Researchers find Envy is what makes

you want an iPhone so bad.

According to a group of researchers, it may very well be. The say that envy is one of the prime reasons why anyone opts to buy a gadget. But don’t feel bad about it: as it turns out, envy is one of the stimulating factors that allows our economy to thrive.

According to a team of researchers at Tilburg University in the Netherlands who performed experiments on their students, envy is a major reason why people buy an iPhone over, say, a pay-as-you-go Nokia.

They set up an experiment to see whether the envy that prompts people to buy gadgets was benign or malicious, and centered their experiment around the iPhone. Here’s how the experiment worked:

First, they asked students to read a story about a study group where one member pulled out his iPhone and started showing its features to the other members. The students were then asked to imagine themselves being admiring and jealous of the iPhone owner (benign envy), jealous and begrudging (malicious envy), or as a control condition in which they liked the iPhone (which was likely hard to imagine for the Android users among the participants, but they endured).

The result? Students asked to imagine being envious wanted an iPhone more than those who were asked to merely like it. Hardly scientific… but my guess is that Apple’s very well-aware of how the sex appeal of their iPhone stimulates sales through one of the baser instincts of the human emotional spectrum.

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