EDITED BY JERRY SULS, REBECCA L. COLLINS, AND LADD WHEELER
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Dedication
Ladd Wheeler, our co-editor of this volume, died peaceably on October 18, 2018, at the age of 81. He had completed his work for this book, which was one of his last professional efforts. Without Ladd’s insights and thoughtful scholarship much of the research in this volume might not have happened. From the early days of social comparison research to his last days of work, Ladd made key contributions to the area. He will be greatly missed.
Ladd (whose real first name was “Laddie”) was born in Midland, Texas, on June 24, 1938. His parents had intended for him, after high school, to attend a bible college to become a preacher. But a high school teacher saw great potential in Ladd and suggested he apply to Stanford University. Knowing his family could not afford Stanford, the teacher mentioned Ladd to a wealthy oilman who was looking to support the college education of a worthy local. After meeting with Ladd, the oilman was apparently impressed. The next fall Ladd entered Stanford as a freshman, eventually becoming Leon Festinger’s senior honor’s student. Some of Ladd’s fondest memories of that time were of the parties Leon regularly threw at his home where faculty and everyone who worked in his lab, including undergraduates, were invited. Many of Ladd’s life-long friendships stemmed from those days. By the time he was about to graduate, Ladd decided to seek graduate training in social psychology, and Festinger suggested he apply to Minnesota to work with Stanley Schachter. There, Ladd collaborated with Schachter on research about the role of visceral states, misattribution, and emotion and began his own research on social comparison. After receipt of his PhD in 1962, Ladd moved to the Naval Research Laboratories in Monterey, California, and then joined the faculty at New York University. There were also jaunts to the University of Finland, Duke University, and the University of Texas–Austin. In 1970, he joined the Department of Psychology at the University of Rochester where he led the Social Psychology training program until his “retirement” in 2000, when he relocated to the warmer clime of Sydney, Australia, with his wife Helen, who was an Australian citizen. He continued to do research and mentor students first at the University of New South Wales and later at Macquarie University. Ladd read widely but had a special liking for detective fiction. He also was an
avid gardener and golfer, and he sang bass in a gospel choir after moving to Sydney. He retained his taste for Texas BBQ but acquired an appetite for meat pies with mushy peas, a staple in Australia.
Several chapters in this volume describe many of the important contributions he made to social comparison and social influence over six decades. In addition, Ladd played a major role in the study of behavioral contagion, interpersonal relationships in situ as co-creator of the Rochester Interaction Record, physical attractiveness, and the psychology of ostracism. In recognition of his contributions, he was elected President of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology and the founding editor of Review of Personality and Social Psychology
We cannot say it better than his obituary: “An inspirational educator and a life-changing influence, friend, colleague, and mentor for so many,” including us.
But Ladd should have the last word. His request for his funeral was “Casual dress please!”
Jerry Suls and Rebecca L. Collins March 22, 2019
Contents
Contributors ix
I. BASIC SOCIAL COMPARISON PROCESSES
1. A History of Social Comparison Theory 5 Ladd Wheeler and Jerry Suls
2. How Social Comparison Affects the Self: The Selective Accessibility Mechanism 32 Thomas Mussweiler
3. Looking Up and Ahead: The Social Comparison of Abilities, Personal Attributes, and Opinions 52 Jerry Suls and Ladd Wheeler
4. Individual Differences in Social Comparison: The Complex Effects of Social Comparison Orientation 77 Abraham P. Buunk, Frederick X. Gibbons, Pieternel Dijkstra, and Zlatan Krizan
5. Social Comparison Before, During, and After the Competition 105 Stephen M. Garcia, Zachary A. Reese, and Avishalom Tor
6. Effects of Local and General Comparisons on Self-Assessment 143 Ethan Zell and Mark D. Alicke
7. Agency and Communion in Social Comparison 178 Kenneth D. Locke
8. Dimensional Comparison Theory: Extending the Internal/ External Frame of Reference Model 201
Friederike Helm, Herbert W. Marsh, Theresa Dicke, and Jens Möller
9. Envy and Social Comparison 226
Niels van de Ven and Marcel Zeelenberg
10. Stereotypes and Relative Social Status in Social Comparisons 251
Jillian K. Swencionis and Susan T. Fiske
11. Navigating the Perils of Outperforming Others 280
Anne L. Zell, Julie J. Exline, and Marci Lobel
12. Temporal Comparisons in a Social World 309
Anne E. Wilson and Erin Shanahan
II. NEIGHBORING FIELDS
13. Local Comparisons and General Standards: Implications for Superiority and Inferiority Biases 349
Yechiel Klar
14. Comparing One and Many: Insights From Judgment and Decision-Making for Social Comparison 386
Eleanor Putnam-Farr and Carey K. Morewedge
15. Approaches to Comparison and Their Influence on Social Comparison 430
Arthur B. Markman
16. How Social Networks Shape Social Comparison 443
Jingwen Zhang and Damon Centola
17. The Evolutionary Roots of Social Comparisons 462
Marcela E. Benítez and Sarah F. Brosnan
III. APPLICATIONS
18. Relative Deprivation Theory: Advances and Applications 495
Heather J. Smith, Thomas F. Pettigrew, and Yuen J. Huo
19. Health Cognitions, Decision-Making, and Behavior: The Ubiquity of Social Comparison 527
William M. P. Klein and Elise L. Rice
20. Social Dominance Theory and Power Comparison 575
Robin Bergh, Gregory K. Davis, Sa-kiera T. J. Hudson, and Jim Sidanius
21. Myopia of the Masses: Relative Deprivation, Comparative Scope, and System Justification 598
Ruthie Pliskin, Daniel Yudkin, John T. Jost, and Yaacov Trope
22. Income Inequality and Well-Being: The Role of Social Comparison 623
Felix Cheung and Richard E. Lucas
Index 647
Contributors
Mark D. Alicke
Ohio University Athens, OH, USA
Marcela E. Benítez
Georgia State University Atlanta, GA, USA
Robin Bergh
Harvard University Cambridge, MA, USA
Sarah F. Brosnan
Georgia State University Atlanta, GA, USA
Abraham P. Buunk
University of Groningen Groningen, The Hague, Netherlands
Damon Centola
University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA, USA
Felix Cheung
University of Hong Kong Pokfulam, Hong Kong, China
Rebecca L. Collins
RAND Corporation
Santa Monica, CA, USA
Gregory K. Davis
Harvard University Cambridge, MA, USA
Theresa Dicke
Australian Catholic University North Sydney, NSW, Australia
Pieternel Dijkstra
University of Groningen Groningen, Netherlands
Julie J. Exline
Case Western Reserve University Cleveland, OH, USA
Susan T. Fiske
Princeton University Princeton, NJ, USA
Stephen M. Garcia
University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI, USA
Frederick X. Gibbons
University of Connecticut Storrs, CT, USA
Friederike Helm
University of Kiel Kiel, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany
Sa-kiera T. J. Hudson,
Harvard University Cambridge, MA, USA
Yuen J. Huo
University of California Los Angeles, CA, USA
John T. Jost
New York University
New York, NY, USA
Yechiel Klar
Tel Aviv University
Tel Aviv, Israel
William M. P. Klein
National Cancer Institute Bethesda, MD, USA
Zlatan Krizan
Iowa State University Ames, IA, USA
x Contributors
Marci Lobel
Stony Brook University
Stony Brook, NY, USA
Kenneth D. Locke University of Idaho Moscow, ID, USA
Richard E. Lucas
Michigan State University East Lansing, MI, USA
Arthur B. Markman University of Texas Austin, TX, USA
Herbert W. Marsh Australian Catholic University Brisbane, Australia & Oxford Univeristy Oxford, UK
Jens Möller
University of Kiel
Kiel, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany
Carey K. Morewedge
Boston University Boston, MA, USA
Thomas Mussweiler
London School of Business London, UK
Thomas F. Pettigrew University of California Santa Cruz, CA, USA
Ruthie Pliskin Institute of Psychology Leiden, Netherelands
Eleanor Putnam-Farr Rice University Houston, TX, USA
Zachary A. Reese
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI, USA
Elise L. Rice
National Institute for Dental and Craniofacial Research
Bethesda, MD, USA
Erin Shanahan
Wilfrid Laurier University
Waterloo, ON, Canada
Jim Sidanius
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA, USA
Heather J. Smith
Sonoma State University
Rohnert Park, CA, USA
Jerry Suls
Center for Personalized Health
Feinstein Institute for Medical Research,
New York, NY, USA
Jillian K. Swencionis
John Jay College of Criminal Justice
New York, NY, USA
Avishalom Tor University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, IN, USA & University of Haifa
Haifa, Israel
Yaacov Trope
New York University
New York, NY, USA
Niels van de Ven
Tilburg University
Tilburg, Netherlands
Ladd Wheeler
Macquarie University
Sydney, Australia
Anne E. Wilson
Wilfrid Laurier University
Waterloo, ON, Canada
Daniel Yudkin
University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA, USA
Marcel Zeelenberg
Tilburg University
Tilburg, Netherlands
Anne L. Zell
Augustana University Sioux Falls, SD, USA
Ethan Zell
University of North Carolina Greensboro, NC, USA
Jingwen Zhang
University of California Davis, CA, USA
Social Comparison, Judgment, and Behavior
SECTION I
BASIC SOCIAL COMPARISON PROCESSES
Chapter 1 provides a historical survey of social comparison research beginning with Leon Festinger’s classic theory and followed by developments of the 1960s through the early 2000s. In the last section, the authors comment on how the definition and scope of comparison phenomena has grown and, in some instances, perhaps exceeded its bounds.
Chapters 2 to 4 present conceptual/empirical approaches, inspired by Festinger’s original statement of comparison theory, the social-cognitive approach, attributional models, and individual differences in social comparison that have continued to generate research. Mussweiler (Chapter 2) reviews the premises and empirical evidence for the Selective Activation Model. He also describes—anticipating arguments made in the “neighboring fields section”—how social and nonsocial comparisons share similar operations and are influenced by contextual factors heretofore thought irrelevant.
Suls and Wheeler (Chapter 3) discuss the evolution of the attributional social comparison reformulation leading to the proxy model of ability evaluation and the triadic model of opinion evaluation. Discussion follows about shared mechanisms of comparison theories and why the tradition, so influential in the history of comparison research to consider self-evaluation and self-enhancement as distinct motives may require reconsideration.
Buunk, Gibbons, Dijkstra, and Krizan (Chapter 4) discuss the development and subsequent research with the Iowa-Netherlands Comparison Orientation Measure (INCOM), which assesses individual differences in the inclination to compare one’s accomplishments, one’s situation, and one’s experiences with those of others. Evidence shows the INCOM is related to seeking upward and downward social comparison information, establishing personal risk and assessing future prospects and applicable
to close relationships, ageing, work, and other organizations, depression, health, physical attractiveness in a wide range of interpersonal, academic, and health settings.
In a new framework for understanding the psychology of competition, Garcia and his colleagues (Chapter 5) consider how comparison and competition intersect at three consecutive chronological stages: before the competition, during the competition, and after the competition. By considering these intersections at each stage, the authors show how the empirical literature yields a generative formulation about competition.
Zell and Alicke (in Chapter 6) present the results of their research program showing that local comparisons about the self in relation to one or a few people often dominate and displace the effects of general comparisons, such as with the average person in one’s profession or country. This has come to be known as the “local dominance effect.” Among other issues, the authors describe how the effect of local comparisons with one or a few people in the immediate environment are largely unaffected by self-enhancement concerns; this is not so with respect to general comparisons.
In Chapter 7, Locke describes how agency (i.e., the motive to get ahead) and communion (i.e., the motive to get along) influence the kinds of comparisons people make; in particular, whether they make vertical comparisons (upward or downward) or horizontal comparisons (how close or distant the target is from the self). The former type of comparisons has been emphasized in past comparison research; Locke documents how horizontal comparisons also play an essential role in social life.
In Chapter 8, Helm, Marsh, Dicke, and Moller describe dimensional comparison theory (DCT), which posits social comparisons are important but self-evaluations are also based on how the person’s accomplishments in one domain compare with his or her accomplishments in another domain. DCT predicts strong contrast effects only for contrasting domains (e.g., a negative effect of math achievement on verbal self-concept) but much weaker contrast, or even positive (assimilative) effects for domains that are close to each other (e.g., positive effects of math achievement on physics self-concept). After empirical studies of DCT in academic domains are reviewed, Helm et al. also show how DCT applies to domains, such as personality characteristics.
van de Ven and Marcel Zeelenberg (Chapter 9) describe recent thinking and research about the psychology of envy, the pain experienced in response
to learning about the good fortune of others—a social comparison. The authors posit two kinds of envy, benign and malicious, and how, for benign envy, reducing the gap with the other will be accomplished by improving one’s own position. For malicious envy, reducing this gap involves pulling the superior other down.
Swencionis and Fiske (Chapter 10) focus on the social context created by interpersonal interactions between people differing in social status. Two main dimensions, perceived competence and warmth, are critical in forming status impressions about the self and others. Competence confers respect, while warmth tends to confer liking. These status comparisons, which are spontaneously activated and neurally mediated, influence how people present themselves. The chapter reviews research about the neural mechanisms that are activated when people rank others and the neural consequences for those higher and lower in the ranking. Motivated to get along, people use distinct interaction strategies in upward versus downward social comparisons. Research indicates that high-status people presume their own competence but not warmth, so they downplay the one to emphasize the other to match their stereotype of low-status (and minority) partners as less competent. Lower-status people promote their own doubted competence, thereby matching a stereotype of the higher-status person as competent. Identifying these injurious strategies to negotiate status divides may lead to practices that can be more humane and productive and value the need for respect and affiliation.
Research in social comparison often emphasizes the predicament for those persons whose performance ranks below others. In Chapter 11, Zell, Exline, and Lobel note that there also are perils associated with outperforming others. The authors describe the interpersonal dilemma faced by outperformers and what interpersonal strategies they use to handle the challenge.
This section’s final chapter by Wilson and Shanrahan presents predictions and empirical evidence indicating that often people evaluate their current selves by looking to their former and future selves (i.e., temporal comparisons). They observe that both social and temporal comparisons are sources of information, but one may be more important in some situations than in others. For example, selective recall of aspects of one’s past to maintain a positive self-assessment may be easy, but a current invidious social comparison may be challenging to dismiss. Wilson and Shanrahan also describe how (a) interpretation or recall of former (or future) selves, (b) the
subjective temporal closeness or distance of those selves, and (c) the importance of the evaluation domain can be selectively accessed or constructed to achieve a positive current identity. These three strategies have parallels in social comparison, but the temporal realm probably allows for a greater range of construction.
1 A History of Social Comparison Theory
Ladd Wheeler and Jerry Suls
For ages, social observers and philosophers noted that comparisons made with other people are frequent and consequential. Aristotle posited that social comparisons were a major factor in ethical actions; de Tocqueville and Marx, among others, emphasized their role in political and economic outcomes. With the rise of the behavioral and social sciences in the 20th century, the concept of relativism was popular—perhaps inspired by similar ideas in physics. The idea that people gauge their self-worth, outcomes, and life circumstances relative to other people was in the air. For example, Stouffer et al.’s (1949) extensive surveys assessing adjustment of the American soldier during World War II found that African American soldiers reported more life satisfaction than Caucasian soldiers, which seemed counterintuitive. Merton and Kitt (1950) proposed that this resulted because “relative to most Negro civilians who [they] saw in southern towns, the Negro soldier had a position of comparative wealth and dignity” (p. 563). One of the first to formalize the comparison idea was Hyman (1942) who studied how status was determined by the reference group (e.g., friends vs. general population), personal values, and the criteria, such as money, education, and achievements. Although it now seems obvious, a person’s subjective status need not and often did not match his or her objective status.
What was lacking, however, was a systematic theory about comparison and research that went beyond case studies and surveys; the first attempt to do so was formulated by Leon Festinger. His social comparison theory (Festinger, 1954a, 1954b) acknowledged Hyman and Stouffer but had its origins in two areas of research: (a) level of aspiration (LOA; Festinger, 1942; Lewin, Dembo, Festinger, & Sears, 1944) and (b) the communication process in informal groups (Festinger, 1950; Festinger, Schachter, & Back, 1950). The first of these led to Festinger’s inclusion of ability evaluation in social comparison theory, and the second led to his inclusion of opinion evaluation in the theory.
Edited by Jerry Suls, Rebecca L. Collins, and Ladd Wheeler,
Level of Aspiration (1944)
In the 1930s, Lewin and his students became interested in how people set goal levels. For Lewin, this was a logical development arising from his work on a theory of motivation—a project to redress the overwhelming emphasis on learning and conditioning inspired by Pavlov, Skinner, and Hull. Lewin and his student Festinger extended an experimental paradigm to investigate goal-setting while minimizing extraneous or confounding factors. In the typical research, individuals performed some task over multiple trials, received feedback after each trial, and announced what score they were aiming for on the next trial (their LOA). By the mid-1940s, a fair amount of research had accumulated on the problem. For example, Festinger (1942) varied whether undergraduates were given performance scores of high school students or graduate students. Those who scored below high school students increased their LOA the most, and those who scored above graduate students decreased their LOA the most. They appeared to be motivated to perform the same as those of the same educational/intellectual status as themselves. The purpose of Lewin et al.’s (1994) paper was to summarize all the evidence and place it in a theoretical framework. This paper had a major influence on later treatments of achievement motivation. It used Lewin’s framework but was actually written by Tamara Dembo, Leon Festinger, and Pauline Sears.
The authors argued that the valence of success increases with the difficulty of the task and that the valence of failure decreases with task difficulty. This means that for any reasonable level of difficulty, the more difficult of two levels of performance will have the higher valence. This is why people will continually raise their LOA when they are succeeding. However, one must also take into account the probability of success (which decreases with difficulty) and failure (which increases with difficulty). At some point of low probability of success, people will no longer increase their LOA. The paper discusses numerous factors that influence the valence of success and failure, including group standards.
Informal Social Communication (1950)
Westgate and Westgate West housing projects were built at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) right after the war to house 270 families, many of whom were returning servicemen with children. Kurt Lewin asked
Festinger to direct a seemingly pedestrian study of housing satisfaction for these two projects; Festinger asked graduate students Stanley Schachter and Kurt Back to work with him. The average age of the three was 26, and none had ever taken a course in social psychology. They discovered that functional proximity determined who would be friends with whom and that the most cohesive courts adopted the most uniform attitudes when a new issue was introduced. Those with deviate attitudes were social isolates. Those who were spatially isolated tended to have the most deviant attitudes despite being randomly assigned to their housing units. From results such as these, Festinger and his students developed a series of propositions concerning informal, spontaneous communication among persons and the consequences of the process of communication (Festinger et al., 1950). They then tested these hypotheses in a series of true experiments (Back, 1951; Festinger & Thibaut, 1951; Kelley, 1951; Schachter, 1951; Thibaut, 1950), culminating with Festinger’s (1950) theory of informal social communication.
One major push to communicate is the pressure toward uniformity of opinion and behavior. Such pressure exists because of the need for group locomotion (the need to accomplish something) and because of the need for social reality (the need to hold correct beliefs, opinions, and attitudes). Regardless of their source, pressures toward uniformity increase with (a) opinion discrepancy within the group, (b) relevance to the group, and (c) the cohesiveness of the group. There are three behavioral outcomes of pressure toward uniformity. These are (a) attempts to change the opinions of those who differ from us, (b) a tendency to change our own opinions to come into agreement with others in the group, and (c) a tendency to reject others who continue to hold deviant opinions. The presumed sequence is that we will try to change the mind of the other person with our best evidence and arguments. If the person refuses to budge in the face of our superior argument, we will at least consider the possibility that we are incorrect, and we may change our opinion. If neither happens, we will write the other person off as a proper person to talk to about this issue. In fact, we may disparage the person or cease to acknowledge his or her existence.
Enter Social Comparison Theory (1954)
In the early 1950s, the Ford Foundation funded Festinger to review and integrate findings about social influence in groups. It was natural that he would
combine the two areas in which he had done the most work—LOA and informal social communication. Some might argue, however, that Festinger’s (1954a, 1954b) paper was a shotgun marriage, or as Arrowood (1986) noted, “a masterpiece of ambiguity.” The problem was combining opinions and abilities, which are very different kinds of concepts. In Festinger’s (1950) paper, one communicated one’s opinion. This had to be changed in the new review because one can’t communicate an ability; one can only compare one’s ability. (It is interesting to note that the words compare and comparison do not appear at all in the 1950 paper.) Communication is a two-way process, but comparison is not, so the theory became more individualistic. Instead of the group exerting pressures toward uniformity on the individual, the individual is using other people to evaluate his or her abilities. In the 1950 paper, social reality for one’s opinion depended upon agreement with others. However, you can’t agree on an ability, so the emphasis had to be changed from agreement to similarity with others. You can’t talk about the social reality of an ability, so Festinger changed that to accurate evaluation. And with abilities, individuals don’t want uniformity but rather superiority. A unidirectional drive upward (i.e., striving to do better) had to be added to the comparison of abilities. All in all, the addition of ability to the pressures-to-uniformity theory required a major reorientation.
It is the meaning of similarity that has produced the greatest problem for social comparison theory. Similarity has been taken to mean the following things.
1. Similarity on the attribute to be evaluated. Do I want to compare my tennis ability to that of a person who plays at the same level? Do I want to compare my opinion about healthcare to someone with the same opinion?
2. Similarity on attributes that are related to the attribute to be evaluated. Do I want to compare my tennis ability to someone of the same age, training, athleticism, etc.? Do I want to compare my opinion about healthcare to someone with the same values, political preferences, etc.?
3. Similarity on anything. Heider (1958) observed that if people are “close” in some way, they develop a preference for each other. Does sharing the same birthday as another person make that person a preferred comparison choice?
We will return later to the question of similarity.
By the time that Festinger wrote the social comparison theory paper, he was already heavily into developing dissonance theory. Although it should be noted that his classic participant observation study (Festinger, Riecken, & Schachter, 1956) of a doomsday cult, When Prophecy Fails, described how comparisons among cult members helped to produce agreement about beliefs that seemed bizarre and crazy by their general community. Later, dissonance played a role when group members had to reconcile their beliefs and actions with blatant disconfirmation of the doomsday prediction. It was probably his preoccupation with dissonance that caused him to produce an unsatisfactory theory of social comparison processes. On the other hand, the many ambiguities in the theory may have helped keep it alive these many years later. Understanding and resolving the ambiguities has been a major intellectual challenge.
Schachter’s Extension to Emotional States and His Teaching of Social Comparison Theory (1959)
At the time that the social comparison theory paper was published, Festinger, as noted, was already working on the theory of cognitive dissonance. Schachter, teaching at the University of Minnesota, essentially kept social comparison theory alive with his work on the evaluation of emotional states (Schachter, 1959) and with his yearlong graduate seminar. In the emotion work, Schachter manipulated anxiety by threatening participants with a painful electric shock or only a mild shock in a control condition. Over a series of studies, he found that the more anxious the participants, the more they wanted to be with other people, presumably to evaluate their emotional states. Schachter won the American Association for the Advancement of Science Socio-Psychological Prize for this work and broke the perception that he was just “Festinger’s boy” (Schachter, 1989).
Perhaps more important was his yearlong graduate seminar (his only teaching responsibility) that started with the Westgate housing study and traced the development of social comparison on to his work on affiliation. Schachter gave as homework a two- or three-page list of readings and questions. The class was said to be run the way his second grade teacher did, which was “teach by terror!” (Schachter, 1989). He called upon students by name and asked questions that required a thorough knowledge of the reading as well as an agile mind. If one couldn’t answer the question, there was
nowhere to hide. From about 1953 to 1961, Schachter produced a number of students who were very well educated in the pressure-to-uniformity or social comparison line of research and who maintained that interest over the years.
The Special Issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (1966)
In 1964, a small group of past or current Minnesota graduate students met for a few days in Springs, Long Island, at a summer cottage being rented by Bibb Latané. They represented several unpublished PhD dissertations and other social comparison research. There was a freewheeling discussion of the research, unanswered questions, and the problem of getting it all published. At about the same time, John Thibaut, who had been Festinger’s student during development of the pressures-to-uniformity formulation, was at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was the editor of the new Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. The Latané family home was also in Chapel Hill, and Thibaut was a family friend. Bibb Latané and Thibaut agreed that there should be a special issue of the journal devoted to social comparison theory, with Latané as guest editor. The special issue (Latané, 1966) provided an immense boost to social comparison theory.
Several experiments investigated the similarity hypothesis. Radloff (1966) showed that the absence of similar comparison people resulted in unstable and inaccurate evaluations. Darley and Aronson (1966) showed that the evaluation motive was more important than the fear reduction motive in the fear-affiliation paradigm. Latané, Eckman, and Joy (1966) showed that others are perceived as more likeable if they are present during a stressful situation, presumably because they provide comparison. Gordon (1966) showed that people uncertain of their opinions affiliated with others who had similar opinions.
Other experiments looked at choice of a comparison other in a new procedure that focused on the upward/downward dimension in ability choice. This procedure has come to be known as the “rank-order paradigm” (Gruder, 1977). In this procedure, participants are tested under a cover story for some trait or ability and given their score and rank in the small group they are tested with. They are then allowed to see the score of one other person at any rank they choose. This provides a measure of whether they compare upward (with someone higher in the rank order) or downward; it also provides
a measure of whether they choose to compare with someone similar (adjacent in the rank order) or someone more removed. Wheeler (1962, 1966) devised this procedure to test the strange prediction from social comparison theory that the more motivated one is to do well, the more likely one will compare upward (and perhaps find that one is truly inferior). Motivation was manipulated by providing a cover story that the score would determine the extent to which the students would profit from a special seminar they would be required to take. Half of the participants received a description of the seminar making it seem very attractive (i.e., high motivation); the other half, making it not attractive (i.e., low motivation). The social comparison prediction was supported in that participants in a high motivation condition compared upward more often than those in a low motivation condition. Moreover, comparisons were with similar others (adjacent in the rank order). Additional data showed that those who thought they were more similar to the person above them than below them were the most likely to compare upward. Wheeler (1966) speculated that participants had assumed similarity with those above them in the rank order and were attempting to confirm that the difference in scores was small—that they were “almost as good as the very good ones” (p. 30).
As soon as Wheeler’s data were in, his fellow student Hakmiller (1962, 1966) wondered what would happen if the trait being tested for was negative rather than the positive trait used by Wheeler. Hakmiller tested participants for the trait, “hostility toward one’s parents,” which he described as extremely negative in a high threat condition (leading to a blunted sense of decency and fair play and deterioration of the personality) and as mildly positive in a low threat condition. Wouldn’t participants want to distance themselves from an awful future by comparing themselves to those who were a lot more hostile than themselves? Hakmiller used a complicated design that led participants to expect a low score on hostility toward one’s parents but then gave them a very high score instead. Participants in the high threat condition were more likely to choose to see the score of the most hostile participant than were participants in the low threat condition. Hakmiller interpreted the result as reflecting the need to sustain or reassert the favorability of the individual’s self-regard. He did, however, admit to the possibility of a different interpretation: Participants simply want to know how pathological another student could be, given that they themselves had received a fairly high score. Because participants in the low threat condition had not been given such a negative description of the trait, they would have no motivation to choose the highest
