89.6.899
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• Scopelliti, I., Loewenstein, G., & Vosgerau, J. (2015). You call it “self-exuberance”; I call it “bragging”: Miscalibrated predictions of emotional responses to self-promotion. Psychological Science, 26(6), 903–914. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797615573516
• Sezer, O., Gino, F., & Norton, M. I. (2018). Humblebragging: A distinct—and ineffective—self-presentation strategy. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 114(1), 52–74. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000108
• Rudman, L. A. (1998). Self-promotion as a risk factor for women: The costs and benefits of counterstereotypical impression management. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(3), 629–645. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.74.3.629
• Heilman, M. E., Wallen, A. S., Fuchs, D., & Tamkins, M. M. (2004). Penalties for success: Reactions to women who succeed at male gender-typed tasks. Journal of Applied Psychology, 89(3), 416–427. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.89.3.416

Being envied

• Foster, G. M. (1972). The anatomy of envy: A study in symbolic behavior. Current Anthropology, 13(2), 165–202. https://doi.org/10.1086/201267
• Exline, J. J., & Lobel, M. (1999). The perils of outperformance: Sensitivity about being the target of a threatening upward comparison. Psychological Bulletin, 125(3), 307–337. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.125.3.307
• Rodriguez Mosquera, P. M., Parrott, W. G., & Hurtado de Mendoza, A. (2010). I fear your envy, I rejoice in your coveting: On the ambivalent experience of being envied by others. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99(5), 842–854. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0020965
• Parrott, W. G., & Rodriguez Mosquera, P. M. (2008). On the pleasures and displeasures of being envied. In R. H. Smith (Ed.), Envy: Theory and research (pp. 117–132). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195327953.003.0007
• van de Ven, N., Zeelenberg, M., & Pieters, R. (2010). Warding off the evil eye: When the fear of being envied increases prosocial behavior. Psychological Science, 21(11), 1671–1677. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797610385352
• Henagan, S. C., & Bedeian, A. G. (2009). The perils of success in the workplace: Comparison target responses to coworkers’ upward comparison threat. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 39(10), 2438–2468. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2009.00533.x
• Lee, K., Duffy, M. K., Scott, K. L., & Schippers, M. C. (2018). The experience of being envied at work: How being envied shapes employee feelings and motivation. Personnel Psychology, 71(2), 181–200. https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12251
• Puranik, H., Koopman, J., Vough, H. C., & Gamache, D. L. (2019). They want what I’ve got (I think): The causes and consequences of attributing coworker behavior to envy. Academy of Management Review, 44(2), 424–449. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2016.0191

Hiding success

• Roberts, A. R., Levine, E. E., & Sezer, O. (2021). Hiding success. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 120(5), 1261–1286. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000322
• Zell, A. L., & Exline, J. J. (2010). How does it feel to be outperformed by a “good winner”? Prize sharing and self-deprecating as appeasement strategies. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 32(1), 69–85. https://doi.org/10.1080/01973530903540125

Attributing achievement to effort or talent, and the kind of envy

• Tsay, C.-J., & Banaji, M. R. (2011). Naturals and strivers: Preferences and beliefs about sources of achievement. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(2), 460–465. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2010.12.010
• Tsay, C.-J. (2016). Privileging naturals over strivers: The costs of the naturalness bias. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 42(1), 40–53. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167215611638
• van de Ven, N., Zeelenberg, M., & Pieters, R. (2012). Appraisal patterns of envy and related emotions. Motivation and Emotion, 36(2), 195–204. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-011-9235-8
• 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

Concentration of work and expectations

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• Bolino, M. C., & Turnley, W. H. (2005). The personal costs of citizenship behavior: The relationship between individual initiative and role overload, job stress, and work-family conflict. Journal of Applied Psychology, 90(4), 740–748. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.90.4.740
• Bolino, M. C., Hsiung, H.-H., Harvey, J., & LePine, J. A. (2015). “Well, I’m tired of tryin’!” Organizational citizenship behavior and citizenship fatigue. Journal of Applied Psychology, 100(1), 56–74. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037583
• Bolino, M. C., Klotz, A. C., Turnley, W. H., & Harvey, J. (2013). Exploring the dark side of organizational citizenship behavior. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 34(4), 542–559. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.1847

Victimization at work and at school

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• Kim, E., & Glomb, T. M. (2014). Victimization of high performers: The roles of envy and work group identification. Journal of Applied Psychology, 99(4), 619–634. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035789
• Jensen, J. M., Patel, P. C., & Raver, J. L. (2014). Is it better to be average? High and low performance as predictors of employee victimization. Journal of Applied Psychology, 99(2), 296–309. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0034822
• Campbell, E. M., Liao, H., Chuang, A., Zhou, J., & Dong, Y. (2017). Hot shots and cool reception? An expanded view of social consequences for high performers. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(5), 845–866. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000183
• Feather, N. T. (1989). Attitudes towards the high achiever: The fall of the tall poppy. Australian Journal of Psychology, 41(3), 239–267. https://doi.org/10.1080/00049538908260088
• Feather, N. T., & McKee, I. R. (1992). Australian and Japanese attitudes towards the fall of high achievers. Australian Journal of Psychology, 44(2), 87–93. https://doi.org/10.1080/00049539208260148
• Coleman, L. J., & Cross, T. L. (1988). Is being gifted a social handicap? Journal for the Education of the Gifted, 11(4), 41–56. https://doi.org/10.1177/016235328801100406
• Cross, T. L., Coleman, L. J., & Terhaar-Yonkers, M. (1991). The social cognition of gifted adolescents in schools: Managing the stigma of giftedness. Journal for the Education of the Gifted, 15(1), 44–55. https://doi.org/10.1177/016235329101500106
• Gross, M. U. M. (1989). The pursuit of excellence or the search for intimacy? The forced-choice dilemma of gifted youth. Roeper Review, 11(4), 189–194. https://doi.org/10.1080/02783198909553207
• Peterson, J. S., & Ray, K. E. (2006). Bullying and the gifted: Victims, perpetrators, prevalence, and effects. Gifted Child Quarterly, 50(2), 148–168. https://doi.org/10.1177/001698620605000206

Distance in relationships

• McPherson, M., Smith-Lovin, L., & Cook, J. M. (2001). Birds of a feather: Homophily in social networks. Annual Review of Sociology, 27, 415–444. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.27.1.415
• Muramoto, Y., & Yamaguchi, S. (2003). When “self-effacement” disappears: Narratives of personal and group successes depending on an ingroup relationship [「自己卑下」が消えるとき：内集団の関係性に応じた個人と集団の成功の語り方] (in Japanese). The Japanese Journal of Psychology, 74(3), 253–262. https://doi.org/10.4992/jjpsy.74.253

How outperformers see others, and culture

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• Hinds, P. J., Patterson, M., & Pfeffer, J. (2001). Bothered by abstraction: The effect of expertise on knowledge transfer and subsequent novice performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86(6), 1232–1243. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.86.6.1232
• Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121–1134. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.77.6.1121
• Heine, S. J., Lehman, D. R., Markus, H. R., & Kitayama, S. (1999). Is there a universal need for positive self-regard? Psychological Review, 106(4), 766–794. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.106.4.766
• Kitayama, S., Markus, H. R., Matsumoto, H., & Norasakkunkit, V. (1997). Individual and collective processes in the construction of the self: Self-enhancement in the United States and self-criticism in Japan. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72(6), 1245–1267. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.72.6.1245