Prepare to Compare: Effects of an Intervention Involving Upward and Downward Social Comparisons on Goal Pursuit in Daily Life.

In a preregistered ecological momentary intervention study, we alternately instructed participants to adopt an upward and downward comparison focus. In all, 349 participants reported 8,137 social comparison situations across 6 days and three comparison conditions (baseline, upward, downward). For each comparison, participants reported social comparison direction, motivation, effort intentions, and emotions in five daily reports and one daily end-of-day summary. As predicted, an upward comparison focus resulted in more self-improvement motivation (pushing) and more negative emotions, whereas days with a downward comparison focus resulted in decreased motivation (coasting) but more positive emotions (vs. baseline). However, at the end of the day, people experienced lower goal approach on upward but higher goal approach on downward comparison days. Hence, engaging in strategic upward comparison was motivating in the short term but resulted in surprisingly opposite effects at the end of the day. We offer possible explanations from cognitive and motivational perspectives.

More threatening and more diagnostic: How moral comparisons differ from social comparisons.

The current research tests how comparisons in the moral domain differ from other social comparisons in three ways. First, an initial experience-sampling study shows that people compare downward more strongly in the moral domain than in most other domains (Study 1, N = 454), because people like to feel moral and present themselves as moral. Second, the classic threat principle of social comparison holds that people choose downward comparisons to improve their well-being after a threat to their self-esteem. We propose that in the moral domain the threat principle is intensified because morality is a uniquely important and central comparison domain. Across seven experiments (Experiments 2a and 2b, 3a-3c, 4a and 4b), we find that people search for downward comparisons much more than in other domains. This effect is so strong that people are willing to forgo money and incur time costs to avoid upward moral comparisons when threatened. Third, another classic principle of social comparison holds that people only consider comparisons that are diagnostic (i.e., close or similar) and therefore self-relevant, while dismissing extreme or dissimilar comparisons as irrelevant. We propose that this diagnosticity principle is attenuated because morality is a binding code that applies equally to all humans. Across four experiments (Experiments 5a and 5b, 6a and 6b), we find that even the most extreme and dissimilar moral (but not other) comparisons are deemed relevant and potentially threatening. Together, these twelve studies (total N = 5,543) demonstrate how moral comparisons are a ubiquitous but fundamentally distinct form of social comparison with altered basic principles. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

A motivational framework of social comparison.

Whether people's current motivation levels increase or decline also hinge on their social environment. The current research tightly integrates motivational principles from self-regulation research with social comparison processes. In a preregistered experience sampling study including more than 5,400 social comparison situations from people's everyday life, we investigated how discrepancy assessments between the self and a comparison standard influence people's motivation and affect. Results revealed a nonlinear relationship between negative discrepancies (upward comparisons) and effort investment ("pushing"): Whereas motivational pushing increases with negative discrepancies, more extreme upward comparisons were associated with less pushing, but increased disengagement ("giving up"). The effect of negative discrepancies on pushing motivation was even more pronounced for people perceiving high control in their domain of comparison or when the domain was considered as important. Positive discrepancies (downward comparisons), on the other hand, were related to a reduction in effort ("coasting"). Similarly, emotional responses, such as an increase or decrease in self-esteem, are yet another signal for whether someone needs to invest further effort at a current time. The self-regulatory perspective on social comparison provides a novel framework uniting motivational, emotional, and cognitive processes of social comparison for a better understanding of when social comparison can benefit or hinder people's everyday goal pursuit. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).