Social Comparison in Everyday Life

Ninety-four college students recorded details of their social comparisons over 2 weeks using a new instrument, the Rochester Social Comparison Record. Major results were (a) comparison direction varied with relationship with the target; (b) precomparison negative mood led more often to upward comparison than to downward comparison, supporting a selective affect-cognition priming model in which dysphoria primes negative thoughts about the self (Bower, 1991; Forgas, Bower, & Moylan, 1990) rather than a motivational self-enhancement model (Wills, 1981,1991); (c) upward comparison decreased subjective well-being, whereas downward comparison increased it; and (d) high self-esteem individuals engaged in more self-enhancing comparison. Festinger's theory of social comparison processes (Festinger, 1954) continues to be an active arena for theory and research. A new edited book (Suls & Wills, 1991), a symposium at the 1990 meeting of the Society for Experimental Social Psychology (SESP), and frequent journal articles attest to this vigor. Yet underlying the vitality is a feeling of uneasiness, obvious in the comments occasioned by the SESP symposium, in which a group of extraordinari ly knowledgeable participants showed little agreement about such apparently basic questions as "Do people compare at all (or very much)? When do people compare? How do people balance upward and downward comparisons? How much does similarity count in comparison? Do people compare with actual targets, or are all comparisons constructed in people's heads? The problem is that there are many measures of social comparison, and they do not agree well with one another, leading to theoretical proliferation lacking a coherent empirical base. These measures may not agree with one another because of difficulties with the measures themselves (Wood, 1991), because they measure different motives for social comparison (cf. Wood & Taylor, 1991), or because they have been used in different contexts. The one thing on which there is general agreement is that social comparison is a wonderfully flexible process that can best be studied under naturalistic

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