Ascribing Advantages to Social Comparison Targets

Shepperd, James A.; Taylor, Kevin M.

doi:10.1207/s15324834ba210203

Cited by 15 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…Since the identification of the social self and the interdependent self (Kitayama and Markus, 1995), the self is increasingly viewed more as being influenced not only by our personal success but also by our social experiences. We evaluate our sense of worth through social comparisons (Marsh et al, 2000;Shepperd and Taylor, 1999), as well as through the judgments of others (Steele, 1997). Leary (1998) went further to claim that self-esteem varies depending on these social comparisons and that our sense of self-esteem is a social psychological gauge that we monitor and calibrate in response to others' appraisals of our various social performances.…”

Section: Social Beliefs Social Experience and Self Esteemmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of social axioms in predicting life satisfaction: a longitudinal study in Hong Kong

2006

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Section: Social Beliefs Social Experience and Self Esteemmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of social axioms in predicting life satisfaction: a longitudinal study in Hong Kong

2006

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“…That is, individuals may attempt to respond in a defensive manner whenever someone else outperforms them. One strategy that has been suggested in the social comparison literature is to self-handicap and choose an obviously superior peer as a comparison target (e.g., Shepperd and Taylor, 1999). It then seems plausible that this self-handicapping is less e §ective when the comparison target is an average performer, as opposed to a top performer.…”

Section: Main Findingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Inspiration from the “Biggest Loser”: Social Interactions in a Weight Loss Program

Uetake

Yang

2020

Marketing Science

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We investigate the role of heterogeneous peer effects in encouraging healthy lifestyles. Our analysis revolves around one of the largest and most extensive databases about weight loss that track individual participants’ meeting attendance and progress in a large national weight loss program. The main finding is that, although weight loss among average-performing peers has a negative effect on an individual’s weight loss, the corresponding effect for the top performer among peers is positive. Furthermore, we show that our results are robust to potential issues related to selection into meetings, endogenous peer outcomes, individual unobserved heterogeneity, lagged dependent variables, and contextual effects. Ultimately, these results provide guidance about how the weight loss program should identify role models.

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“…This strategy may prove attractive, at times, because people do not have to sabotage their own performance, in absolute terms, to give or to see their opponent as enjoying some advantage, such as a “head start.” Attributionally, people can have their cake and eat it too, performing at their best while still staving off the anxiety of the self‐implicating attribution of losing a contest to some competitor who enjoys some advantage. Even believing that one’s competitor enjoys an advantage satisfies the same desire to deal with the threat to self‐competence judgments (Shepperd & Taylor, 1999).…”

Section: Self‐doubt In Action: Thoughts Feelings and Behaviormentioning

confidence: 99%

Self‐Doubt

Braslow

Guerrettaz

Arkin

et al. 2012

Social & Personality Psych

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The need for understanding serves as a theme throughout social and personality psychology. It is reflected in people's striving toward a shared, social construction of reality (e.g., conformity, uniformity) that runs through so much of the history of theory and research in the field. Stemming from this core motivation, the literature is peppered with illustrations of the preeminence of certainty as a goal (e.g., clarity, consistency, consonance, and related constructs) and the ultimate objective of cultural consensus. Yet, the role of doubt in the form of shaky certainty about the basis for beliefs in attitudes -or doubts about one's self-esteem or self-concept -has increasingly taken center stage. This review takes the self-competence element (vs. self-liking element) of selfworth judgments as its focus and provides an integration of individual difference approaches and experimental investigations of self-doubt. Long neglected, self-doubt increasingly appears critical for understanding some of the surprising, ironic, and self-defeating cognitive, emotional, and behavioral findings seen in the achievement realm.Four be the things I'd been better without: Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt Dorothy ParkerThe fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt Bertrand Russell Certainty and clarity are prized and desired, except when they aren't. A careful search for pithy quotations about the value of clarity reveals little, while the virtues of doubt are widely praised. Yet, the preeminence of certainty and clarity as a core human social motive (among social and personality psychologists) is revealed in the central spot accorded the need to understand (e.g., Fiske, 2004). People are said to wish to know things quickly and clearly and to predict things well enough to function in ordinary daily social life (e.g., Heider, 1958). The value of the shared, social construction of reality can be traced through the Festinger tradition (e.g., 1950, 1954, 1957) where disunity among people is psychologically uncomfortable and produces pressures toward uniformity (1950), lack of certainty produces social information seeking (i.e., affiliation) driven by the desire for clarity (1954), and ultimately one's own beliefs and behavior push people away from dissonance and toward consistency of beliefs (1957); indeed, people sometimes place a premium on certainty, clarity, and consonance (a satisfying sense of reality) in the face of objective facts to the contrary. Dissonance is dismissed even when the facts are clearly in conflict and impossible to reconcile -as when prophesy fails (e.g., Gal & Rucker, 2010).People bother to make sense of themselves and one another (e.g., attribution; social cognition) to satisfy this core motive of understanding, setting the stage for the important Social and Personality Psychology Compass 6/6 (2012):

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Ascribing Advantages to Social Comparison Targets

Cited by 15 publications

References 31 publications

The role of social axioms in predicting life satisfaction: a longitudinal study in Hong Kong

The role of social axioms in predicting life satisfaction: a longitudinal study in Hong Kong

Inspiration from the “Biggest Loser”: Social Interactions in a Weight Loss Program

Self‐Doubt

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