Social Comparison Theory

We learn about our own abilities and attitudes by comparing ourselves with other people and their opinions. Mostly, we seek to compare ourselves with someone against whom we believe we should have reasonable similarity, although in the absence of such a benchmark, we will use almost anyone.

Upward social comparison occurs where we mostly compare ourselves with people who we deem to be socially better than us in some way. Downward social comparison acts in the opposite direction.

Research
Hornstein et al. dropped a wallet containing some trivial items, a return address, $2 and a letter in midtown Manhattan, then watched what people did when they picked it up. There were two variations, each with a different letter. Some letters were from an articulate English-speaker (who would be like the person picking up the letter) whilst others were from a clear foreigner. Some letters had a positive tone, some were neutral and some were negative.

Letter from the 'foreigner' led to the wallet being returned around 30% of the time. Letters from the 'native' with positive or neutral tones were returned around 65% of the time, whilst native letters with negative tone were returned only around 10% of the time.

Thus, when the person finding the letter felt similar to the letter-writer, they were more motivated to return the wallet. However, when the letter writer seemed like them, but wrote in a negative way, they 'punished' the person by not returning the wallet.

Example
To determine how good an artist I am, I will compare myself with a competent friend rather than Michaelangelo or my 4-year-old niece.

Application
Find out other people with whom the target people compares themselves, then either get those reference people to adopt the desired action or find a way of persuading the target to select a better reference.

Who are your social references? Are they normal people or have you adopted (or been persuaded to adopt) unreasonable comparisons. Beware of comparing yourself against people whose standards you cannot reasonably attain or who have other attributes which are not so desirable.

Social Comparison Under Adversity

"I think I did extremely well under the circumstances. I know that there are just some women who aren't strong enough, who fall apart and become psychologically disturbed and what have you. It's a big adjustment for them." (Taylor, 1983, p. 1165)

The above statement, drawn from interviews Shelley Taylor and her colleagues conducted with women with breast cancer, illustrates how individuals who are experiencing adversity may employ information about less-fortunate others to restore and enhance their own self-esteem. This process of downward social comparison has been reported across a variety of laboratory and field studies on coping with negative events (Wills, 1987).

Recent research, however, suggests a more complicated connection between adverse circumstances and social comparison. Taylor and Lobel (1989), for example, argue the importance of separating different types of social comparison to fully understand when and how these processes may be involved in coping with negative events. Under some conditions of adversity, they suggest, people may prefer to evaluate themselves against someone who is less fortunate, while at the same time seeking information from and contact with people who are more fortunate. They termed these activities downward evaluation and upward contacts. Downward evaluation presumably provides a yardstick for favorable self-evaluation, while actually seeking contact with others who are less fortunate could be depressing or frightening. Upward contact, on the other hand, may provide both inspiration and ideas for coping, while avoiding the inevitably negative consequences of direct evaluative comparisons.

Studies by Aspinwall and Taylor (1993) further suggest that both individual differences and context may influence the impact of social comparison activities. They reported that college students with low self-esteem who had recently experienced an academic setback provided more favorable self-evaluations and expectations of future success after receiving downward social comparison information. Interestingly, neither low self-esteem nor negative circumstances alone were sufficient to produce a positive impact of downward comparisons in this research. In addition, Aspinwall and Taylor found evidence of the positive impact of downward comparisons even when they statistically controlled for initial reports of depressed affect. Downward social comparison has typically been described as a means of regulating negative affect-- thus the finding of a positive impact of downward comparison after controlling for depressed mood raises some question about the mechanism underlying the benefits of downward comparison.

Finally, Aspinwall and Taylor identified the perceived controllability of an individual's circumstances and the timing of social comparison activities as important dimensions for future research. While potentially beneficial as a short-term strategy for bolstering mood, self-evaluations, and optimism, downward social comparison may be disadvantageous as a long-term strategy because it fails to provide role models and information about successful coping.