Have you ever seen a pile of crabs in a bucket, where they all try to escape while pulling back any crab who manages to escape so that they're back to their misery and the group's collective demise? This phenomenon is also reflected in human psychology under the term Crab Mentality. This kind of mentality influences people's thoughts, statements, and actions in various situations.
According to Psychology Today, crab mentality is an analogy to the selfish and envious behavior of someone upon other people's success. Crab mentality is also defined as someone's tendency to pull down people around them who they consider are better than them in any aspect. People with crab mentality often think that if they can't have it, then other people can't have it too. That's why they pull other people down those who go ahead with them in order for them not to fail alone.
As a daily example, when someone sees their friend is almost reaching their success, their goals, and their accomplishments, instead of being supportive and motivated, a person with a crab mentality rather manipulates and drags them down by throwing criticism, bullying, and many things. This is done with the purpose to cancel people's success down to their level.
Signs of people with a crab mentality
Several signs point out whether someone tends to acquire a crab mentality within themself
- Have the mindset of "people can't be better or more successful than me"
- Tend to criticize and blame others
- Get irritated and jealous for seeing people's success and reaching their accomplishments
- Have constant bad presumptions of people's accomplishments
- Have overflowing competitiveness that gives them bad energy
- Assume people's success is obtained by luck and privileges, instead of their effort.
Why do they have these tendencies?
In some cases, people with crab mentality are driven by emotional motivation, where they all have the urge to feel better about themselves, yet hate to acknowledge other people who are better than them. They also have an incorrect belief that someone else's gains will come at the expense of their loss. This is caused by various cognitive biases and other forms of irrationality which makes them mistakenly view certain situations that gain them zero benefits means that they are emotionally harmed.
Another reason why people tend to have a crab mentality is the bandwagon effect. This can be caused by their mindset of being a victim of this mentality by other people, and that's why they are projecting this mentality onto people around them. Maybe, they used to get invalidated for their success in the past and that happened to leave a big emotional wound in their heart. This can lead to the spread of crab mentality among the social group of friends, group of coworkers, and family members.
To sum it up, crab mentality is a hostile action toward people around them who they consider are better. Meanwhile, if we think about it, there are a lot of people who are indeed better and way more experienced than us. If we can make their success a motivation, then it will bring progress in our lives. It's different when we try to outperform others and even bring each other down. This action will be very detrimental and hinder our path to success.
(DIP/DIR)