Together, Hypotheses 1–3 suggest a chain of relationships linking social information consumption with feelings of envy, which in turn are hypothesized to be negatively related with the cognitive and affective well-being of SNS users. Moreover, considering the central role that envy plays in the interpretation and internalization of information about others (Foster 1972, Hill et al. 2011), it is plausible that the undesirable outcomes associated with social information consumption on SNSs, as reported in past research (see Table 1), may partly be due to the envy processes this activity may trigger (see Table A.1 in Online Appendix A). In other words, it is presumably not social information consumption per se that is linked to detrimental SWB-related outcomes, such as reduced life satisfaction (Wenninger et al. 2014) and negative affective states (Haferkamp and Kraemer 2011). Rather, it is the feelings of envy that this social information consumption may evoke that are responsible for the observed undesirable outcomes. In this case, envy operates as a mediating mechanism that, triggered by social information, works to reduce cognitive evaluations of life and affective experiences of SNS members.