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Social Comparison Theory in Psychology

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

essay about self concept through social comparison

Emily is a board-certified science editor who has worked with top digital publishing brands like Voices for Biodiversity, Study.com, GoodTherapy, Vox, and Verywell.

Nicholas Prior / Stone / Getty Images

How It Works

Social comparison theory suggests that people value their own personal and social worth by assessing how they compare to others. Introduced by Leon Festinger in 1954, the theory describes the comparison processes people utilize to evaluate their actions, accomplishments, and opinions in contrast to those of other people.

We all compare ourselves to others in our social worlds, whether by comparing our looks to those of celebrities we see in the media or our talents to those of our coworkers. In psychology , social comparison theory is one explanation for this tendency we have to make comparisons between ourselves and others.

Let's take a closer look at how social comparison theory works and how the comparisons we make influence the views we may hold of ourselves.

Social comparison theory was first proposed in 1954 by psychologist Leon Festinger and suggested that people have an innate drive to evaluate themselves, often in comparison to others. People make all kinds of judgments about themselves, and one of the key ways that we do this is through social comparison, or analyzing the self in relation to others.

For example, imagine that a high school student has just signed up for band class to learn how to play the clarinet. As she evaluates her skills and progress, she will compare her performance to other students in the class.

She might initially compare her abilities to the other members of the clarinet section, particularly noting those who are better than her as well as those who are worse. She may also compare her abilities to those of students who play other instruments as well.

Psychologist Leon Festinger believed that we engage in this comparison process as a way of establishing a benchmark by which we can make accurate evaluations of ourselves.

For example, a music student might compare herself to the star student of the class. If she finds that her abilities do not measure up to her peer's talents, she might be driven to achieve more and improve her abilities.

How Social Comparison Process Works

The social comparison process involves people coming to know themselves by evaluating their own attitudes , abilities, and traits in comparison with others. In most cases, we try to compare ourselves to those in our peer group or with whom we are similar. There are two kinds of social comparison—upward social comparison and downward social comparison.

Upward Social Comparison

This takes place when we compare ourselves with those who we believe are better than us. These upward comparisons often focus on the desire to improve our current status or level of ability. We might compare ourselves to someone better off and look for ways that we can achieve similar results.

Downward Social Comparison

This takes place when we compare ourselves to others who are worse off than us. Such downward comparisons are often centered on making ourselves feel better about our abilities or traits. We might not be great at something, but at least we are better off than someone else.

People compare themselves to those who are better when they want inspiration to improve, and they compare themselves to those who are worse when they want to feel better about themselves.

According to Festinger, people rely on these comparisons with other people to accurately assess their own abilities, traits, and attitudes. In cases where your comparisons are not effective, you might find yourself getting into situations that are too difficult or complex for your current skill levels.

For example, when you compare yourself to your friends you might feel that you are pretty physically fit. So, you might sign up for a marathon believing that you have the ability to finish with no problem.

When race day arrives, you might find yourself surrounded by people who are much more athletic than you and realize that your initial assessment of your abilities was overly optimistic. When we can, we may put these comparisons to the test in real-world settings.

Upward Comparison

For example, if you want to assess your skill as a basketball player, you might start by playing a game with your friends or practice shooting free throws. Once you have a good understanding of what you are capable of, you might then begin comparing your performance to other people that you know.

You might immediately think of a friend who plays on his school's basketball team. This is an example of upward social comparison.

In comparison to him, your performance is not nearly as skilled. At first you may feel discouraged by the gap between your ability levels. But you might also realize that you can eventually achieve a similar skill level with a little practice. In this case, the upward social comparison may make you more motivated to improve upon your abilities.

Downward Comparison

You might then compare your abilities to a friend who couldn't make a basket to save his life. In comparison, your performance is much better.

This is an example of downward social comparison. In this case, observing your friend’s poor skills actually makes you feel even better about your own abilities.

Some comparisons might make you feel inadequate and less likely to pursue a goal, while others give you confidence and help boost your self-esteem .

A Word From Verywell

Social comparison not only plays a role in the judgments that people make about themselves but also in the way that people behave. As you compare yourself to others, consider how both upward and downward social comparison might influence your self-belief , confidence, motivation, and attitude, and watch out for negative feelings that might emerge as a result of this process.

Festinger L. A theory of social comparison processes . Human Relations. 1954;7(2):117-140. doi:10.1177/001872675400700202

Kesici S, Erdogan A. Mathematics anxiety according to middle school students' achievement motivation and social comparison . Education. 2010;131(1):54-63.

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

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Chapter 3. The Self

3.3 The Social Self: The Role of the Social Situation

Learning Objectives

Describe the concept of the looking-glass self and how it affects our self-concept.
Explore the impact of the labeling bias, self-labeling, and internalized prejudice on people’s self-concepts, particularly in those from marginalized social groups.
Define social comparison, and summarize how people use it to define their self-concepts and self-esteem.
Give examples of the use of upward and downward social comparison and their influences on social cognition and affect.
Explain the concept of social identity and why it is important to human behavior.
Describe how self-evaluation maintenance theory helps to explain how we react when other people’s behaviors threaten our sense of self.
Describe the concept of self-presentation and the various strategies we use to portray ourselves to others.
Outline the concept of reputation management and how it relates to self-presentation.
Discuss the individual-difference variable of self-monitoring and how it relates to the ability and desire to self-present.

To this point, we have seen, among other things, that human beings have complex and well-developed self-concepts and that they generally attempt to view themselves positively. These more cognitive and affective aspects of ourselves do not, of course, occur in a vacuum. They are heavily influenced by the social forces that surround us. We have alluded to some of these forces already; for example, in our review of self-verification theory, we saw how feedback from others can affect our self-concept and esteem. We also looked at ways that our sociocultural backgrounds can affect the content of our self-concept.

In this section, we will consider in more detail these and other social aspects of the self by exploring the many ways that the social situation influences our self-concept and esteem. The self is not created in isolation; we are not born with perceptions of ourselves as shy, interested in jazz, or charitable to others, for example. Rather, such beliefs are determined by our observations of and interactions with others. Are you rich or poor? Beautiful or ugly? Smart or not? Good or bad at playing video games? And how do you know? These questions can be answered only by looking at those around us. The self has meaning only within the social context, and it is not wrong to say that the social situation defines our self-concept and our self-esteem. We rely on others to provide a “social reality”—to help us determine what to think, feel, and do (Hardin & Higgins, 1996). But what forms do these social influences take? It is to this question that we will now turn.

The Looking-Glass Self: Our Sense of Self is Influenced by Others’ Views of Us

The concept of the looking-glass self states that part of how we see ourselves comes from our perception of how others see us (Cooley, 1902). We might feel that we have a great sense of humor, for example, because others have told us, and often laugh (apparently sincerely) at our jokes. Many studies have supported a basic prediction derived from the notion of the looking-glass self, namely that our self-concepts are often quite similar to the views that others have of us (Beer, Watson, & McDade-Montez, 2013). This may be particularly so with people from our own families and culture. Perkins, Wiley, and Deaux (2014), for example, found that, in the United States, how members of ethnic minority groups believed other members of the same culture perceived them significantly correlated with their self-esteem scores. In contrast, their perceived appraisal of European Americans toward them was only weakly related to their self-esteem.

This evidence is merely correlational, though, so we cannot be sure which way the influence is working. Maybe we develop our self-concept quite independently of others, and they then base their views of us on how we see ourselves. The work of Mark Baldwin and colleagues has been particularly important in demonstrating that how we think we are being perceived by others really can affect how we see ourselves.

For example, Baldwin and Holmes (1987) conducted two experiments to test the hypothesis that our self-concepts derive partly from the way we imagine that we would be perceived by significant others. In the first study, 40 women were instructed to visualize the faces of either two acquaintances or two older members of their own family. Later they were asked to rate their perceived enjoyableness of a piece of fiction with sexual content, and they typically responded in keeping with the responses they perceived the people they had visualized would have had. This effect was more pronounced when they sat in front of a mirror (remember the earlier discussion of self-awareness theory). In the second study, 60 men were exposed to a situation involving failure, and their self-evaluations to this setback were then measured. As with the women’s study, the men’s self-evaluations matched those they perceived that the people they were asked to visualize would have made, particularly when they were more self-aware. At least some of the time, then, we end up evaluating ourselves as we imagine others would. Of course, it can work both ways, too. Over time, the people around us may come to accept the self-concept that we present to others (Yeung & Martin, 2003).

Sometimes, the influence of other people’s appraisals of ourselves on our self-concept may be so strong that we end up internalizing them. For example, we are often labeled in particular ways by others, perhaps informally in terms of our ethnic background, or more formally in terms of a physical or psychological diagnosis. The labeling bias occurs when we are labeled, and others’ views and expectations of us are affected by that labeling (Fox & Stinnett, 1996). For example, if a teacher knows that a child has been diagnosed with a particular psychological disorder, that teacher may have different expectations and explanations of the child’s behavior than he or she would if not aware of that label. Where things get really interesting for our present discussion is when those expectations start to become self-fulfilling prophecies, and our self-concept and even our behavior start to align with them. For example, when children are labeled in special education contexts, these labels can then impact their self-esteem (Taylor, Hume, & Welsh, 2010).

If we are repeatedly labeled and evaluated by others, then self-labeling may occur, which happens when we adopt others’ labels explicitly into our self-concept . The effects of this self-labeling on our self-esteem appear to depend very much on the nature of the labels. Labels used in relation to diagnosis of psychological disorders can be detrimental to people whom then internalize them. For example, Moses (2009) found that adolescents who self-labeled according to diagnoses they had received were found to have higher levels of self-stigma in their self-concepts compared with those who described their challenges in non-pathological terms. In these types of situation, those who self-label may come to experience internalized prejudice, which occurs when individuals turn prejudice directed toward them by others onto themselves. Internalized prejudice has been found to predict more negative self-concept and poorer psychological adjustment in members of various groups, including sexual minorities (Carter, 2012) and racial minorities (Szymanski & Obiri, 2011).

In other cases, labels used by wider society to describe people negatively can be positively reclaimed by those being labeled. Galinsky and colleagues (2013) explored this use of self-labeling by members of oppressed groups to reclaim derogatory terms, including “queer” and “bitch,” used by dominant groups. After self-labeling, minority group members evaluated these terms less negatively, reported feeling more powerful, and were also perceived by observers as more powerful. Overall, these results indicate that individuals who incorporate a formerly negative label into their self-concept in order to reclaim it can sometimes undermine the stigma attached to the label.

Social Comparison Theory: Our Sense of Self Is Influenced by Comparisons with Others

Self-concept and self-esteem are also heavily influenced by the process of social comparison (Buunk & Gibbons, 2007; Van Lange, 2008). Social comparison occurs when we learn about our abilities and skills, about the appropriateness and validity of our opinions, and about our relative social status by comparing our own attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors with those of others . These comparisons can be with people who we know and interact with, with those whom we read about or see on TV, or with anyone else we view as important. However, the most meaningful comparisons we make tend to be with those we see as similar to ourselves (Festinger, 1954).

Social comparison occurs primarily on dimensions on which there are no correct answers or objective benchmarks and thus on which we can rely only on the beliefs of others for information. Answers to questions such as “What should I wear to the interview?” or “What kind of music should I have at my wedding?” are frequently determined at least in part by using the behavior of others as a basis of comparison. We also use social comparison to help us determine our skills or abilities—how good we are at performing a task or doing a job, for example. When students ask their teacher for the class average on an exam, they are also seeking to use social comparison to evaluate their performance.

Research Focus

Affiliation and Social Comparison

The extent to which individuals use social comparison to determine their evaluations of events was demonstrated in a set of classic research studies conducted by Stanley Schachter (1959). Schachter’s experiments tested the hypothesis that people who were feeling anxious would prefer to affiliate with others rather than be alone because having others around would reduce their anxiety. Female college students at the University of Minnesota volunteered to participate in one of his experiments for extra credit in their introductory psychology class. They arrived at the experimental room to find a scientist dressed in a white lab coat, standing in front of a large array of electrical machinery. The scientist introduced himself as Dr. Zilstein of the Department of Neurology and Psychiatry, and he told the women that they would be serving as participants in an experiment concerning the effects of electrical shock. Dr. Zilstein stressed how important it was to learn about the effects of shocks, since electroshock therapy was being used more and more commonly and because the number of accidents due to electricity was also increasing!

At this point, the experimental manipulation occurred. One half of the participants (those in the high-anxiety condition ) were told that the shocks would be “painful” and “intense,” although they were assured that they could do no permanent damage. The other half of the participants (those in the low-anxiety condition ) were also told that they would be receiving shocks but that they would in no way be painful—rather, the shocks were said to be mild and to resemble a “tickle” or a “tingle.” Of course, the respondents were randomly assigned to conditions to assure that the women in the two conditions were, on average, equivalent except for the experimental manipulation.

Each of the women was then told that before the experiment could continue the experimenter would have to prepare the equipment and that they would have to wait until he was finished. He asked them if they would prefer to wait alone or with others. The outcome of Schachter’s research was clear: while only 33% of the women who were expecting mild shocks preferred to wait with others, 63% of the women expecting to get painful shocks wanted to wait with others. This was a statistically significant difference, and Schachter concluded that the women chose to affiliate with each other in order to reduce their anxiety about the upcoming shocks.

In further studies, Schachter found that the research participants who were under stress did not want to wait with just any other people. They preferred to wait with other people who were expecting to undergo the same severe shocks that they were rather than with people who were supposedly just waiting to see their professor. Schachter concluded that this was not just because being around other people might reduce our anxiety but because we also use others who are in the same situation as we are to help us determine how to feel about things. As Schachter (1959) put it, “Misery doesn’t just love any kind of company, it loves only miserable company” (p. 24). In this case, the participants were expecting to determine from the other participants how afraid they should be of the upcoming shocks.

In short, and as predicted by the idea of social comparison, the women in Schachter’s studies relied on each other to help them understand what was happening to them and to find out how they should feel and respond to their social situations. Again, the power of the social situation—in this case, in determining our beliefs and attitudes—is apparent.

Although Schachter’s studies were conducted in relatively artificial lab settings, similar effects have been found in field studies in more naturally occurring settings. For instance, Kulik, Mahler, and Moore (1996) found that hospital patients who were awaiting surgery preferred to talk to other individuals who were expecting to have similar procedures rather than to patients who were having different procedures, so that they could share information about what they might expect to experience. Furthermore, Kulik and his colleagues found that sharing information was helpful: people who were able to share more information had shorter hospital stays.

Upward and Downward Comparisons Influence Our Self-Esteem

Although we use social comparison in part to develop our self-concept—that is, to form accurate conclusions about our attitudes, abilities, and opinions—social comparison has perhaps an even bigger impact on our self-esteem. When we are able to compare ourselves favorably with others, we feel good about ourselves, but when the outcome of comparison suggests that others are better or better off than we are, then our self-esteem is likely to suffer. This is one reason why good students who attend high schools in which the other students are only average may suddenly find their self-esteem threatened when they move on to colleges and universities in which they are no longer better than the other students (Marsh, Kong, & Hau, 2000). Perhaps you’ve had the experience yourself of the changes in self-esteem that occur when you have moved into a new year in school, got a new job, or changed your circle of friends. In these cases, you may have felt much better about yourself or much worse, depending on the nature of the change. You can see that in these cases the actual characteristics of the individual person have not changed at all; only the social situation and the comparison with others have changed.

Because many people naturally want to have positive self-esteem, they frequently attempt to compare themselves positively with others. Downward social comparison occurs when we attempt to create a positive image of ourselves through favorable comparisons with others who are worse off than we are. In one study Morse and Gergen (1970) had students apply for a job, and they also presented the students with another individual who was supposedly applying for the same job. When the other candidate was made to appear to be less qualified for the job, the downward comparison with the less-qualified applicant made the students feel better about their own qualifications. As a result, the students reported higher self-esteem than they did when the other applicant was seen as a highly competent job candidate. Research has also found that people who are suffering from serious diseases prefer to compare their condition with other individuals whose current condition and likely prognosis is worse than their own (Buunk, Gibbons, & Visser, 2002). These comparisons make them feel more hopeful about their own possible outcomes. More frequent use of downward than upward social comparison with similar others has been been shown to be a commonly used coping strategy for preserving self-esteem in the face of a wide variety of challenging life situations, including experiences of physical decline, rheumatoid arthritis, AIDS, occupational burnout, eating disorders, unemployment, educational difficulties, and intellectual disabilities (Buunk, Gibbons, & Buunk, 1997).

Although downward comparison provides us with positive feelings, upward social comparison , which occurs when we compare ourselves with others who are better off than we are , is also common (Blanton, Buunk, Gibbons, & Kuyper, 1999; Vrugt & Koenis, 2002). Upward comparison may lower our self-esteem by reminding us that we are not as well off as others. The power of upward social comparison to decrease self-esteem has been documented in many domains (Buunk, Gibbons, & Buunk, 1997). Thinking back to our case study at the beginning of this chapter, this power can sometimes be strongly felt when looking at social networking sites. Imagine someone who has had a bad day, or is generally unhappy with how life is going, then logs onto Facebook to see that most of his or her friends have posted very positive status updates about how happy they are, how well they are doing, or the wonderful vacations they are having. What would your prediction be about how that person would feel? Would that person take pleasure from knowing that the friends were happy, or would the friends’ happiness make the person feel worse? The research on upward social comparisons to similar others would suggest the latter, and this has been demonstrated empirically. Feinstein and colleagues (2013) investigated whether a tendency to make upward social comparisons on Facebook led to increased symptoms of depression over a three-week period. Sure enough, making more upward comparisons predicted increased rumination, which in turn was linked to increased depressive symptoms.

Despite these negative effects of upward comparisons, they can sometimes be useful because they provide information that can help us do better, help us imagine ourselves as part of the group of successful people that we want to be like (Collins, 2000), and give us hope (Snyder, Cheavens, & Sympson, 1997). The power of upward social comparison can also be harnessed for social good. When people are made aware that others are already engaging in particular prosocial behaviors, they often follow suit, partly because an upward social comparison is triggered. This has been shown in relation to sustainable environmental practices, for example, with upward social comparisons helping to facilitate energy-saving behaviors in factory workers (Siero, Bakker, Dekker, & van den Berg, 1996) and hotel guests (Goldstein, Cialdini, & Griskevicius, 2008). As with downward comparisons, the effects of looking upward on our self-esteem tend to be more pronounced when we are comparing ourselves to similar others. If, for example, you have ever performed badly at a sport, the chances are that your esteem was more threatened when you compared yourselves to your teammates as opposed to the top professional athletes in that sport.

Although everyone makes social comparisons, both upward and downward, there are some sources of differences in how often we do so and which type we tend to favor. As downward social comparisons generally increase and upward ones generally decrease self-esteem, and the pursuit of high self-esteem, as we have seen, is more prominent in Western as opposed to Eastern cultures, then it should come as no surprise that there are cultural differences here. White and Lehman (2005), for example, found that Asian Canadians made more upward social comparisons than did European Canadians, particularly following failures and when the opportunity to self-improve was made salient. These findings, the authors suggest, indicate that the Asian Canadians were using social comparisons more as a vehicle for self-improvement than self-enhancement.

There are also some age-related trends in social comparison. In general, older adults tend to make more downward comparisons than do younger adults, which is part of the reason why their self-esteem is typically higher (Helgeson & Mickelson, 2000). Older adults also use more downward social comparisons to cope with feelings of regret than do younger adults, and these comparisons are often more effective for them (Bauer, Wrosch, & Jobin, 2008). In addition to these cultural and age differences in social comparison processes, there are also individual differences. People who score higher on a measure of social comparison orientation have been found to experience more positive affect following downward social comparisons and more negative affect following upward ones (Buunk, Zurriaga, Peiró, Nauta, & Gosalvez, 2005).

Social Identity Theory: Our Sense of Self Is Influenced by the Groups We Belong To

In our discussion of social comparisons, we have seen that who we compare ourselves to can affect how we feel about ourselves, for better or worse. Another social influence on our self-esteem is through our group memberships. For example, we can gain self-esteem by perceiving ourselves as members of important and valued groups that make us feel good about ourselves. Social identity theory asserts that we draw part of our sense of identity and self-esteem from the social groups that we belong to (Hogg, 2003; Oakes, Haslam, & Turner, 1994; Tajfel, 1981).

Normally, group memberships result in positive feelings, which occur because we perceive our own groups and thus ourselves in a positive light. If you are an Arsenal F.C. fan, or if you are an Australian, or if you are a Muslim, for example, then your membership in the group becomes part of what you are, and the membership often makes you feel good about yourself. The list that follows presents a measure of the strength of social identity with a group of university students. If you complete the measure for your own school, university, or college, the research evidence would suggest that you would agree mostly with the statements that indicate that you identify with the group.

Figure 3.10 A Measure of Social Identity

For each of the following items, please indicate your response on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree) by writing a number in the blank next to the question.

___ I identify with the group of University of Maryland students.
___ I am glad to belong to the group of University of Maryland students.
___ I make excuses for belonging to the group of University of Maryland students.
___ I consider the group of University of Maryland students to be important.
___ I feel held back by the group of University of Maryland students. (R)
___ I criticize the group of University of Maryland students. (R)
___ I see myself as belonging to the group of University of Maryland students.
___ I try to hide belonging to the group of University of Maryland students. (R)
___ I feel strong ties with the group of University of Maryland students.
___ I am annoyed to say that I am a member of the group of University of Maryland students. (R)

Kay Deaux and her colleagues (Deaux, Reid, Mizrahi, & Ethier, 1995) asked U.S. college students to list the groups that they identified with. As you can see in Table 3.1 ,”Varieties of Social Identities,” the students reported belonging to a wide variety of groups and claimed that many of these groups provided them with social identities. The categories that they listed included ethnic and religious groups (e.g., Asian, Jewish), political affiliations (e.g., conservative, Democrat), occupations and hobbies (e.g., gardener, tennis player), personal relationships (e.g., husband, girlfriend), and marginalized groups (e.g., gay, homeless). You can see that these identities were likely to provide a lot of positive feelings for the individuals.

Which of our many identities is most accessible for us will vary from day to day as a function of the particular situation we are in (Yakushko, Davidson, & Williams, 2009). Seeing our national flag outside a government office may remind of us our national identity, whereas walking past our local soccer stadium may remind us of our identification with our team. Identity can also be heightened when it is threatened by conflict with another group—such as during an important sports game with a rival team. We each have multiple social identities, and which of our identities we draw our self-esteem from at a given time will depend on the situation we are in, as well as the social goals we have.

In particular, we use occasions when our social groups are successful in meeting their goals to fuel our self-worth. Robert Cialdini and his colleagues (Cialdini et al., 1976) studied the idea that we can sometimes enhance our self-esteem by basking in the reflected glory of our ingroups, which occurs when we use and advertise our ingroups’ positive achievements to boost our self-esteem . To test this idea, they observed the clothes and clothing accessories that students at different U.S. universities wore to classes on Mondays. They found that when the university’s football team had won its game on Saturday, students were likely to emphasize their university membership by wearing clothing, such as sweatshirts and hats with the symbols of the university on them. However, they were significantly less likely to wear university clothing on the Mondays that followed a football loss. Furthermore, in a study in which students from a university were asked to describe a victory by their university team, they frequently used the term “we,” whereas when asked to describe a game in which their school lost, they used the term “we” significantly less frequently. Emphasizing that “we’re a good school” and “we beat them” evidently provided a social identity for these students, allowing them to feel good about themselves.

When people in our ingroups perform well, social identity theory suggests that we tend to make intergroup social comparisons, and by seeing our group as doing better than other groups, we come to feel better about ourselves. However, this is not generally what happens when we make intragroup comparisons—those between ourselves and other ingroup members. In this case it is often not advantageous to bask in the glory of others in our ingroups, because in some cases the other person’s successes may create an upward comparison and thus more negative emotions. Self-evaluation maintenance theory (Tesser, 1988) asserts that our self-esteem can be threatened when someone else outperforms us, particularly if that person is close to us and the performance domain is central to our self-concept. This theory leads to the interesting implication that these threats will often occur in the context of our family relationships, and they have been shown to be an integral part of both family functioning in general (Tesser, 1980) and marital relationships in particular (Beach et al., 1996).

When threats occur, the theory states that we will typically try to rebuild our self-esteem using one of three main strategies. The first is distancing, where we redefine ourselves as less close to the person in question. For example, if a close friend keeps beating you at tennis, you may, over time, seek out another playing partner to protect your bruised ego. Interestingly, people who are more narcissistic are more likely to use this tactic than people who are lower in these characteristics (Nicholls & Stukas, 2011). The second option is to redefine how important the trait or skill really is to your self-concept. For instance, you may decide that tennis ability just isn’t that important a part of who you are, and choose to take up another hobby instead. The third strategy is try to improve on the ability in question. In the current example, this would mean practicing more often or hiring a coach to improve your tennis game. Notice the clear parallels between these strategies that occur in response to threats to our self-esteem posed by the behavior of others, and those that are triggered by feelings of self-discrepancy, discussed earlier in this chapter. In both cases, we seek to rebuild our self-esteem by redefining the aspect of ourself that has been diminished.

Self-Presentation: Our Sense of Self Is Influenced by the Audiences We Have

It is interesting to note that each of the social influences on our sense of self that we have discussed can be harnessed as a way of protecting our self-esteem. The final influence we will explore can also be used strategically to elevate not only our own esteem, but the esteem we have in the eyes of others. Positive self-esteem occurs not only when we do well in our own eyes but also when we feel that we are positively perceived by the other people we care about.

Because it is so important to be seen as competent and productive members of society, people naturally attempt to present themselves to others in a positive light. We attempt to convince others that we are good and worthy people by appearing attractive, strong, intelligent, and likable and by saying positive things to others (Jones & Pittman, 1982; Schlenker, 2003). The tendency to present a positive self-image to others, with the goal of increasing our social status , is known as self-presentation , and it is a basic and natural part of everyday life.

A big question in relation to self-presentation is the extent to which it is an honest versus more strategic, potentially dishonest enterprise. The sociologist Erving Goffman (1959) developed an influential theory of self-presentation and described it as a mainly honest process, where people need to present the parts of themselves required by the social role that they are playing in a given situation. If everyone plays their part according to accepted social scripts and conventions, then the social situation will run smoothly and the participants will avoid embarrassment. Seen in this way, self-presentation is a transparent process, where we are trying to play the part required of us, and we trust that others are doing the same. Other theorists, though, have viewed self-presentation as a more strategic endeavor, which may involve not always portraying ourselves in genuine ways (e.g., Jones & Pittman, 1982). As is often the case with two seemingly opposing perspectives, it is quite likely that both are true in certain situations, depending on the social goals of the actors.

Different self-presentation strategies may be used to create different emotions in other people, and the use of these strategies may be evolutionarily selected because they are successful (Toma, Hancock, & Ellison, 2008). Edward Jones and Thane Pittman (1982) described five self-presentation strategies, each of which is expected to create a resulting emotion in the other person:

The goal of ingratiation is to create liking by using flattery or charm.
The goal of intimidation is to create fear by showing that you can be aggressive.
The goal of exemplification is to create guilt by showing that you are a better person than the other.
The goal of supplication is to create pity by indicating to others that you are helpless and needy.
The goal of self-promotion is to create respect by persuading others that you are competent.

No matter who is using it, self-presentation can easily be overdone, and when it is, it backfires. People who overuse the ingratiation technique and who are seen as obviously and strategically trying to get others to like them are often disliked because of this. Have you ever had a slick salesperson obviously try to ingratiate him- or herself with you just so you will buy a particular product, and you end up not liking the person and making a hasty retreat from the premises? People who overuse the exemplification or self-promotion strategies by boasting or bragging, particularly if that boasting does not appear to reflect their true characteristics, may end up being perceived as arrogant and even self-deluded (Wosinska, Dabul, Whetstone-Dion, & Cialdini, 1996). Using intimidation can also often backfire; acting more modestly may be more effective. Again, the point is clear: we may want to self-promote with the goal of getting others to like us, but we must also be careful to consider the point of view of the other person. Being aware of these strategies is not only useful for better understanding how to use them responsibly ourselves, it can also help us to understand that other people’s behaviors may often reflect their self-presentational concerns. This can, in turn, facilitate better empathy for others, particularly when they are exhibiting challenging behaviors (Friedlander & Schwartz, 1985). For instance, perhaps someone’s verbally aggressive behavior toward you is more about that person being afraid rather than about his or her desire to do you harm.

Now that we have explored some of the commonly used self-presentation tactics, let’s look at how they manifest in specific social behaviors. One concrete way to self-promote is to display our positive physical characteristics. A reason that many of us spend money on improving our physical appearance is the desire to look good to others so that they will like us. We can also earn status by collecting expensive possessions such as fancy cars and big houses and by trying to associate with high-status others. Additionally, we may attempt to dominate or intimidate others in social interactions. People who talk more and louder and those who initiate more social interactions are afforded higher status. A businessman who greets others with a strong handshake and a smile, and people who speak out strongly for their opinions in group discussions may be attempting to do so as well. In some cases, people may even resort to aggressive behavior, such as bullying, in attempts to improve their status (Baumeister, Smart, & Boden, 1996).

Self-promotion can also be pursued in our online social behaviors. For example, a study in Taiwan conducted by Wang and Stefanone (2013) used survey methodology to investigate the relationship between personality traits, self-presentation and the use of check-ins on Facebook. Interestingly, narcissism was found to predict scores on a measure of exhibitionistic, self-promoting use of Facebook check-ins, which included items like “I check in so people know that I am with friends,” and “I expect friends to like or leave comments on my check-in status on Facebook.”

Other studies have also found associations between narcissistic traits and self-promotional activity on Facebook. Mehdizadeh (2010), for example, found that narcissistic personality scores were positively correlated with the amount of daily logins on Facebook and the duration of each login. Furthermore, narcissistic traits were related to increased use of self-promotional material in the main photo, view photos, status updates, and notes sections of people’s Facebook pages.

Analysis of the content and language used in Facebook postings has also revealed that they are sometimes used by individuals to self-promote. Bazarova, Taft, Choi, and Cosley (2013) explored self-presentation through language styles used in status updates, wall posts, and private messages from 79 participants. The use of positive emotion words was correlated with self-reported self-presentation concern in status updates. This is consistent with the idea that people share positive experiences with Facebook friends partly as a self-enhancement strategy.

Online self-presentation doesn’t seem to be limited to Facebook usage. There is also evidence that self-promotional concerns are often a part of blogging behaviors, too. Mazur and Kozarian (2010), for example, analyzed the content of adolescents’ blog entries and concluded that a careful concern for self-presentation was more central to their blogging behavior than direct interaction with others. This often seems to apply to micro-blogging sites like Twitter. Marwick and Boyd (2011) found that self-presentational strategies were a consistent part of celebrity tweeting, often deployed by celebrities to maintain their popularity and image.

You might not be surprised to hear that men and women use different approaches to self-presentation. Men are more likely to present themselves in an assertive way, by speaking and interrupting others, by visually focusing on the other person when they are speaking, and by leaning their bodies into the conversation. Women, on the other hand, are more likely to be modest; they tend to create status by laughing and smiling, and by reacting more positively to the statements of others (Dovidio, Brown, Heltman, Ellyson, & Keation, 1988).

These gender differences are probably in large part socially determined as a result of the different reinforcements that men and women receive for using particular self-presentational strategies. For example, self-promoting by speaking out and acting assertively can be more effective for men than it is for women, in part because cross-culturally consistent stereotypes tend to depict assertiveness as more desirable in men than in women. These stereotypes can have very important consequences in the real world. For instance, one of the reasons for the “glass ceiling” existing in some occupations (where women experience discrimination in reaching top positions in organizations) may be attributable to the more negative reactions that their assertive behaviors, necessary for career advancement, receive than those of their male colleagues (Eagly & Carli, 2007).

There are also some cultural differences in the extent to which people use self-presentation strategies in social contexts. For instance, when considering job interviews, Konig, Haftseinsson, Jansen, & Stadelmann (2011) found that individuals from Iceland and Switzerland used less self-presentational behavior than people from the United States. Differences in self-presentation have also been found in job interviews involving individuals from Ghana, Turkey, Norway, and Germany, with the former two groups showing higher impression management scores than the latter two (Bye et al., 2011).

So far we have been talking about self-presentation as it operates in particular situations in the short-term. However, we also engage in longer-term self-presentational projects, where we seek to build particular reputations with particular audiences. Emler & Reicher (1995) describe the unique capacity humans have to know one another by repute and argue that, accordingly, we are often engaged in a process of reputation management , which is a form of long-term self-presentation, where individuals seek to build and sustain specific reputations with important audiences . According to this perspective, our behaviors in current social situations may not only be to serve our self-presentational goals in that moment, but also be based on a consideration of their longer-term repercussions for our reputations. As many politicians, for example, know only too well, a poor decision from their past can come back to haunt them when their reputation is being assessed during a campaign.

The concept of reputation management can be used to help explain a wide variety of social and antisocial behaviors, including corporate branding (Smith, Smith, & Wang, 2010), sociomoral debate (Emler, Tarry, & St. James, 2007), and teenage criminal activity (Lopez-Romero & Romero, 2011). In the last example, it is argued that a lot of teenage antisocial behavior results from a desire to build a reputation for toughness and rebelliousness with like-minded peer audiences (Emler & Reicher, 1995). Similarly, antisocial and self-destructive online actions, like people posting to Facebook their involvement in illegal acts during riots, or individuals engaging in life-threatening activities in Internet crazes like Neknominate, may make more sense if they are considered partly as stemming from a desire to project a particular reputation to specific audiences. Perhaps the perceived social kudos from doing these things outweighs the obvious personal risks in the individuals’ minds at the time.

People often project distinct reputations to different social audiences. For example, adolescents who engage in antisocial activity to build reputations for rebelliousness among their peers will often seek to construct very different reputations when their parents are the audience (Emler & Reicher, 1995). The desire to compartmentalize our reputations and audiences can even spill over into our online behaviors. Wiederhold (2012) found that, with some adolescents’ Facebook friends numbering in the hundreds or thousands, increasing numbers are moving to Twitter in order to reach a more selective audience. One critical trigger for this has been that their parents are now often friends with them on Facebook, creating a need for young people to find a new space where they can build reputations that may not always be parent-friendly (Wiederhold, 2012).

Although the desire to present the self favorably is a natural part of everyday life, both person and situation factors influence the extent to which we do it. For one, we are more likely to self-present in some situations than in others. When we are applying for a job or meeting with others whom we need to impress, we naturally become more attuned to the social aspects of the self, and our self-presentation increases.

There are also individual differences. Some people are naturally better at self-presentation—they enjoy doing it and are good at it—whereas others find self-presentation less desirable or more difficult. An important individual-difference variable known as self-monitoring has been shown in many studies to have a major impact on self-presentation. Self-monitoring refers to the tendency to be both motivated and capable of regulating our behavior to meet the demands of social situations (Gangestad & Snyder, 2000). High self-monitors are particularly good at reading the emotions of others and therefore are better at fitting into social situations—they agree with statements such as “In different situations and with different people, I often act like very different persons,” and “I guess I put on a show to impress or entertain people.” Low self-monitors, on the other hand, generally act on their own attitudes, even when the social situation suggests that they should behave otherwise. Low self-monitors are more likely to agree with statements such as “At parties and social gatherings, I do not attempt to do or say things that others will like,” and “I can only argue for ideas that I already believe.” In short, high self-monitors use self-presentation to try to get other people to like them by behaving in ways that the others find desirable, whereas low self-monitors tend to follow their internal convictions more than the demands of the social situation.

In one experiment that showed the importance of self-monitoring, Cheng and Chartrand (2003) had college students interact individually with another student (actually an experimental confederate) whom they thought they would be working with on an upcoming task. While they were interacting, the confederate subtly touched her own face several times, and the researchers recorded the extent to which the student participant mimicked the confederate by also touching his or her own face.

The situational variable was the status of the confederate. Before the meeting began, and according to random assignment to conditions, the students were told either that they would be the leader and that the other person would be the worker on the upcoming task, or vice versa. The person variable was self-monitoring, and each participant was classified as either high or low on self-monitoring on the basis of his or her responses to the self-monitoring scale.

As you can see in Figure 3.14, “Self-Monitoring and Behavioral Mimicry,” Cheng and Chartrand found an interaction effect: the students who had been classified as high self-monitors were more likely to mimic the behavior of the confederate when she was described as being the leader than when she was described as being the worker, indicating that they were “tuned in” to the social situation and modified their behavior to appear more positively. Although the low self-monitors did mimic the other person, they did not mimic her more when the other was high, versus low, status. This finding is consistent with the idea that the high self-monitors were particularly aware of the other person’s status and attempted to self-present more positively to the high-status leader. The low self-monitors, on the other hand—because they feel less need to impress overall—did not pay much attention to the other person’s status.

High self-monitors imitated more when the person they were interacting with was of higher (versus lower) status. Low self-monitors were not sensitive to the status of the other. Data are from Cheng and Chartrand (2003).

This differential sensitivity to social dynamics between high and low self-monitors suggests that their self-esteem will be affected by different factors. For people who are high in self-monitoring, their self-esteem may be positively impacted when they perceive that their behavior matches the social demands of the situation, and negatively affected when they feel that it does not. In contrast, low self-monitors may experience self-esteem boosts when they see themselves behaving consistently with their internal standards, and feel less self-worth when they feel they are not living up to them (Ickes, Holloway, Stinson, & Hoodenpyle, 2006).

H5P: TEST YOUR LEARNING: CHAPTER 3 DRAG THE WORDS – CLIMATE CHANGE AND SUSTAINABLE BEHAVIOR IN SOCIAL CONTEXT

Social psychologists often use concepts from the study of the self to make sense of important social issues For example, many are interested in understanding sustainable behaviors in relation to climate change. To test your learning of some key concepts from this chapter, read through each of the following sustainability-related scenarios. For each one, select the most relevant concept from chapter 3 by matching it with the correct scenarios.

Concepts: self-affirmation, deindividuation, self-monitoring, basking in reflected glory, cognitive dissonance, social comparison, self-complexity, social identity theory, self-consciousness, self-presentation.

Some politicians may change how much they publicly endorse sustainability initiatives that may clash with economic concerns, depending on which groups of people they are meeting with.
Many people feel a sense of inconsistency because they think that tackling climate change is an important issue, but do not always practice sustainable behaviors.
Some activists for climate change see their activist identity as a large part of their self-concept, and may have relatively few other important identities.
People may feel more judged on whether they practice sustainability in public, as opposed to more private settings.
Individuals may feel that their own commitments to sustainable behavior are inadequate if they see peers who are doing more.
Some people involved in climate change activism find that they draw self-esteem from the positive achievements of the relevant groups they belong to.
Some individuals may claim to practice more sustainable behaviors than is accurate, in order to appear in a positive light in front of particular audiences.
A student at a school that receives an institutional award for their sustainable practices may feel good about this and talk about their membership of the school more regularly in the aftermath.
When someone is criticized for not pursuing sustainable behaviors, for example not regularly recycling, they may respond with a counter claim in a related area, such as by noting that they drive a hybrid vehicle.
When people are in a large crowd, they may sometimes feel less personally accountable and practice less sustainable behaviors because of this. For instance when attendees at a music festival leave large amounts of litter behind.

Key Takeaways

Our self-concepts are affected by others’ appraisals, as demonstrated by concepts including the looking-glass self and self-labeling.
The self-concept and self-esteem are also often strongly influenced by social comparison. For example, we use social comparison to determine the accuracy and appropriateness of our thoughts, feelings, and behavior.
When we are able to compare ourselves favorably with others through downward social comparison, we feel good about ourselves. Upward social comparison with others who are better off than we are leads to negative emotions.
Social identity refers to the positive emotions that we experience as a member of an important social group.
Normally, our group memberships result in positive feelings, which occur because we perceive our own groups, and thus ourselves, in a positive light.
Which of our many category identities is most accessible for us will vary from day to day as a function of the particular situation we are in.
In the face of others’ behaviors, we may enhance our self-esteem by “basking in the reflected glory” of our ingroups or of other people we know.
If other people’s actions threaten our sense of self according to self-evaluation maintenance theory, we may engage in a variety of strategies aimed at redefining our self-concept and rebuilding our self-esteem.
The tendency to present a positive self-image to others, with the goal of increasing our social status, is known as self-presentation, and it is a basic and natural part of everyday life. Different self-presentation strategies may be used to create different emotions in other people.
We often use self-presentation in the longer term, seeking to build and sustain particular reputations with specific social audiences.
The individual-difference variable of self-monitoring relates to the ability and desire to self-present.

Exercises and Critical Thinking

Describe some aspects of your self-concept that have been created through social comparison.
Describe times when you have engaged in downward and upward social comparison and the effects these comparisons have had on your self-esteem. To what extent do your experiences fit with the research evidence here?
What are your most salient social identities? How do they create positive feelings for you?
Outline a situation where someone else’s behavior has threatened your self-concept. Which of the strategies outlined in relation to self-evaluation maintenance theory did you engage in to rebuild your self-concept?
Identify a situation where you basked in the reflected glory of your ingroup’s behavior or peformance. What effect did this have on your self-esteem and why?
Describe some situations where people you know have used each of the self-presentation strategies that were listed in this section. Which strategies seem to be more and less effective in helping them to achieve their social goals, and why?
Consider your own level of self-monitoring. Do you think that you are more of a high or a low self-monitor, and why? What do you see as the advantages and disadvantages for you of the level of self-monitoring that you have?

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Yeung, K., & Martin, J. (2003). The Looking Glass Self: An empirical test and elaboration. Social Forces , 81 (3), 843-879. doi:10.1353/sof.2003.0048

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Part of how we see ourselves comes from our perception of how others see us.

When we are labeled, and others' views and expectations of us are affected by that labeling.

When we adopt others' labels explicitly into our self-concept.

When individuals turn prejudice directed toward them by others onto themselves.

When we learn about our abilities and skills, about the appropriateness and validity of our opinions, and about our relative social status by comparing our own attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors with those of others.

When we attempt to create a positive image of ourselves through favorable comparisons with others who are worse off than we are.

When we compare ourselves with others who are better off than we are.

We draw part of our sense of identity and self-esteem from the social groups that we belong to.

When we use and advertise our ingroups' positive achievements to boost our self-esteem.

Our self-esteem can be threatened when someone else outperforms us, particularly if that person is close to us and the performance domain is central to our self-concept.

The tendency to present a positive self-image to others, with the goal of increasing our social status.

a form of long-term self-presentation, where individuals seek to build and sustain specific reputations with important audiences.

The tendency to be both motivated and capable of regulating our behavior to meet the demands of social situations.

Principles of Social Psychology - 1st International H5P Edition Copyright © 2022 by Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani and Dr. Hammond Tarry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Social Comparison Effects on Academic Self-Concepts—Which Peers Matter Most?

Malte jansen.

1 Institute for Educational Quality Improvement (IQB), Humboldt University Berlin

2 Centre for International Student Assessment (ZIB), Munich, Germany

Zsófia Boda

3 Department of Sociology and Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER), University of Essex

Georg Lorenz

This study was funded by the Volkswagen Foundation as part of the project “Who Succeeds and Who Fails? A Multilevel Social Network Analysis Approach to Immigrants’ Psychological and Sociocultural Adaption in Europe (ISONET)” (- AZ 93 489). Zsófia Boda acknowledges support from the Economic and Social Research Council (Grant ES/S012486/1).

The dataset can be acquired for secondary analysis at the research data archive at GESIS | Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences. Because our study was based on secondary data use, no approval from an ethics committee or institutional review board was necessary. Our study was not preregistered. Further materials such as analysis code will be made available upon request.

Associated Data

Social comparisons with peers are important sources of self-development during adolescence. Many previous studies showed that students’ academic self-concepts (ASC) form by contrasting one’s own achievement with the average of one’s class or school (the Big-Fish-Little-Pond Effect [BFLPE]). Based on social comparison theory, however, we would expect some peers to be more likely social comparison targets than other peers, for example, because they are more visible or students perceive them as similar to themselves. In this study, we used sociometric data to analyze which peers play the most important role for social comparison effects on ASC. We examined how the average achievement of friends, study partners, peers perceived as popular by the student, as well as same-gender and same-ethnic peers affect the general ASC and how these effects compare to the effect of the classroom’s average achievement. The study was based on a German longitudinal sample of 2,438 students (44% no recent immigrant background, 19% Turkish immigrant background, 10% Eastern European immigrant background, 27% other immigrant background) from 117 school classes that were followed from grade 9 to 10. Results from longitudinal social network analysis do not confirm substantial incremental effects of specific types of peers, while class average achievement showed a stable negative effect (confirming the BFLPE). In addition, we could provide evidence for social selection effects based on ASC. We conclude that classrooms provide a specific setting that imposes social comparisons with the “generalized peer” rather than with specific subgroups of peers.

Students with high academic self-concepts (ASCs)—that is, students who think they are doing well at school—also show higher achievement, effort, attainment, academic aspirations, and intrinsic motivation ( Denissen et al., 2007 ; Guo et al., 2017 ; Huang, 2011 ; Marsh et al., 2018 ; Valentine et al., 2004 ; Wigfield & Eccles, 2000 ). ASC is therefore a central component of academic motivation and one of the most studied motivational constructs in developmental and educational psychology. The development of students’ ASCs is not only shaped by their own achievement, but also by the social environment ( Becker & Neumann, 2016 ; Gore & Cross, 2014 ; Huguet et al., 2009 ). The Big-Fish-Little-Pond Effect (BFLPE) predicts a higher ASC for a student in a lower-achieving class or school, compared with a student with the same ability level in a higher achieving class or school. Evidence for the BFLPE exists cross-culturally, in different domains, and for different age groups ( Fang et al., 2018 ).

The BFLPE is assumed to result from social comparisons ( Huguet et al., 2009 ; Marsh, 1987 ). One key assumption of the BFLPE is that students compare themselves with a “generalized other” (i.e., the average achievement of their classmates) to estimate their ranking within a given group ( Huguet et al., 2009 ). Following this idea, all peers are assumed to be equally important social comparison targets 1 because they contribute equally to the group average. However, this assumption can be questioned on the basis of insights from social comparison research, which emphasizes that information may not be equally available about all school- or classmates ( Mussweiler, 2003 ) and that not all peers are equally subjectively meaningful for students ( Lomi et al., 2011 ). Some peers, such as friends, peers one frequently studies with, particularly visible and popular peers, and peers with the same gender and ethnicity, may be more important comparison targets than other peers. Despite first attempts (see Koivuhovi et al., 2020 ; Wouters et al., 2013 ), though, the relative importance of such (probably overlapping) subgroups of peers as social comparison targets has rarely been tested in BFLPE research.

In this study, we examined which peers play the most important role for social comparison effects on ASC. We used sociometric data (i.e., information on friendship ties, on study partners, and on popularity perceptions) which we analyzed using longitudinal social network analyses techniques (stochastic actor-oriented models [SAOMs]). These models have only recently been introduced to the field of development psychology ( Dijkstra et al., 2013 ; Gremmen et al., 2017 ; Laninga-Wijnen et al., 2019 ; Rambaran et al., 2017 ) and have a strong potential for gaining a deeper understanding of social comparison processes that has not yet been exploited in ASC research. This method allows us to investigate whether different types of peers impose social influence (i.e., students being affected by the characteristics of their peers as a result of comparisons with their peers’ achievement). At the same time, the SAOM approach considers that specific peers (e.g., friends and study partners) are self-selected in the first place and controls for such social selection processes (e.g., students with similar achievement or ASC selecting each other as friends) when estimating peer effects.

Social Comparison Theory

In his seminal Social Comparison Theory (SCT), Festinger (1954) postulated some core processes governing social comparisons. Among others, SCT introduced the similarity hypothesis : people should choose social comparison targets that are relatively similar to them in terms of achievement level or attitudes because such comparisons are perceived to be more informative and meaningful than comparisons with different targets ( Festinger, 1954 ).

Since the first formulation of Festinger’s SCT, research on the conditions, mechanisms, and effects of social comparisons has been a staple in social psychology and also received attention in developmental psychology ( Butler, 1998 ; France-Kaatrude & Smith, 1985 ). One central distinction added to SCT is that between contrasting and assimilating social comparisons ( Gerber et al., 2018 ; Mussweiler, 2003 ). In the case of contrast effects , the ability self-perception diverges from the perceived ability of the target. That is, if the comparison target has a higher (lower) ability, one’s ASC will become lower (higher). In the case of assimilation , the ability self-perception adapts toward the ability of the target. That is, if the comparison target has a higher (lower) ability, one’s ASC would also become higher (lower). Assimilation has also been assumed to result from “basking in reflected glory” ( Dockx et al., 2019 ; Trautwein et al., 2006 ) and indicates identification with a certain group and its characteristics. That is, students who are part of high-achieving groups and engage in assimilation, would conclude that owing to being part of this group, they must be good achievers, too.

Mussweiler (2003) argued that whether contrast or assimilation takes place depends on an initial, rapid, and holistic judgment of similarity between oneself and the target. If the target is perceived to be similar (e.g., if the target is a friend who shares characteristics with oneself), the subject will engage in similarity testing and knowledge relating to similarity will become more easily accessible leading to assimilating comparisons. On the contrary, if a target is perceived to be dissimilar in the initial judgment, the subject will engage in dissimilarity testing and information on dissimilarity is more easily accessible leading to contrasting comparisons. A recent meta-analysis by Gerber et al. (2018) reviewed more than 60 years of research on SCT. They focused on (mostly experimental) studies which involved comparisons to specific single targets (rather than multiple targets or group averages). The analysis showed a general tendency toward contrasting rather than assimilating social comparisons. The authors concluded that “the common response to comparison is contrast” (p. 18). As we will discuss below, this preference for contrasting comparisons is very consistent with the BFLPE.

Social Comparisons in the Classroom: The Big-Fish-Little-Pond Effect

Students who learn in high-achieving groups (i.e., schools or classrooms) report lower ASCs than students with similar individual achievement in low-achieving learning groups. This is the central postulation of the BFLPE ( Marsh, 1987 ) and one of the most robust findings in educational psychology ( Seaton et al., 2009 ). Typical studies on the BFLPE use a multilevel design and large-scale observational data of students. The effect is then operationalized as the incremental negative effect of school- or classroom average achievement on ASC beyond the positive effect of individual achievement.

The BFLPE has been interpreted as a result of contrasting social comparison processes ( Marsh, 1987 ). Testing the mechanism underlying this assumption (e.g., by testing boundary conditions of the effect) played a relatively minor role in early BFLPE research. In their critical review, Dai and Rinn (2008) suggested to broaden the research scope. Consequently, an increasing number of studies on the BFLPE began to test specific assumptions from SCT or used innovative research designs to replicate the effect. For example, some studies examined students that experienced a change in their learning environment (e.g., moving between school tracks or courses) and thus, assumingly, their frame of reference. These studies supported that students moving into higher-achieving contexts experienced a drop in their ASC ( Arens & Watermann, 2015 ; von Keyserlingk et al., 2019 ; Wouters et al., 2012 ).

Local dominance effects , initially described in social psychology as the tendency to “rely on the most local comparison information while deemphasizing more general, and typically more diagnostic, forms of comparison feedback” ( Zell & Alicke, 2010 , p. 369), also received recent attention in BFLPE research. Several studies showed that the more local frame of reference of the classroom produced a stronger negative BFLPE than the school frame of reference ( Janssen et al., 2015 ; Liem et al., 2013 ; Marsh et al., 2014 ). This is plausible given that (a) students know more about the achievement of their classmates compared with other peers in their school and (b) some teachers grade “on a curve” within a class and thus teacher-assigned grades, which are an important source of ASC ( Marsh et al., 2018 ), partly represent the class rank.

Probably the most direct tests of social comparison mechanisms in BFLPE research were conducted in the few studies that combined estimations of the BFLPE with items asking students explicitly about their social comparison targets and about their perceived ability rank in their class. The seminal study by Huguet et al. (2009) showed that the substantial negative BFLPE (i.e., the usage of peer average achievement as a frame of reference for contrasting comparisons) coexists with additional single comparisons to specific classmates, which produce small assimilation effects. However, other salient characteristics that might affect the selection of comparison targets, such as gender or ethnic status, were not examined. Furthermore, the study showed that the BFLPE can be explained by students’ perceived rank in class. This study provided the most conclusive evidence for the notion that the BFLPE is based on social comparisons, more specifically “ego-deflating comparisons with the class standard” ( Huguet et al., 2009 , p. 158). The mediating effect of perceived within-class rank between average achievement and ASC has also been found in other studies ( Marsh et al., 2008 , 2014 ; Thijs et al., 2010 ).

This evidence suggests that social comparisons with generalized others (i.e., the average classmate), which lead to stable contrast effects, can be differentiated from social comparisons with specific others and that both processes can have independent effects. However, few previous studies investigated who these specific others are—that is, whether there are particular subgroups within a class that students compare themselves with.

Social Comparisons With Specific Peers as Social Comparison Targets

In the following, we will describe three interrelated aspects that might drive social comparisons with specific groups of classmates as well as preferences among students for “local” frames of reference.

Availability of Information on the Target’s Performance

To be able to conduct comparisons, students first need to know about the achievement of their target and that knowledge needs to be available to them when making their comparisons ( Mussweiler, 2003 ). Students will know more about the abilities of students they frequently spend time with, which makes comparisons more accurate. This is an argument for the importance of friends and particularly study partners with whom students frequently engage in academic content.

The notion that people select similar others as preferred social comparison targets (similarity hypothesis) was already introduced by Festinger (1954) and its importance highlighted by Mussweiler (2003) . Similar others could be peers from students’ social ingroups along salient dimensions, such as gender or ethnicity ( Huguet et al., 2001 ; Tajfel, 1974 ). In addition, social network studies demonstrated that friends are more likely than other peers to show similarities along various dimensions ( homophily ) ( McPherson et al., 2001 ), such as academic achievement ( Gremmen et al., 2017 ; Kretschmer et al., 2018 ; Lomi et al., 2011 ), aspirations ( Lorenz et al., 2020 ), favorite subjects ( Raabe et al., 2019 ), and engagement ( Wang et al., 2018 ). Therefore, friends may serve as “routine standards” for social comparisons ( Lubbers et al., 2009 ; Mussweiler & Rüter, 2003 ). Similarities have also been found among those who study together ( Stadtfeld et al., 2019 ), likely because study partners are also more likely to become friends over time and vice versa ( Palacios et al., 2019 ), making study partners another likely comparison target.

Status and (Perceived) Popularity

Social status has high importance in the life of adolescents. Students of high status can exert social power over other students by serving as opinion leaders or role models ( Coleman, 1961 ), often through a combination of prosocial and aggressive behaviors ( Cillessen et al., 2011 ). Therefore, other students might strive to adapt their behavior to that of peers they perceive as popular ( Helms et al., 2014 ; Laninga-Wijnen et al., 2018 ). In the case of social comparisons, assimilation effects could be a means to increase similarity between oneself and popular students—if popular students had high academic achievement, other students may increase their ASCs. However, this would only apply for students who themselves have a high popularity motive which is not the case for all students ( Dawes & Xie, 2017 ; Jones & Cooke, 2021 ).

Summary and State of Research

Overall, it is unclear whether comparisons with specific peers would result in contrast or assimilation effects. Zell and Alicke (2010 , p. 376) formulated a possible preference for friends within the framework of the above-mentioned local dominance effect and suggested that contrast effects would be present: “Students who, by chance, associate with friends […] who perform terribly on standardized tests may have inflated ability perceptions.” Furthermore, as mentioned above, previous research ( Gerber et al., 2018 ) indicates that contrast effects are much more frequent and stable than assimilation effects. However, a perception of similarity to the target should increase the likelihood of assimilation—thus if assimilation effects do occur, it should be when comparing oneself with friends ( Mussweiler, 2003 ; Suls et al., 2002 ).

Very few studies have tested the role of friends for within-class social comparisons and students’ self-concepts empirically. In longitudinal studies, having friends with high grades seemed to have a small detrimental effect on self-evaluations of low-achieving students ( Altermatt & Pomerantz, 2005 ; Guay et al., 1999 ). However, the studies did not control for class-average achievement.

The probably most comprehensive study of Wouters et al. (2013) tested two competing hypotheses: a local frame of reference should result in “friendship dominance,” but the salient nature of comparisons with the class mean should lead to “classroom dominance.” The authors also tested whether both standards could be used simultaneously. Using a large sample of primary school students from The Netherlands, they included both predictors in the same model and found only a negative effect of classroom average achievement. A recent study based on Finnish primary found similar classroom-dominance when comparing classroom average and the average of peers students spend time with during and after classes ( Koivuhovi et al., 2020 ). It should be noted that, even though Koivuhovi et al. (2020) used techniques from social network analysis, they did not differentiate social selection and influence mechanics. Furthermore, the study did not examine friendships.

The central research question of this study was how social comparisons with different (overlapping) groups of peers in the classroom affect students’ ASCs. We juxtaposed different frames of reference and peer groups that students might use for their social comparisons using longitudinal social network analysis (SAOMs; Snijders et al., 2010 ) based on two measurement waves of secondary school students in Germany. Our working model is shown in Figure 1 . In addition to the classroom average achievement, we examine friends, study partners, peers the student perceives as popular as well as same-gender and same-ethnic classmates as possible frames of reference. reference.

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Note . References to the tables that include the models where the different effects are tested are shown in parentheses.

Without considering other frames of reference, we expect the classic BFLPE to be replicated—that is, we expect positive effects of individual achievement on ASC and additional negative effects of classroom average achievement (Hypothesis 1).

Regarding the effect of friend average achievement on ASC, two conflicting expectations can be formulated. The first argument is based on BFLPE research and the idea of a “local dominance” effect ( Koivuhovi et al., 2020 ): There should be a negative effect of friend-average achievement on ASC indicating contrasting social comparison. In this case, friends would function as a more local frame of reference than the classroom ( Zell & Alicke, 2010 ). In contrast, following arguments made in social psychology, a high similarity between the source and the target of social comparisons should make assimilation effects more likely ( Mussweiler, 2003 ). Thus, a positive effect of friend-average achievement on ASC could be interpreted as an assimilative social comparison effect with students’ ASCs benefiting from high-achieving peers through identification and “basking in reflected glory” ( Koivuhovi et al., 2020 ). On the grounds of previous empirical work on the prevalence of contrasting comparisons, we expect contrast effects be more likely—the effect of friend-average achievement on ASC should thus be negative (Hypothesis 2).

Study partners might serve as viable social comparison targets as students know more about their ability and achievement (owing to studying together) than about the achievement of other students. Furthermore, a study group might be perceived as a local frame of reference by the students ( Zell & Alicke, 2010 ). Therefore, as for friends (who substantially overlap with study partners; Stadtfeld et al., 2019 ), we expect the average achievement of study partner peers to show a negative effect on ASC (Hypothesis 3).

There are no previous studies on social comparison effects with student-perceived popular peers on ASC and it has been shown that popularity cannot easily be inferred from friendship status, but should be assessed separately ( Vörös et al., 2019 ). We expect the achievement of student-perceived popular peers to be meaningful for ASC owing to popular peers’ visibility and status (and thus being likely social comparison targets). One argument for assimilation effects could be that students perceived as popular serve as role models for the academic behavior within a class. However, this would only be the case if (a) students think of students they perceive as popular as similar to them in the first place ( Mussweiler, 2003 ), which is less likely than for friends, and/or (b) students have a popularity motive ( Jones & Cooke, 2021 ). Furthermore, contrast effects are generally dominant in most situations (see above). Therefore, we refrain from making a prediction on the direction of social comparison effects with student-perceived popular students and examine whether the effects of the average achievement of student-perceived popular peers on ASC are contrastive/negative (Hypothesis 4.a) or assimilative/positive (Hypothesis 4.b).

Finally, salient ingroups of same-gender or same-ethnic peers might constitute a more “local” frame of reference than the class. In that case, students would compare themselves with peers from their ingroups rather than all classmates, but still in a contrasting way. Therefore, the achievement of same-gender and same-ethnic peers should show a negative effect on ASC (Hypothesis 5).

We tested the effects for specific peers both with and without controlling for classroom average achievement, and our Hypotheses 2 to 5 assume that the effects of specific peers are incremental to possible effects of the classroom average. Through this juxtaposition of different frames of reference (see Figure 2 for an illustration how these different frames of reference can look like in the social network of one example classroom), we could examine whether there is “classroom dominance” or “friendship dominance” (or perhaps dominance of other specific peers) in social comparisons with one frame of reference possibly prevailing ( Wouters et al., 2013 ). We extended the studies by Wouters et al. (2013) and Koivuhovi et al. (2020) , who found evidence for “classroom dominance” (i.e., no incremental effect of friend-average achievement beyond a persisting BFLPE) in several ways. First, we separated social selection and influence processes (see below). Second, we considered several types of peers that could be valid comparison targets in addition to friends. Third, both studies were based on primary school samples. However, friendships become much more important as students reach adolescence where peers become their primary social contacts ( Larson & Richards, 1991 ). Therefore, we formulated no hypothesis on the dominance of different social comparison effects. Still, the relative strength and possible coexistence of these effects are essential research objectives of this study. study.

An external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.
Object name is dev_58_8_1541_fig2a.jpg

Note . Nodes (circles) refer to students, edges (arrows) refer to friendship nominations made by students. The plot was created using the R package igraph. The layout of the nodes is based on the Fruchterman-Reingold algorithm ( Fruchterman & Reingold, 1991 ). The aim of the algorithm is to depict the network based on aesthetic criteria such that the relationship structure (more connected nodes being more central) is well represented and that the visibility of nodes and edges is optimal (e.g., no edges crossing nodes). Black = examplary student, gray = comparison targets, white = classmates not used for comparison. Data from an exemplary classroom in the CILS4SEU dataset.

Finally, we note that, using terminology from social network research, the research questions we examine are examples of social influence —that is, an individual’s behavior or characteristic (here: students’ ASC) being affected by the behaviors or characteristics (here: achievement) of specific peers such as their friends ( Lomi et al., 2011 ). An old discussion in research on social networks is, however, whether people select friends who are similar to them (social selection based on homophily) or if friends become more similar over time (social influence) or both ( McPherson et al., 2001 ). For the study of social influence processes, it is therefore important to disentangle them from social selection ( Cohen-Cole & Fletcher, 2008 ; Steglich et al., 2010 ). For example, if students with a higher self-concept would preferably choose friends who also have high self-concepts in a given domain and thereby also have high achievement, this could result in cross-sectional similarities of self-concepts between friends and be misinterpreted as an assimilative social influence effect if selection was not taken into account. Similarly, if students with low self-concept would tend to select students with high achievement as their friends, this could be misinterpreted as a contrastive social influence effect (students with higher achieving friends have lower self-concepts).

Longitudinal social network models such as SAOMs allow us to disentangle social influence and social selection processes (such as homophily). Using such models, homophily regarding gender and ethnicity have been demonstrated to be key criteria for the selection of friends ( Lorenz et al., 2021 ; Raabe et al., 2019 ), and there is evidence suggesting that academic achievement is a predictor of friendship choices, too, ( Gremmen et al., 2017 ; Laninga-Wijnen et al., 2019 ). There is much less theoretical and empirical work on the question whereas students’ ASCs could also be linked to friendship selection processes. Identifying as “a good student” and perceiving someone else the same way might be a more important dimension along which to select similar friends than objective achievement. This is supported by empirical work demonstrating similarity among friends regarding self-perceptions and motivational beliefs ( Altermatt & Pomerantz, 2003 ). Another study based on longitudinal social network modeling found that similarity among students regarding academic self-efficacy and achievement can be attributed to selection processes along with self-efficacy and achievement ( Shin & Ryan, 2014 ). To our knowledge, however, no previous studies examined social selection based on ASCs.

Our study was based on the German sample of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Survey in Four European Countries (CILS4EU; Kalter et al., 2019 ). The CILS4EU is a large-scale panel study of secondary school students with an oversampling of students with immigrant backgrounds and one of the few studies that include sociometric measures (e.g., information about complete social networks within classrooms). The dataset can be acquired for secondary analysis at the research data archive at GESIS | Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences. Because our study was based on secondary data use, no approval from an ethics committee or institutional review board was necessary. However, data collection for the CILS4EU study in Germany was approved by the ministries for education of the federal states as well as state data protection officers. Our study was not preregistered. Further materials such as analysis code will be made available upon request.

We used the first two measurement waves. The target sample for CILS4EU in Germany were students who attended the 9th grade during the first wave. They were surveyed again 1 year later. Students were selected from all school-types (i.e., lower, intermediate and higher secondary track as well as comprehensive schools; for a more detailed description of Germany’s tracked school system, see Maaz et al., 2008 ). For the first wave, information regarding 5,013 adolescents’ social networks, self-concepts, school achievements and family backgrounds was collected between October 2010 and March 2011. This base sample size referred to the number of students that were reached and thus the number of cases in the student questionnaire dataset at T1. It resulted from a participation rate of 80.9% on student level. The school and student sampling process, participation rates and fieldwork are described in detail in the technical report ( CILS4EU, 2016 ). The data collection for the second wave (T2) took place about a year later (from September 2011 to February 2012 for 97% of the sample; however, there were a few students for which interviews were conducted later until June 2012).

Analysis Sample

Our study relied on SOAMs to study social networks longitudinally. These models have particular requirements with regard to the data structure. Thus, following the recommendations in the sociometric fieldwork reports of the CILS4EU ( Kruse et al., 2016 ; Kruse & Jacob, 2016 ) and previous applications of SAOMs ( Boda, 2018 , 2019 ; Lorenz et al., 2020 ; Raabe et al., 2019 ), we only analyzed classes with a sufficient participation rate across all waves and without major compositional changes. More specifically, we included classes only if (a) students in those classes participated in the sociometric questionnaire at both measurement points and students did not change the class between the two survey waves (resulting in N = 3.858), (b) not more than 25% of students dropped out between the measurement points (resulting in N = 2.506) and (c) the class included at least 10 students (resulting in N = 2.467). Finally, one class was excluded for which all grade variables were missing.

These exclusions resulted in an analysis sample of 2,438 students from 117 school classes. They were on average 15.18 years old ( SD = .66) and 47% were male. More than half of the students (56%) had an ethnic minority background with the biggest origin groups being students whose families emigrated from Turkey (19%) and Eastern Europe (10%). Further details on the sample can be found in Supplement 1, Table S1 , which includes the sample statistics.

Social Ties

The CILS4EU study is unique among publicly available panel data sets in its usage of comprehensive sociometric measures. Students were asked to nominate a maximum of five friends from their classroom (“Who are your best friends in class?,” max. five nominations), to report with which students they study together (“Who do you sometimes do your homework with?,” any number of nominations) and who they considered popular (“Who are the most popular students in this class,” max. five nominations). The sociometric questions were included in the student questionnaires at both T1 (9th grade) and T2 (10th grade). Details on the sociometric fieldwork can be found in the technical reports ( Kruse et al., 2016 ; Kruse & Jacob, 2016 ). In our sample, 30% of friends were also being nominated as study partners and 54% vice versa. Thus, these two sociometric features can be clearly differentiated even though overlap is to be expected ( Stadtfeld et al., 2019 ). Descriptive statistics at the network level (see Supplement 1 for details) showed that the friendship networks were denser than the study partner and perceived-popularity networks. All networks showed sufficient stability between the measurement occasions.

Academic Self-Concept

Because there are no domain-specific, multiitem ASC scales in the CILS4EU dataset, we constructed a proxy measure for general ASC. We combined three indicators referring to self-perceived domain-specific achievement in the three main subjects (“How well are you doing in the following subjects?” asked for German, English and mathematics with replies given on a 5-point scale ranging from not well at all to very well ) with two Likert-style indicators of general academic self-efficacy (“I am sure that I can do well at school” and “I am sure that I can get good grades at school” with agreement indicated on a 5-point-scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree ) to create a latent factor. All indicators were assessed in 9th (T1) and 10th (T2) grade. The resulting general ASC factors showed a reasonable, though not ideal fit (which is plausible given its nature as a combined proxy) to the data in a first-order one-factor confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) model (T1: CFI = .921, RMSEA = .091, SRMR = .042, df = 5; T2: CFI = .891, RMSEA = .131, SRMR = .057, df = 5) as well as high reliability (T1: McDonald’s ω = .82, T2: ω = .86). The model fit could be improved by adding two correlated residuals between the two self-concept measures in the language domains and between the two self-efficacy measures. This led to better model fit (T1: CFI = 1.00, RMSEA = .005, SRMR = .005, df = 3; T2: CFI = .999, RMSEA = .015, SRMR = .007, df = 3). However, the reliability was lower (T1: ω = .71, T2: ω = .81).

Therefore, factor scores from the CFA models without correlated residuals were used in the further multivariate analysis. Descriptive statistics of the indicators are provided in Supplement 1, Table S1 . However, we replicated model 3 for the friendship network using the latent self-concept variable with the two correlated residuals. The results were very consistent across all parameters (see Supplement 5 for details).

Academic Achievement

Similar to the procedure for ASC, we computed latent achievement scores based on five indicators that were then used in further analyses. This is in line with the recommendations by Dicke et al. (2018) to use several indicators when computing peer-averages to control for measurement error. We used reverse-scored teacher-assigned grades in German, Mathematics and English (which, in Germany, range from 1 [ excellent ] to 6 [ insufficient ]) as well as the sum scores of a cognitive ability test and a language ability test. Cognitive abilities were measured using a language-free test based on solving figural problems. The language ability tests were country-specific (given that different languages were being tested), but all had a focus on lexical knowledge using synonym- or antonym tests. In Germany, the verbal subscale of the KFT 4–12+ R ( Heller & Perleth, 2000 ) was used which is a well-validated and frequently used ability test for student samples. The achievement tests were only conducted at T1. The latent factor showed a reasonable fit (CFA = .964, RMSEA = .127, SRMR = .028; correlated residuals between the grade indicators were included) and reliability (ω = .67) given that it can be considered a composite achievement measure. We additionally created two separate measures (a) using only the two achievement tests and (b) using only the three grade variables. In a two-factorial CFA model, the fit was adequate (CFI = .964; RMSEA = .090; SRMR = .027) and the latent correlation between the achievement and the grade factor was .49. The results of the main models (model 3 for each of the social networks; see data analysis section) could be replicated with those alternate achievement measures (i.e., separate models for grades and test-scores were estimated), and they were consistent for all hypotheses (see Supplement 4 ).

Further Covariates

Gender was self-reported by the students. To assess the socioeconomic status (SES) of the students, they were asked to specify the current occupation of their parents. The information was recoded using the International Socio-Economic Index of Occupational Status (ISEI). The ISEI is a continuous measure aiming to classify occupations according to their income, prestige, and the required educational status, ranging from 16 (e.g., unskilled agricultural worker) to 90 (e.g., judge). It is thus a broad measure of SES that taps into parental education, vocational success, and income and has been frequently used in previous studies on social networks based on the same data (e.g., Lorenz et al., 2021 ). The ISEI was measured for both parents, but the higher ISEI was used in the analyses as an indicator for socioeconomic resources in the family. We further included students’ ethnic background which was computed based on the countries of birth of the students, their parents and their grandparents. The classification of origin groups followed the procedure described in Dollmann et al. (2014) . In the analyzed sample, it was possible to differentiate between four groups: native majority students ( N = 1,079), students of Turkish origin ( N = 454), students of Polish origin ( N = 254), and students of any other national origin ( N = 651).

Data Analysis

Stochastic actor-oriented models.

SAOMs simultaneously model changes in social networks (e.g., friendship ties) and individual characteristics (e.g., ASCs). SAOMs rely on simulations to infer the social mechanisms that potentially underlie the observed changes in a social network. The technical and mathematical foundations of SAOMs are described in detail in other work ( Snijders, 2017 ; Snijders et al., 2010 ; Steglich et al., 2010 )—in the following we will explain the conceptual idea. The simulations aim to reconstruct the evolution of the observed social network(s) as a sequence of many small changes while taking an actor-oriented perspective. That means actors (e.g., students in a classroom) are assumed to control their outgoing ties (i.e., establishing new friendship ties or maintaining or terminating existing friendship ties) as well as the change in their behavioral characteristics (e.g., increasing or lowering their ASCs). During the simulation process, single actors are randomly selected and given a chance to change a single outgoing social tie or value of a behavioral variable (e.g., ASC). In our case, it is simulated that a single random adolescent creates, maintains, or terminates a friendship tie to one other classmate or changes their ASC by one unit. For this reason, the dependent behavioral variable (here: self-concept) is recoded into a discrete number of categories. In our case, we used quantiles of the distribution and recoded the variable into five categories each representing 20% of the student distribution.

The decisions from the actors in the model are simulated based on effects (independent variables) specified by the researcher. In case of the social ties, the effects represent the rules of tie formation within the network; for the behavioral outcomes, they represent influences of predictors on an individual characteristic comparable to a regression model. Also similar to a regression model, the effects coefficients represent independent marginal effects (each controlling for all other effects) and can be tested for significance individually. The effects can be based on actor attributes (e.g., academic achievement and ASC of the student), the attributes of the other actors in the network (e.g., the average academic achievement of friends), and endogenous network processes (e.g., the reciprocity of friendships). The first survey wave serves as a starting point for simulating the network processes leading to the social network observed during the second wave. Therefore, SAOMs enable the independent study of (a) possible social comparison effects with peers and their effects on ASC (behavioral outcome; this perspective is similar to the classic BFLPE model) and (b) social selection effects based on ASCs.

In the context of SAOMs, each classroom is traditionally considered an independent social network and the simulation processes refer to every single network. This poses the question of how to integrate results from these networks. Recently, a new method became available—random effects stochastic actor oriented models which are implemented using a Bayesian estimate procedure in RSienaTest (SienaBayes, see Ripley et al., 2021 ). This approach accounts for the hierarchical data structure and multilevel dynamics as it is the case in random-coefficient regression models. This is particularly important because multilevel modeling is the classic framework for testing the BFLPE as it is the effect of a classroom-level (L2) variable (average achievement) on student-level ASC (L1). Using multilevel SAOMs, such L2 effects can also be included and thus the BFLPE and the effect of specific social groups can be included in the same model (see Figure 1 ). We tested the convergence of our models, as described in Ripley et al. (2021 : section 11.3.7). All models achieved sufficient convergence.

Model Specification

In a series of multilevel SAOMs, we aimed to identify the effects of social comparisons on students’ ASCs. Thus, ASC was the behavioral outcome variable in all models, whereas the predictors of interest (i.e., interpreted as resulting from social comparisons) were different achievement averages of either all or of specific classmates (see Figures 1 and and2 2 ).

As mentioned above, all SAOMs included a selection model part (or network dynamics model part) that focuses on social ties and that was used to control selection effects in the estimation of social influence effects. This part of the statistical model was configured congruently across all models. It included structural effects that tap into endogenous network processes (reciprocity, transitive triplets, transitive reciprocated triplets, and three degree effects). In addition, both a selection of actor and target effects (e.g., the effect of a students’ achievement on their tendency to create friendship ties) as well as homophily effects for ASC, achievement and gender, as well as SES and ethnicity were included.

The estimated models varied in the social influence model part (or behavior dynamics model) where different predictors of ASC were included. In the first model, in accordance with Hypothesis 1, we aimed to replicate the classic BFLPE using a SAOM framework and thus included students’ individual achievement and the classroom average achievement (Model F.1). Focusing on friendship, we then estimated a model in which friends’ average achievement was included instead of classroom average achievement (Model F.2). Then the effects of the classroom average achievement and the friends’ average achievement were modeled competitively in the same model (Model F.3). Finally, we then added the average achievement of only same-gender classmates (Model F.4) or same-ethnic classmates (Model F.5). Finally, Models 2 and 3 were replicated using study partners (Models S.2 and S.3) and student-perceived popular peers (Models P.2 and P.3) instead of friends. An overview of the models can also be found in Tables 1 and and2, 2 , where the results are reported. Furthermore, a detailed description of each effect is included in Supplement 2 . .

Treatment of Missing Data

Missing information in sociometric data poses more severe problems for the reliability and validity of social network analyses compared with missing data in, for example, conventional regression analyses. This is because in network data, when a high proportion of information regarding social ties is missing, key characteristics of the network structure might be misrepresented (e.g., when a central node is missing) which is problematic since the network structure can determine the changes in both social relations among the actors and their behavior ( Huisman & Steglich, 2008 ). Therefore, as described in the “analysis sample” section, we followed the guidelines laid out in the sociometric report of the CILS4EU study (as well as the procedure in previous studies) and only analyzed classes with a sufficient participation rate.

A summary of the missing data in the analysis sample can be found in Supplement 1, Table S1 . Owing to the sample restriction procedure, the missing rates for the sociometric indicators are very low at T1 (all < 3.2%) and still relatively low at T2 (< 16.6%). It should be noted that even when students’ nominations were missing (outdegrees), they could still be nominated (indegrees) which is why there are no missing values on the indegree variables. In addition, because the base sample ( N = 5,013, see above) only includes students that participated in the study at T1 and received instruments (rather than just being contacted), the missing rates were very low for the achievement (< 3%) and the self-concept variables (T1 < .5%; T2 < 8.2%) as well as the control variables, particularly at T1 (see Table S1 ). The ethnic origin variable is a specific case, where, owing to the oversampling of immigrants in the CILS4EU study, information on immigrant status was also collected from the school administrative data and not just the questionnaire. Therefore, this variable has no missing cases.

At T2, 7.5% of cases were missing for the latent self-concept variable and 13.7% of cases for the friendship outdegree variables. These are thus youth who did not fill out the questionnaires or were not present for testing at T2 (but were still part of the contacted study sample at T2 and could be nominated). Students with missing latent self-concept values at T2 had lower self-concept ( d = .24, p < .01) and achievement ( d = .53, p < .01) at T1. Students with missing sociometric data at T2 also had lower self-concept ( d = .28, p < .01) and achievement ( d = .33, p < .01) at T1. It is plausible that these youth were indeed less engaged at school and thus not present on testing day at T2. However, given the low percentage of missing data overall, we do not think this could influence the results. Furthermore, no students were dropped from the sample using listwise deletion. Rather, within the network simulation models, missing values were imputed for both the dependent variables and covariates as described by Ripley et al. (2021 : section 4.3.2).

Social Selection Model

In the following, we report results of the SAOMs. A discussion of descriptive statistics for all variables, bivariate correlations as well as network level descriptive statistics can be found in Supplement 1 . We briefly report the results from the social selection part of the model first because it serves to disentangle these processes from the social influence processes that we are theoretically interested in.

Social selection processes based on individual characteristics can either be actor (or ego) effects (e.g., students with higher achievement making more friendship nominations), target (or alter) effects (e.g., students with higher achievement being nominated more frequently), or homophily effects (e.g., students nominating other students with similar achievement to themselves as friends). The social selection part included the same predictors in each model—thus, the models only differed in the behavior dynamics part (predictors of ASC) and whether friendship (see Table 1 ) or costudying/perceived popularity (see Table 2 ) were used as the social network. The parameter estimated can be interpreted similarly to conditional log odds rations in logistic regression models (see Chapter 13 in Ripley at al., 2021 ). Aside from the structural network effects (see Supplement 2 for an overview of all effects that were modeled and Supplement 3 for all parameters), there were several significant ego, alter, and homophily effects. For example, in terms of friendship, female students nominated fewer peers as friends (B = −.11, p < .05; parameter from Table 1 , model F.1), but were nominated more often (B = .06, p < .05). Also, we observed strong gender homophily (B = .30, p < .05). Furthermore, there were significant homophily effects of both achievement (B = .46, p < .05) and ASC (B = .15, p < .05) for friendship selection. In the costudying network, we found homophily effects for gender, social background, ethnic background, and achievement similar students along these dimensions were more often reported as study partners (see Table 2 , Model S.2). In the popularity network, there were fewer significant effects in the selection model, but we also observed a homophily effect for gender (i.e., students are more likely to name students from their own gender as popular; B = .34, p < .05; see Table 2 , Model P.2). Overall, the social selection models show that similarities in individual attributes contribute to not only the selection of friends and study partners, but also whom one perceives as popular. Importantly, SAOMs allow us to estimate social influence, presented in the next sections, while controlling for these selection processes.

Social Comparisons With the Class Average: Replicating the BFLPE (Hypothesis 1)

The classic BFLPE is represented by a positive effect of individual achievement and an incremental negative effect of class-average achievement on ASC. As the BFLPE affects students’ ASCs, the coefficients of interest can be found in the behavior dynamics part of the SAOM depicted in Table 1 , Model F.1. This model provides significant evidence for the BFLPE: students with higher achievement show a more positive ASC (B = .31, p < .05), but, given similar individual achievement, students in higher-achieving classes show lower ASCs (B = −.23, p < .05). Thus, the BFLPE could be replicated and its classic interpretation would suggest that students make contrasting social comparisons with the class-average.

Social Comparisons With Friends, Study Partners, and Student-Perceived Popular Peers (Hypotheses 2 to 4)

In the next model ( Table 1 , Model F.2), we included the average achievement of friends instead of class-average achievement as a predictor of ASCs. We found a similar pattern of effects with a positive individual effect of achievement on ASC (B = .26, p < .05) and a negative effect of friend-average achievement (B = −.10, p < .05). Interpreted similarly to the BFLPE, this would mean that students make contrasting social comparisons with their friends (evidence for Hypothesis 2). We also estimated this model using study partners and student-perceived popular peers (see Table 2 , Models S.2 and P.2) rather than friendship to define the social ties and the achievement aggregates. For student-perceived popular peers, we also found a negative contrast effect (B = −.16, p < .05), which would speak in favor of Hypothesis 4.a (and thus against 4.b). For study partners, we did not find a significant effect (no evidence for Hypothesis 3).

After first investigating the effects of friends, study partners, and student-perceived popular peers without taking into account the average class achievement, we juxtaposed the frames of references in the next step to examine the relative strength of the social comparison effects (friendship vs. classroom dominance) as well as possible incremental and suppressor effects. In Table 1 , Model F.3, we included both the effects of all classmates’ and friends’ average achievement. There was a negative effect of average classroom achievement (i.e., the BFLPE) which was nearly as strong as in model 1 (B = −.21, p < .05), but we no longer saw a significant effect of average friend achievement (B = .03, p = .25). These results thus speak for “classroom dominance” ( Wouters et al., 2013 ) and no longer provide evidence for Hypothesis 2. We found similar results (i.e., a persistent negative effect of average classroom achievement) when examining study partners and student-perceived popular peers ( Table 2 , Models S.3 and P.3). Interestingly, however, there seems to be a beneficial effect of studying with high-achieving peers for students’ ASCs (see Table 2 , Model S.3). This could be interpreted as an assimilation or “reflected glory” effect (i.e., students moving their self-evaluations toward the achievement of their study-peers) and goes against the expected contrast effect we formulated in Hypothesis 3. However, it should be noted that the effect is small and failed to reach significance in the two models estimated for robustness using only grades and only test-scores (probably for reasons of power resulting from a narrower achievement factor; see Supplement 4 ). In contrast, the average achievement of student-perceived popular peers did not show a significant effect (no evidence for Hypotheses 4.a and 4.b after controlling for average classroom achievement).

The Role of Same-Gender and Same-Ethnic Classmates (Hypothesis 5)

In the final step, we added the average achievement of same-gender and same-ethnic classmates to see whether students compare themselves primarily with peers from specific ingroups. We found no incremental effects comparisons with these two social ingroups and the same patterns of a persistent negative effect of the classroom average (see Table 1 , Models F.4 and F.5; additional support for Hypothesis 1, no support for Hypothesis 5 as an incremental effect).

In this study, we juxtaposed several frames of reference that students might use for social comparisons to adapt their ASCs. Thereby, we aimed to bridge (a) research on the BFLPE emphasizing the importance of the classroom average and (b) works from social psychology that had pointed out that the subjective relevance of peers should matter for their selection as social comparison targets—thus far, these lines of research were largely unconnected ( Huguet et al., 2009 ; Wouters et al., 2013 ). We replicated the classic BFLPE—a negative contrast effect of average classroom achievement on individual ASC—using longitudinal social network analysis as the first study to apply such models in research on ASC (Hypothesis 1). In models that did not consider the classic BELPE, we found the average achievement of friends and student-perceived popular peers to show contrast effects on ASC as well. However, these effects disappeared when classroom average achievement was controlled in the models. That is, in models that simultaneously included the average achievement in the classroom and the average achievement of specific types of peers, only the former exerted a significant influence on students’ ASC. In these models, we observed no additional contrast or assimilation effects of friends or student-perceived popular peers (evidence against Hypotheses 2, 4a and 4b). Only for study partners, we found an assimilation rather than a contrast effect once classroom average achievement was controlled for (contrary to Hypothesis 3). That is, students’ ASC seemed to have benefited from studying with higher-achieving peers—though this effect was not robust. The average achievement of same-gender and same-ethnic peers did not show incremental effects (Hypothesis 5 rejected).

Our Hypotheses 2 to 5 regarding the role of specific peer groups were based on insights from experimental social comparison research: Research on the selection of social comparison targets suggested that, for example, the similarity to the social comparison target or availability of information might play a role ( Festinger, 1954 ; Gerber et al., 2018 ; Mussweiler, 2003 ; Mussweiler & Rüter, 2003 ). We could not find evidence for these hypotheses in the classroom setting. Rather, our main finding is a tendency for “classroom dominance” ( Wouters et al., 2013 ) rather than “local dominance” ( Zell & Alicke, 2010 ). This indicates that the average achievement of the whole classroom seems to exhibit the strongest social comparison effect on students’ ASC. At the same time, the average achievements of specific peers/subgroups of peers such as friends, study partners peers, student-perceived popular peers, and salient social ingroups based on gender and ethnicity seem to be less influential (or do not even exert any influence at all). In that sense, our results are very similar to those reported by other studies ( Koivuhovi et al., 2020 ; Wouters et al., 2013 ). However, unlike these studies, we considered social selection processes and examined different subgroups of peers (such as study partners and student-perceived popular peers). In this way, our study provides new evidence that adds to a consistent overall picture.

Implications for Social Comparison Theory

In general, people actively select their friends and their social peer group ( McPherson et al., 2001 ) and, in that same sense, people are assumed to choose their social comparison targets based on the target peers that are available for social comparisons, the motives for social comparisons (e.g., information, self-enhancement, protection against self-worth threat etc.), the characteristic that is compared, and other aspects ( Festinger, 1954 ; Gerber et al., 2018 ; Lubbers et al., 2009 ). However, even though there are strong arguments from social psychology, for instance based on similarity, availability of information, and peer status, that would speak in favor of a more important role of specific peer subgroups, the present study shows that class-average exhibits the strongest effect.

We argue that the BFLPE is so dominant in our study and, as shown in other studies, also very universal ( Seaton et al., 2009 ) compared with other social comparison situations (e.g., social comparisons concerning nonformal abilities and characteristics such as personality aspects) because the classroom situation is unique. Students do not actively select their classmates. Owing to the nature of this “mandatory” social setting, social comparisons may become very salient and easily triggered for students. School is all about fostering skills and abilities, and these skills and abilities become visible for classmates as soon as students engage with the learning content. For instance, teachers give positive or negative performance feedback to individual students in attendance of all other students during classes. Sometimes, grades are given “on a curve” and thus partly represent class rank. In this setting, adolescents have less freedom to choose (a) who they want to be with and (b) who to compare themselves to (because the teacher might, in any case, use social comparisons). These conditions seem to lay the ground for social comparisons to the class average (the “generalized other”) and for trying to estimate one’s rank in the class rather than to discount nonsimilar students when making comparisons. A similar argument has been made by Diener and Fujita (1997) as well as by Dai and Rinn (2008) , who differentiate between “imposed” and “self-engendered” social comparisons (p. 290) pointing out that most of the literature within the field of social psychology focuses on active comparison process, that include target selections, whereas the BFLPE is seen as situationally imposed. Furthermore, it could be argued that the class-mean provides more diagnostic value than comparisons with individual classmates and is thus a more valid comparison target ( Wouters et al., 2013 )—in that sense, it may even be the most “rational” comparison standard for students to choose. After controlling for classroom average achievement, we found a tendency for small assimilation effects of the achievement of study partners. These seem to coexist with the contrasting social comparisons made with the classroom average. This result would be consistent with studies showing that comparisons with the class average and with individual peers can coexist ( Huguet et al., 2009 ).

Limitations and Open Questions

We used latent factors with several indicators as measures for both general ASC and achievement. We combined test scores and grades and argued that this provides the best estimate of the overall peer performance as researchers have previously warned that using just one indicator of peer-average performance can lead to “phantom effects” owing to measurement error ( Dicke et al., 2018 ). Still, it can be argued that the proxy indicators are not ideal: Test scores and grades capture different aspects of achievement, and ASC is considered a domain-specific construct (even though general ASC is also commonly studied). It is a well-known finding in research on ASC that the relation between ASC and achievement is higher when studying it on a domain-specific level as opposed to a general level ( Valentine et al., 2004 ). Accordingly, the BFLPE also seems to be a bit smaller for general ASC than domain-specific ASC ( Fang et al., 2018 ). Thus, we would expect social comparison effects to be stronger on domain-specific measures. Furthermore, there are conceptual differences between ASC and self-efficacy ( Bong & Skaalvik, 2003 ; Jansen et al., 2015 ), even though the items that were used to measure general school-related self-efficacy were close in wording to typical self-concept items. Ideally, data sets should include both a multiitem domain-specific ASC scale and scores from domain-specific achievement test. However, we do not know any available dataset which includes such measures in combination with information on students’ social networks. Given these constraints, we deem the latent factor approach as preferable over using single-item indicators.

Germany has a relatively strong between-school tracking system in secondary school. After four to six years (depending on the federal state) years of primary school, students are tracked into different school types. Traditionally there was a vocational (Hauptschule), an intermediate (Realschule), and an academic track (Gymnasium), which was also the case in most states during the time of testing. During the last years, comprehensive schools became more common, and in many states, there are now only two tracks, but there is still an important distinction between academic track and nonacademic track schools. Once in a track, students do not move between classes until grade 11 (when course-by-course teaching starts). Thus, we can generally expect students from a class to show some similarity in achievement, leading to a relatively higher between-school variance in tracked education systems than in untracked/integrated systems. Earlier studies have provided evidence for the BFLPE in school systems with and without between-school tracking, also numerous times in Germany ( Chmielewski et al., 2013 ; Fang et al., 2018 ; Marsh et al., 2018 ; von Keyserlingk et al., 2019 ). We, therefore, know that social comparisons also take place in tracked education systems. However, besides possible differences in the between-school variance in average class achievement, we do not expect social comparisons with the classroom to operate differently across tracked and untracked education systems (e.g., other countries or younger student cohorts). Still, it could be the case that more substantial heterogeneity of achievement within a class would lead to students building more distinct social networks in terms of how those networks are composed. Consequently, social comparisons with particular peers might matter more in such contexts than in contexts with strong between-school tracking. It would indeed be interesting to replicate the study results in other education systems.

Furthermore, we found a high correlation between average classroom achievement and the average achievement of social ingroups. When there are no clear achievement differences between student groups, these effects are possibly confounded and difficult to disentangle. Still, our random effects SAOMs produced effect estimates with reasonable standard errors and we found significant effects even though there was a substantial correlation between the predictors. These effects indicated a dominance of classroom average achievement with no additional effects of same-gender or same-ethnicity average achievement, and this result is substantially in line with both the theory and the results of our other models.

Finally, our study produced results on friendship selection that might inspire future research in developmental and educational psychology. Students select their friends based on their own characteristics (ego), the characteristics of their peers (alters), and dyadic characteristics such as similarity in these attributes. Previous studies have shown such processes for sociodemographic characteristics such as gender and ethnicity, but also academic achievement ( Gremmen et al., 2017 ; Lorenz et al., 2020 , 2021 ). We replicated those effects. In addition, we found similarity effects based on ASC which had not been tested in previous studies. Thus, students cluster in friendship cliques with similar ASCs and such a clustering appears independently of the clustering along with achievement and sociodemographic characteristics such as gender and ethnicity. Future work could aim to replicate this explorative result and to look into the mechanisms and possible theoretical explanations for these selection effects. It is conceivable that ASC, as an important part of general self-concept and an aspect of identity (the image of being or not being “a good student”), might be just as important and visible for peers as the achievement itself.

It would also be valuable to investigate whether the similarity in domain-specific ASCs and other domain-specific motivational characteristics such as interest drive the selection of specific peers such as friends. This person-peer/group similarity judgment as well the extent to which students attain to popularity goals ( Jones & Cooke, 2021 ) are also important for possible social comparisons with student-perceived popular peers. Future studies could aim to assess these additional constructs to better understand under which conditions social comparisons with friends, study partners, and student-perceived popular students might be made. Still, it seems unlikely to find subgroups (with particular motives or configurations of similarity) for which the BFLPE is not still more dominant than assimilation effects given the strong evidence for the universality of the BFLPE ( Marsh et al., 2021 ).

Overall, our study shows the importance of the classroom context as a “total environment” for social comparisons ( Diener & Fujita, 1997 ). Compared with the salience of using comparisons to find out one's own within-class rank, social comparisons with specific groups of peers such as friends pale in importance. A practical implication could be for teachers to be aware of social comparison processes, the BFLPE, and in particular of the role of “classroom dominance”—that is, to know that students seem to be very well aware of their within-class rank and that this rank is a central source of their ASCs.

Supplementary Material

1 The term “target” has been inconsistently used in the literature on social comparisons. Some authors (e.g., Mussweiler, 2003 ) use (evaluation) “target” to refer to a person that is being evaluated against a comparison standard. This usage is mostly common in experimental work where the participants are asked to evaluate different persons with regard to different standards. In many other studies, “social comparison target” refers to another person or group of persons that is chosen by the person making the social comparison as a standard to compare oneself with (i.e., the target is the comparison standard). Following the recent meta-analysis by Gerber et al. (2018) , we use this terminology. Thus, in this study, the social comparison target refers to a classmate or group of classmates with whom the students compare themselves.

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4.1 The Cognitive Self: The Self-Concept

Learning objectives.

Define and describe the self-concept and its influence on information processing.
Describe the concept of self-complexity, and explain how it influences social cognition and behavior.
Review the measures that are used to assess the self-concept.
Differentiate the different types of self-awareness and self-consciousness.

Some nonhuman animals, including chimpanzees, orangutans, and perhaps dolphins, have at least a primitive sense of self (Boysen & Himes, 1999). We know this because of some interesting experiments that have been done with animals. In one study (Gallup, 1970), researchers painted a red dot on the forehead of anesthetized chimpanzees and then placed the animals in a cage with a mirror. When the chimps woke up and looked in the mirror, they touched the dot on their faces, not the dot on the faces in the mirror. This action suggests that the chimps understood that they were looking at themselves and not at other animals, and thus we can assume that they are able to realize that they exist as individuals. Most other animals, including dogs, cats, and monkeys, never realize that it is themselves they see in a mirror.

Self awareness collage: a woman looking in the mirror, a dog looking in the mirror, and a monkey looking in the mirror

A simple test of self-awareness is the ability to recognize oneself in a mirror. Humans and chimpanzees can pass the test; dogs never do.

Allen Skyy – Mirror – CC BY 2.0; 6SN7 – Reflecting Bullmatian – CC BY 2.0; Mor – There’s a monkey in my mirror – CC BY-NC 2.0.

Infants who have similar red dots painted on their foreheads recognize themselves in a mirror in the same way that the chimps do, and they do this by about 18 months of age (Asendorpf, Warkentin, & Baudonnière, 1996; Povinelli, Landau, & Perilloux, 1996). The child’s knowledge about the self continues to develop as the child grows. By age 2, the infant becomes aware of his or her gender as a boy or a girl. At age 4, self-descriptions are likely to be based on physical features, such as one’s hair color, and by about age 6, the child is able to understand basic emotions and the concepts of traits, being able to make statements such as “I am a nice person” (Harter, 1998).

By the time they are in grade school, children have learned that they are unique individuals, and they can think about and analyze their own behavior. They also begin to show awareness of the social situation—they understand that other people are looking at and judging them the same way that they are looking at and judging others (Doherty, 2009).

Development and Characteristics of the Self-Concept

Part of what is developing in children as they grow is the fundamental cognitive part of the self, known as the self-concept . The self-concept is a knowledge representation that contains knowledge about us, including our beliefs about our personality traits, physical characteristics, abilities, values, goals, and roles, as well as the knowledge that we exist as individuals . Throughout childhood and adolescence, the self-concept becomes more abstract and complex and is organized into a variety of different cognitive aspects , known as self-schemas . Children have self-schemas about their progress in school, their appearance, their skills at sports and other activities, and many other aspects, and these self-schemas direct and inform their processing of self-relevant information (Harter, 1999).

By the time we are adults, our sense of self has grown dramatically. In addition to possessing a wide variety of self-schemas, we can analyze our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and we can see that other people may have different thoughts than we do. We become aware of our own mortality. We plan for the future and consider the potential outcomes of our actions. At times, having a sense of self may seem unpleasant—when we are not proud of our appearance, actions, or relationships with others, or when we think about and become afraid of the possibility of our own death. On the other hand, the ability to think about the self is very useful. Being aware of our past and able to speculate about the future is adaptive—it allows us to modify our behavior on the basis of our mistakes and to plan for future activities. When we do poorly on an exam, for instance, we may study harder for the next one or even consider changing our major if we continue to have problems in the major we have chosen.

One way to learn about a person’s self-concept and the many self-schemas that it contains is by using self-report measures. One of these is a deceptively simple fill-in-the-blank measure that has been used by many scientists to get a picture of the self-concept (Rees & Nicholson, 1994). All of the 20 items in the measure are exactly the same, but the person is asked to fill in a different response for each statement. This self-report measure, known as the Twenty Statements Test, can reveal a lot about a person because it is designed to measure the most accessible—and thus the most important—parts of one’s self-concept. Try it for yourself, at least five times:

I am (please fill in the blank) __________________________________

Although each person has a unique self-concept, we can identify some characteristics that are common across the responses given by different people on the measure. Physical characteristics are an important component of the self-concept, and they are mentioned by many people when they describe themselves. If you’ve been concerned lately that you’ve been gaining weight, you might write, “I am overweight. ” If you think you’re particularly good looking (“I am attractive ”), or if you think you’re too short (“I am too short ”), those things might have been reflected in your responses. Our physical characteristics are important to our self-concept because we realize that other people use them to judge us. People often list the physical characteristics that make them different from others in either positive or negative ways (“I am blond ,” “I am short ”), in part because they understand that these characteristics are salient and thus likely to be used by others when judging them (McGuire, McGuire, Child, & Fujioka, 1978).

A second characteristic of the self-concept reflects our memberships in the social groups that we belong to and care about. Common responses in this regard include such ones as “I am an artist ,” “I am Jewish ,” and “I am a student at Augsburg College. ” As we will see later in this chapter, our group memberships form an important part of the self-concept because they provide us with our social identity —the sense of our self that involves our memberships in social groups.

The remainder of the self-concept is normally made up of personality traits —the specific and stable personality characteristics that describe an individual (“I am friendly, ” “I am shy, ” “I am persistent ”). These individual differences (the person part of the person-situation interaction) are important determinants of our behavior, and this aspect of the self-concept reflects this variation across people.

Self-Complexity Provides a Buffer Against Negative Emotions

The self-concept is a rich and complex social representation. In addition to our thoughts about who we are right now, the self-concept includes thoughts about our past self—our experiences, accomplishments, and failures—and about our future self—our hopes, plans, goals, and possibilities (Oyserman, Bybee, Terry, & Hart-Johnson, 2004). The self-concept also includes thoughts about our relationships with others. You no doubt have thoughts about your family and close friends that have become part of yourself. Indeed, if you don’t see the people you really care about for a while, or if you should lose them in one way or another, you will naturally feel sad because you are in essence missing part of yourself.

Although every human being has a complex self-concept, there are nevertheless individual differences in self-complexity , the extent to which individuals have many different and relatively independent ways of thinking about themselves (Linville, 1987; Roccas & Brewer, 2002). Some selves are more complex than others, and these individual differences can be important in determining psychological outcomes. Having a complex self means that we have a lot of different ways of thinking about ourselves. For example, imagine a woman whose self-concept contains the social identities of student, girlfriend, daughter, psychology major , and tennis player and who has encountered a wide variety of life experiences. Social psychologists would say that she has high self-complexity. On the other hand, a man who perceives himself solely as a student or solely as a member of the hockey team and who has had a relatively narrow range of life experiences would be said to have low self-complexity. For those with high self-complexity, the various self-aspects of the self are separate, such that the positive and negative thoughts about a particular self-aspect do not spill over into thoughts about other aspects.

Research has found that compared with people low in self-complexity, those higher in self-complexity experience more positive outcomes. People with more complex self-concepts have been found to have lower levels of stress and illness (Kalthoff & Neimeyer, 1993), a greater tolerance for frustration (Gramzow, Sedikides, Panter, & Insko, 2000), and more positive and less negative reactions to events that they experience (Niedenthal, Setterlund, & Wherry, 1992).

The benefits of self-complexity occur because the various domains of the self help to buffer us against negative events and help us to enjoy the positive events that we experience. For people low in self-complexity, negative outcomes on one aspect of the self tend to have a big impact on their self-esteem. If the only thing that Maria cares about is getting into medical school, she may be devastated if she fails to make it. On the other hand, Marty, who is also passionate about medical school but who has a more complex self-concept, may be better able to adjust to such a blow by turning to other interests. People with high self-complexity can also take advantage of the positive outcomes that occur on any of the dimensions that are important to them.

Although having high self-complexity seems useful overall, it does not seem to help everyone equally and also does not seem to help us respond to all events equally (Rafaeli-Mor & Steinberg, 2002). The benefits of self-complexity seem to be particularly strong on reactions to positive events. People with high self-complexity seem to react more positively to the good things that happen to them but not necessarily less negatively to the bad things. And the positive effects of self-complexity are stronger for people who have other positive aspects of the self as well. This buffering effect is stronger for people with high self-esteem, whose self-complexity involves positive rather than negative characteristics (Koch & Shepperd, 2004), and for people who feel that they have control over their outcomes (McConnell et al., 2005).

Studying the Self-Concept

Because the self-concept is a schema, it can be studied using the methods that we would use to study any other schema. As we have seen, one approach is to use self-report—for instance, by asking people to list the things that come to mind when they think about themselves. Another approach is to use neuroimaging to directly study the self in the brain. As you can see in Figure 4.1 , neuroimaging studies have shown that information about the self is stored in the prefrontal cortex, the same place that other information about people is stored (Barrios et al., 2008). This finding suggests that we store information about ourselves as people the same way we store information about others.

This figure shows the areas of the human brain that are known to be important in processing information about the self. They include primarily areas of the prefrontal cortex (areas 1, 2, 4, and 5). Data are from Lieberman (2010).

Still another approach to studying the self is to investigate how we attend to and remember things that relate to the self. Indeed, because the self-concept is the most important of all our schemas, it has extraordinary influence on our thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Have you ever been at a party where there was a lot of noise and bustle, and yet you were surprised to discover that you could easily hear your own name being mentioned in the background? Because our own name is such an important part of our self-concept, and because we value it highly, it is highly accessible. We are very alert for, and react quickly to, the mention of our own name.

Other research has found that information that is related to the self-schema is better remembered than information that is unrelated to it, and that information related to the self can also be processed very quickly (Lieberman, Jarcho, & Satpute, 2004). In one classic study that demonstrated the importance of the self-schema, Rogers, Kuiper, and Kirker (1977) conducted an experiment to assess how college students recalled information that they had learned under different processing conditions. All the participants were presented with the same list of 40 adjectives to process, but through the use of random assignment, the participants were given one of four different sets of instructions about how to process the adjectives.

Participants assigned to the structural task condition were asked to judge whether the word was printed in uppercase or lowercase letters. Participants in the phonemic task condition were asked whether or not the word rhymed with another given word. In the semantic task condition , the participants were asked if the word was a synonym of another word. And in the self-reference task condition , participants indicated whether or not the given adjective was or was not true of themselves. After completing the specified task, each participant was asked to recall as many adjectives as he or she could remember.

Figure 4.2 The Self-Reference Effect

The chart shows the proportion of adjectives that students were able to recall under each of four learning conditions. The same words were recalled significantly better when they were processed in relation to the self than when they were processed in other ways. Data from Rogers et al. (1977).

Rogers and his colleagues hypothesized that different types of processing would have different effects on memory. As you can see in Figure 4.2 “The Self-Reference Effect” , the students in the self-reference task condition recalled significantly more adjectives than did students in any other condition. The finding that information that is processed in relationship to the self is particularly well remembered , known as the self-reference effect , is powerful evidence that the self-concept helps us organize and remember information. The next time you are studying for an exam, you might try relating the material to your own experiences—the self-reference effect suggests that doing so will help you better remember the information.

Self-Awareness

Like any other schema, the self-concept can vary in its current cognitive accessibility. Self-awareness refers to the extent to which we are currently fixing our attention on our own self-concept . When the self-concept becomes highly accessible because of our concerns about being observed and potentially judged by others, we experience the publicly induced self-awareness known as self-consciousness (Duval & Wicklund, 1972; Rochat, 2009).

I am sure that you can remember times when your self-awareness was increased and you became self-conscious—for instance, when you were giving a class presentation and you were perhaps painfully aware that everyone was looking at you, or when you did something in public that embarrassed you. Emotions such as anxiety and embarrassment occur in large part because the self-concept becomes highly accessible, and they serve as a signal to monitor and perhaps change our behavior.

Not all aspects of our self-concepts are equally accessible at all times, and these long-term differences in the accessibility of the different self-schemas help create individual differences, for instance, in terms of our current concerns and interests. You may know some people for whom the physical appearance component of the self-concept is highly accessible. They check their hair every time they see a mirror, worry whether their clothes are making them look good, and do a lot of shopping—for themselves, of course. Other people are more focused on their social group memberships—they tend to think about things in terms of their role as Christians or as members of the tennis team. Think back for a moment to the opener of this chapter and consider Dancing Matt Harding. What do you think are his most highly accessible self-schemas?

In addition to variation in long-term accessibility, the self and its various components may also be made temporarily more accessible through priming. We become more self-aware when we are in front of a mirror, when a TV camera is focused on us, when we are speaking in front of an audience, or when we are listening to our own tape-recorded voice (Kernis & Grannemann, 1988). When the knowledge contained in the self-schema becomes more accessible, it also becomes more likely to be used in information processing and more likely to influence our behavior.

Beaman, Klentz, Diener, and Svanum (1979) conducted a field experiment to see if self-awareness would influence children’s honesty. The researchers expected that most children viewed stealing as wrong but that they would be more likely to act on this belief when they were more self-aware. They conducted this experiment on Halloween evening in homes within the city of Seattle. When children who were trick-or-treating came to particular houses, they were greeted by one of the experimenters, shown a large bowl of candy, and were told to take only one piece each. The researchers unobtrusively watched each child to see how many pieces he or she actually took.

Behind the candy bowl in some of the houses was a large mirror. In the other houses, there was no mirror. Out of the 363 children who were observed in the study, 19% disobeyed instructions and took more than one piece of candy. However, the children who were in front of a mirror were significantly less likely to steal (14.4%) than were those who did not see a mirror (28.5%). These results suggest that the mirror activated the children’s self-awareness, which reminded them of their belief about the importance of being honest. Other research has shown that being self-aware has a powerful influence on other behaviors as well. For instance, people are more likely to stay on their diets, eat better foods, and act more morally overall when they are self-aware (Baumeister, Zell, & Tice, 2007; Heatherton, Polivy, Herman, & Baumeister, 1993). What this means is that when you are trying to stick to a diet, study harder, or engage in other difficult behaviors, you should try to focus on yourself and the importance of the goals you have set.

Social psychologists are interested in studying self-awareness because it has such an important influence on behavior. People lose their self-awareness and become more likely to violate acceptable social norms when, for example, they put on a Halloween mask or engage in other behaviors that hide their identities. The members of the militant White supremacist organization the Ku Klux Klan wear white robes and hats when they meet and when they engage in their racist behavior. And when people are in large crowds, such as in a mass demonstration or a riot, they may become so much a part of the group that they lose their individual self-awareness and experience deindividuation — the loss of self-awareness and individual accountability in groups (Festinger, Pepitone, & Newcomb, 1952; Zimbardo, 1969).

Collage: A Klu Klux Klan propaganda meeting, a group of four Nazis smiling, and three college friends helping another do a keg stand

Examples of situations that may create deindividuation include wearing uniforms that hide the self and alcohol intoxication.

Craig ONeal – KKK Rally in Georgia – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0; Bart Everson – Nazis – CC BY 2.0; John Penny – Snuggie Keg Stand – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Two particular types of individual differences in self-awareness have been found to be important, and they relate to self-concern and other-concern, respectively (Fenigstein, Scheier, & Buss, 1975; Lalwani, Shrum, & Chiu, 2009). Private self-consciousness refers to the tendency to introspect about our inner thoughts and feelings . People who are high in private self-consciousness tend to think about themselves a lot and agree with statements such as “I’m always trying to figure myself out” and “I am generally attentive to my inner feelings.” People who are high on private self-consciousness are likely to base their behavior on their own inner beliefs and values—they let their inner thoughts and feelings guide their actions—and they may be particularly likely to strive to succeed on dimensions that allow them to demonstrate their own personal accomplishments (Lalwani, Shrum & Chiu, 2009).

Public self-consciousness , in contrast, refers to the tendency to focus on our outer public image and to be particularly aware of the extent to which we are meeting the standards set by others . Those high in public self-consciousness agree with statements such as “I’m concerned about what other people think of me,” “Before I leave my house, I check how I look,” and “I care a lot about how I present myself to others.” These are the people who check their hair in a mirror they pass and spend a lot of time getting ready in the morning; they are more likely to let the opinions of others (rather than their own opinions) guide their behaviors and are particularly concerned with making good impressions on others.

Research has found cultural differences in public self-consciousness, such that people from East Asian collectivistic cultures have higher public self-consciousness than do people from Western individualistic cultures. Steve Heine and his colleagues (Heine, Takemoto, Moskalenko, Lasaleta, & Henrich, 2008) found that when college students from Canada (a Western culture) completed questionnaires in front of a large mirror, they subsequently became more self-critical and were less likely to cheat (much like the trick-or-treaters we discussed earlier) than were Canadian students who were not in front of a mirror. However, the presence of the mirror had no effect on college students from Japan. This person-situation interaction is consistent with the idea that people from East Asian cultures are normally already high in public self-consciousness, in comparison with people from Western cultures, and thus manipulations designed to increase public self-consciousness are less influential for them.

Overestimating How Others View Us

Although the self-concept is the most important of all our schemas, and although people (particularly those high in self-consciousness) are aware of their self and how they are seen by others, this does not mean that people are always thinking about themselves. In fact, people do not generally focus on their self-concept any more than they focus on the other things and other people in their environments (Csikszentmihalyi & Figurski, 1982).

On the other hand, self-awareness is more powerful for the person experiencing it than it is for others who are looking on, and the fact that self-concept is so highly accessible frequently leads people to overestimate the extent to which other people are focusing on them (Gilovich & Savitsky, 1999). Although you may be highly self-conscious about of something you’ve done in a particular situation, that does not mean that others are necessarily paying all that much attention to you. Research by Thomas Gilovich and his colleagues (Gilovich, Medvec, & Savitsky, 2000) found that people who were interacting with others thought that other people were paying much more attention to them than those other people reported actually doing.

Teenagers are particularly likely to be highly self-conscious, often believing that others are constantly watching them (Goossens, Beyers, Emmen, & van Aken, 2002). Because teens think so much about themselves, they are particularly likely to believe that others must be thinking about them, too (Rycek, Stuhr, McDermott, Benker, & Swartz, 1998). It is no wonder that everything a teen’s parents do suddenly feels embarrassing to them when they are in public.

People also often mistakenly believe that their internal states show to others more than they really do. Gilovich, Savitsky, and Medvec (1998) asked groups of five students to work together on a “lie detection” task. One at a time, each student stood up in front of the others and answered a question that the researcher had written on a card (e.g., “I have met David Letterman”). On each round, one person’s card indicated that they were to give a false answer, whereas the other four were told to tell the truth.

Figure 4.3 The Illusion of Transparency

After each round, the students who had not been asked to lie indicated which of the students they thought had actually lied in that round, and the liar was asked to estimate the number of other students who would correctly guess who had been the liar. As you can see in Figure 4.3 “The Illusion of Transparency” , the liars overestimated the detectability of their lies: On average, they predicted that over 44% of their fellow players had known that they were the liar, but in fact only about 25% were able to accurately identify them. Gilovitch and his colleagues called this effect the “illusion of transparency.”

Key Takeaways

The self-concept is a schema that contains knowledge about us. It is primarily made up of physical characteristics, group memberships, and traits.
Because the self-concept is so complex, it has extraordinary influence on our thoughts, feelings, and behavior, and we can remember information that is related to it well.
Self-complexity, the extent to which individuals have many different and relatively independent ways of thinking about themselves, helps people respond more positively to events that they experience.
Self-awareness refers to the extent to which we are currently fixing our attention on our own self-concept. Differences in the accessibility of different self-schemas help create individual differences, for instance, in terms of our current concerns and interests.
When people lose their self-awareness, they experience deindividuation, and this may lead them to act in violation of their personal norms.
Private self-consciousness refers to the tendency to introspect about our inner thoughts and feelings; public self-consciousness refers to the tendency to focus on our outer public image and the standards set by others.
There are cultural differences in self-consciousness, such that public self-consciousness may normally be higher in Eastern than in Western cultures.
People frequently overestimate the extent to which others are paying attention to them and accurately understand their true intentions in public situations.

Exercises and Critical Thinking

What are the most important aspects of your self-concept, and how do they influence your behavior?
Consider people you know in terms of their self-complexity. What effects do these differences seem to have on their feelings and behavior?
Can you think of ways that you have been influenced by your private and public self-consciousness?
Do you think you have ever overestimated the extent to which people are paying attention to you in public?

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4 Social Comparison

When athletes compete in a race, they are able to observe and compare their performance against those of their competitors. In the same way, all people naturally engage in mental comparisons with the people around them during the course of daily life. These evaluations can impact our motivation and feelings. In this module, you will learn about the process of social comparison: its definition, consequences, and the factors that affect it.

Learning Objectives

Understand the reasons people make social comparisons.
Identify consequences of social comparison.
Understand the Self-Evaluation Maintenance Model.
Explain situational factors that can affect social comparison.

Introduction: Social Comparison

One pleasant Saturday afternoon, Mr. Jones arrives home from the car dealership in a brand-new Mercedes-Benz C-Class , the entry-level sedan in the Mercedes family of cars. Although Mercedes-Benzes are common in Europe, they are often viewed as status symbols in Mr. Jones’ neighborhood in North America. This new car is a huge upgrade from his previous car. Excited, Mr. Jones immediately drives around the block and into town to show it off. He is thrilled with his purchase for a full week—that is, until he sees his neighbor across the street, Mr. Smith, driving a brand-new Mercedes S-Class , the highest tier of Mercedes sedans. Mr. Smith notices Mr. Jones from a distance and waves to him with a big smile. Climbing into his C-Class , Mr. Jones suddenly feels disappointed with his purchase and even feels envious of Mr. Smith. Now his C-Class feels just as uncool as his old car.

Mr. Smith is experiencing the effects of social comparison . Occurring frequently in our lives, social comparison shapes our perceptions, memory, and behavior—even regarding the most trivial of issues. In this module, we will take a closer look at the reasons we make social comparisons and the consequences of the social comparison process.

An advertisement for Kawasaki motorcycles from the 1970's. The slogan is "Are You the Kawasaki Kind?" The ad features an average looking man dressed in a shirt and tie standing behind a Kawasaki motorcycle and holding a motorcycle helmet. An attractive woman sits on the seat of the motorcycle and leans her head on the man's shoulder. " title="An advertisement for Kawasaki motorcycles from the 1970's. The slogan is "Are You the Kawasaki Kind?" The ad features an average looking man dressed in a shirt and tie standing behind a Kawasaki motorcycle and holding a motorcycle helmet. An attractive woman sits on the seat of the motorcycle and leans her head on the man's shoulder.

Social Comparison: Basics

In 1954, psychologist Leon Festinger hypothesized that people compare themselves to others in order to fulfill a basic human desire: the need for self-evaluation. He called this process social comparison theory . At the core of his theory is the idea that people come to know about themselves—their own abilities, successes, and personality—by comparing themselves with others. These comparisons can be divided into two basic categories.

In one category, we consider social norms and the opinions of others. Specifically, we compare our own opinions and values to those of others when our own self-evaluation is unclear. For example, you might not be certain about your position on a hotly contested issue, such as the legality of abortion. Or, you might not be certain about which fork to use first in a multi-course place setting. In these types of instances people are prone to look toward others—to make social comparisons—to help fill in the gaps.

Imagine an American exchange student arriving in India for the first time, a country where the culture is drastically different from his own. He notices quickly through observing others—i.e., social comparison—that when greeting a person, it is normal to place his own palms together rather than shaking the other person’s hand. This comparison informs him of how he should behave in the surrounding social context.

The second category of social comparison pertains to our abilities and performance. In these cases, the need for self-evaluation is driven by another fundamental desire: to perform better and better—as Festinger ( 1954 ) put it, “a unidirectional drive upward.” In essence, we compare our performance not only to evaluate ourselves but also to benchmark our performance related to another person. If we observe or even anticipate that a specific person is doing better than us at some ability then we may be motivated to boost our performance level. Take, for example, a realistic scenario where Olivia uses social comparison to gauge her abilities: Olivia is a high school student who often spends a few hours in her backyard shooting a soccer ball at her homemade goal. A friend of hers suggests she try out for the school’s soccer team. Olivia accepts her friend’s suggestion, although nervously, doubting she’s good enough to make the team. On the day of tryouts, Olivia gets her gear ready and starts walking towards the soccer field. As she approaches, she feels butterflies in her stomach and her legs get wobbly. But, glancing towards the other candidates who have arrived early to take a few practice shots at the goal, she notices that their aim is inconsistent and they frequently miss the goal. Seeing this, Olivia feels more relaxed, and she confidently marches onto the field, ready to show everyone her skills.

Relevance and Similarity

There are important factors, however, that determine whether people will engage in social comparison. First, the performance dimension has to be relevant to the self ( Festinger, 1954 ). For example, if excelling in academics is more important to you than excelling in sports, you are more likely to compare yourself with others in terms of academic rather than athletic performance. Relevance is also important when assessing opinions. If the issue at hand is relevant to you, you will compare your opinion to others; if not, you most likely won’t even bother. Relevance is thus a necessary precondition for social comparison.

A secondary question is, ” to whom do people compare themselves ?” Generally speaking, people compare themselves to those who are similar ( Festinger, 1954 ; Goethals & Darley, 1977 ), whether similar in personal characteristics (e.g., gender, ethnic background, hair color, etc.) or in terms of performance (e.g., both being of comparable ability or both being neck-and-neck in a race). For example, a casual tennis player will not compare her performance to that of a professional, but rather to that of another casual tennis player. The same is true of opinions. People will cross-reference their own opinions on an issue with others who are similar to them rather than dissimilar (e.g., ethnic background or economic status).

Direction of Comparison

Social comparison is a bi-directional phenomenon where we can compare ourselves to people who are better than us—“ upward comparisons ”—or worse than us—“ downward comparisons .” Engaging in either of these two comparisons on a performance dimension can affect our self-evaluation. On one hand, upward comparisons on relevant dimensions can threaten our self-evaluation and jeopardize self-esteem ( Tesser, 1988 ). On the other hand, they can also lead to joy and admiration for others’ accomplishments on dimensions that are not relevant to the self, where one’s self-evaluation is not under threat. For example, an academic overachiever who distinguishes himself by having two advanced degrees, both a PhD and a law degree, may not enjoy meeting another individual with a PhD, a law degree, and an MBA, but may well enjoy meeting a fellow overachiever in a domain that is not self-relevant, such as a famous NASCAR racer or professional hockey player.

Downward comparisons may boost our self-evaluation on relevant dimensions, leading to a self-enhancement effect ( Wills, 1981 ), such as when an individual suffering from an illness makes downward comparisons with those suffering even more. A person enduring treatment for cancer, for instance, might feel better about his own side effects if he learns that an acquaintance suffered worse side effects from the same treatment. More recent findings have also shown that downward comparisons can also lead to feelings of scorn ( Fiske, 2011 ), such as when those of a younger generation look down upon the elderly. In these cases, the boost to self-evaluation is so strong that it leads to an exaggerated sense of pride.

Interestingly, the direction of comparison and a person’s emotional response can also depend on the counterfactual —“what might have been”—that comes most easily to mind. For example, one might think that an Olympic silver medalist would feel happier than a bronze medalist. After all, placing second is more prestigious than placing third. However, a classic study by Victoria Medvec, Scott Madey, and Thomas Gilovich ( 1995 ) found the opposite effect: bronze medalists were actually happier than silver medalists. The reason for this effect is that silver medalist’s focus on having fallen short of achieving the gold ( so close! ), essentially turning a possible downward comparison into an upward comparison; whereas the bronze medalists recognize they came close to not winning any medal, essentially turning a possible upward comparison (to another medalist) into a downward comparison to those who did not even receive a medal.

Positive and negative effects of upward and downward social comparison. 1. Upward Social Comparison. Positive effects - hope and inspiration. Negative effects - dissatisfaction and envy. 2. Downward Social Comparison. Positive effects - gratitude. Negative effects - scorn.

Consequences of Social Comparison

The social comparison process has been associated with numerous consequences. For one, social comparison can impact self-esteem ( Tesser, 1988 ), especially when doing well relative to others. For example, having the best final score in a class can increase your self-esteem quite a bit. Social comparison can also lead to feelings of regret ( White, Langer, Yariv, & Welch, 2006 ), as when comparing the negative outcome of one’s investment strategy to the positive outcome of a different strategy taken by a neighbor. Social comparison can also lead to feelings of envy ( Fiske, 2011 ; Salovey & Rodin, 1984 ), as when someone with thinning hair envies the thick hair of a colleague.

A sticker with the message "I Voted" next to an American flag.

Social comparison can also have interesting behavioral consequences. If you were to observe a discrepancy in performance between yourself and another person, then you might behave more competitively ( Garcia, Tor, & Schiff, 2013 ), as you attempt to minimize the discrepancy. If, for example, you are among the top 10% on your class mid-term you might feel competitive with the other top students. Although competition can raise performance it can also take more problematic forms, from inflicting actual harm to making a comment to another person. These kinds of behaviors are likely to arise when the situation following the social comparison does not provide the opportunity to self-repair, such as another chance to compete in a race or retake a test ( Johnson, 2012 ). However, when later opportunities to self-repair do exist, a more positive form of competitive motivation arises, whether that means running harder in a race or striving to earn a higher test score.

Self-Evaluation Maintenance Model

The self-evaluation maintenance (SEM; Tesser, 1988 ) model builds on social comparison theory. SEM points to a range of psychological forces that help and maintain our self-evaluation and self-esteem. In addition to relevance and similarity, SEM reveals the importance of relationship closeness. It turns out that relationship closeness—where two people stand on the continuum from being complete strangers to being intimate friends—affects self-evaluations.

For example, in one study, Tesser and Smith ( 1980 ) asked people to play a verbal game in which they were given the opportunity to receive clues from a partner. These clues could be used to help them guess the correct word in a word game. Half the participants were told the game was related to intelligence whereas the other half were not. Additionally, half the participants were paired with a close friend but the other half played with a stranger. Results show that participants who were led to believe the task was self-relevant or having to do with intelligence provided more difficult clues when their partner was a friend versus a stranger—suggesting a competitive uptick associated with relationship closeness. However, when performance was implied to be irrelevant to the self, partners gave easier clues to friends than strangers.

SEM can predict which of our friends and which of our comparison dimensions are self-relevant ( Tesser & Campbell, 2006 ; Zuckerman & Jost, 2001 ). For example, suppose playing chess is highly self-relevant for you. In this case you will naturally compare yourselves to other chess players. Now, suppose that your chess-playing friend consistently beats you. In fact, each time you play she beats you by a wider and wider margin. SEM would predict that one of two things will likely happen: (1) winning at chess will no longer be self-relevant to you, or (2) you will no longer be friends with this individual. In fact, if the first option occurs—you lose interest in competing—you will begin to bask in the glory of your chess playing friend as his or her performance approaches perfection.

These psychological processes have real world implications! They may determine who is hired in an organization or who is promoted at work. For example, suppose you are a faculty member of a university law school. Your work performance is appraised based on your teaching and on your academic publications. Although you do not have the most publications in your law school, you do have the most publications in prestigious journals.

Two women sit across a table from one another during a job interview.

Now, suppose that you are chairing a committee to hire a new faculty member. One candidate has even more top tier publications than you, while another candidate has the most publications in general of all the faculty members. How do you think social comparison might influence your choice of applicants? Research suggests that someone in your hypothetical shoes would likely favor the second candidate over the first candidate: people will actively champion the candidate who does not threaten their standing on a relevant dimension in an organization ( Garcia, Song, & Tesser, 2010 ). In other words, the SEM forces are so powerful that people will essentially advocate for a candidate whom they feel is inferior!

Individual Differences

It is also worth mentioning that social comparison and its effects on self-evaluation will often depend on personality and individual differences . For example, people with mastery goals ( Poortvliet, Janssen, Van Yperen, & Van de Vliert, 2007 ) may not interpret an upward comparison as a threat to the self but more as challenge, and a hopeful sign that one can achieve a certain level of performance. Another individual difference is whether one has a “ fixed mindset ” or “ growth mindset ” ( Dweck, 2007 ). People with fixed mindsets think that their abilities and talents cannot change; thus, an upward comparison will likely threaten their self-evaluation and prompt them to experience negative consequences of social comparison, such as competitive behavior, envy, or unhappiness. People with growth mindsets, however, are likely to interpret an upward comparison as a challenge, and an opportunity to improve themselves.

Situational factors

Social comparison researchers are actively exploring situational factors that can likewise influence degrees of social comparison:

As the number of comparison targets (i.e., the number of people with whom you can compare) increases, social comparison tends to decrease. For example, imagine you are running a race with competitors of similar ability as your own, and the top 20% will receive a prize. Do you think you would try harder if there were only 10 people in the race, or if there were 100? The findings on N-Effect ( Garcia & Tor, 2009 ; Tor & Garcia, 2010 ) suggest the answer is 10. Even though the expected value of winning is the same in both cases, people will try harder when there are fewer people. In fact, findings suggest that as the number of SAT test-takers at a particular venue increases, the lower the average SAT score for that venue will be ( Garcia & Tor, 2009 ). One of the mechanisms behind the N-Effect is social comparison. As the number of competitors increases, social comparison—one of the engines behind competitive motivation—becomes less important. Perhaps you have experienced this if you have had to give class presentations. As the number of presenters increases, you feel a decreasing amount of comparison pressure.

A black and white photo from the 1930s of three young women on the beach smiling for the camera.

Research on the local dominance effect ( Zell & Alicke, 2010 ) also provides insights about social comparison. People are more influenced by social comparison when the comparison is more localized rather than being broad and general. For example, if you wanted to evaluate your height by using social comparison, you could compare your height to a good friend, a group of friends, people in your workplace, or even the average height of people living in your city. Although any of these comparisons is hypothetically possible people generally rely on more local comparisons. They are more likely to compare with friends or co-workers than they are to industry or national averages. So, if you are among the tallest in your group of friends, it may very well give you a bigger boost to your self-esteem, even if you’re still among the shortest individuals at the national level.

Proximity to a Standard

Research suggests that social comparison involves the proximity of a standard—such as the #1 ranking or other qualitative threshold. One consequence of this is an increase in competitive behavior. For example, in childhood games, if someone shouts, “First one to the tree is the coolest-person-in the-world!” then the children who are nearest the tree will tug and pull at each other for the lead. However, if someone shouts, “Last one there is a rotten-egg!” then the children who are in last place will be the ones tugging and pulling each other to get ahead. In the proximity of a standard, social comparison concerns increase. We also see this in rankings. Rivals ranked #2 and #3, for instance, are less willing to maximize joint gains (in which they both benefit) if it means their opponent will benefit more , compared to rivals ranked #202 and #203 ( Garcia, Tor, & Gonzalez, 2006 ; Garcia & Tor, 2007 ). These latter rivals are so far from the #1 rank (i.e., the standard) that it does not bother them if their opponent benefits more than them. Thus, social comparison concerns are only important in the proximity of a standard.

Social Category Lines

Social comparison can also happen between groups. This is especially the case when groups come from different social categories versus the same social category . For example, if students were deciding what kind of music to play at the high school prom, one option would be to simply flip a coin—say, heads for hip-hop, tails for pop. In this case, everyone represents the same social category—high school seniors—and social comparison isn’t an issue. However, if all the boys wanted hip-hop and all the girls wanted pop flipping a coin is not such an easy solution as it privileges one social category over another ( Garcia & Miller, 2007 ). For more on this, consider looking into the research literature about the difficulties of win-win scenarios between different social categories ( Tajfel, Billig, Bundy, & Flament, 1971 ; Turner, Brown, & Tajfel, 1979 ).

Related Phenomena

Frog pond effect.

One interesting phenomenon of social comparison is the Frog Pond Effect . As the name suggests, its premise can be illustrated using the simple analogy of a frog in a pond: as a frog, would you rather be in a small pond where you’re a big frog, or a large pond where you’re a small frog? According to Marsh, Trautwein, Ludtke and Koller ( 2008 ), people in general had a better academic self-concept if they were a big frog in a small pond (e.g., the top student in their local high school) rather than a small frog in a large one (e.g., one of many good students at an Ivy League university). In a large study of students, they found that school-average ability can have a negative impact on the academic self-esteem of a student when the average ability is 1 standard deviation higher than normal (i.e., a big pond). In other words, average students have a higher academic self-concept when attending a below-average school (big fish in a small pond), and they have a lower academic self-concept when attending an above-average school (small fish in a big pond) ( Marsh, 1987 ; Marsh & Parker, 1984 ).

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

Another related topic to social comparison is the Dunning-Kruger Effect . The Dunning-Kruger effect, as explained by Dunning, Johnson, Ehrlinger and Kruger ( 2003 ), addresses the fact that unskilled people often think they are on par or superior to their peers in tasks such as test-taking abilities. That is, they are overconfident. Basically, they fail to accurately compare themselves or their skills within their surroundings. For example, Dunning et al. ( 2003 ) asked students to disclose how well they thought they had done on an exam they’d just taken. The bottom 25% of students with the lowest test scores overestimated their performance by approximately 30%, thinking their performance was above the 50th percentile. This estimation problem doesn’t only apply to poor performers, however. According to Dunning et al. ( 2003 ), top performers tend to under estimate their skills or percentile ranking in their surrounding context. Some explanations are provided by Dunning et al. ( 2003 ) for this effect on both the good and poor performers:The poor performers, compared to their more capable peers, lack specific logical abilities similar to the logic necessary to do some of the tasks/tests in these studies and, as such, cannot really distinguish which questions they are getting right or wrong. This is known as the double-curse explanation. However, the good performers do not have this particular logic problem and are actually quite good at estimating their raw scores. Ironically, the good performers usually overestimate how well the people around them are doing and therefore devaluate their own performance. As a result, most people tend to think they are above average in what they do, when in actuality not everyone can be above average.

Social comparison is a natural psychological tendency and one that can exert a powerful influence on the way we feel and behave. Many people act as if social comparison is an ugly phenomenon and one to be avoided. This sentiment is at the heart of phrases like “keeping up with the Joneses” and “the rat race,” in which it is assumed that people are primarily motivated by a desire to beat others. In truth, social comparison has many positive aspects. Just think about it: how could you ever gauge your skills in chess without having anyone to compare yourself to? It would be nearly impossible to ever know just how good your chess skills are, or even what criteria determine “good” vs. “bad” chess skills. In addition, the engine of social comparison can also provide the push you need to rise to the occasion and increase your motivation, and therefore make progress toward your goals.

Text Attribution

Media attributions.

1967 Kawasaki Samurai SS Motorcycle Advertisement Playboy May 1967
Table 4.1: The effects of social comparison.
I Voted Sticker
grandpa’s friends
Figure 4.2: The Dunning-Kruger Effect

The process by which people understand their own ability or condition by mentally comparing themselves to others.

Making mental comparisons to people who are perceived to be superior on the standard of comparison.

Making mental comparisons with people who are perceived to be inferior on the standard of comparison.

The extent to which a person feels that he or she is worthy and good. The success or failure that the motivated agent experiences in pursuit of valued goals is a strong determinant of self-esteem.

The finding that people can boost their own self-evaluations by comparing themselves to others who rank lower on a particular comparison standard.

Mentally comparing actual events with fantasies of what might have been possible in alternative scenarios.

A model of social comparison that emphasizes one’s closeness to the comparison target, the relative performance of that target person, and the relevance of the comparison behavior to one’s self-concept.

A person’s relatively stable patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior.

Psychological traits, abilities, aptitudes and tendencies that vary from person to person.

Goals that are focused primarily on learning, competence, and self-development. These are contrasted with “performance goals” that are focused on the quality of a person’s performance.

The belief that personal qualities such as intelligence are traits that cannot be developed. People with fixed mindsets often underperform compared to those with “growth mindsets”

The belief that personal qualities, such as intelligence, can be developed through effort and practice.

The finding that increasing the number of competitors generally decreases one’s motivation to compete.

People are generally more influenced by social comparison when that comparison is personally relevant rather than broad and general.

The relative closeness or distance from a given comparison standard. The further from the standard a person is, the less important he or she considers the standard. When a person is closer to the standard he/she is more likely to be competitive.

Any group in which membership is defined by similarities between its members. Examples include religious, ethnic, and athletic groups.

The theory that a person’s comparison group can affect their evaluations of themselves. Specifically, people have a tendency to have lower self-evaluations when comparing themselves to higher performing groups.

The tendency for unskilled people to be overconfident in their ability and highly skilled people to underestimate their ability.

An Introduction to Social Psychology Copyright © 2022 by Thomas Edison State University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Social Comparisons: Personal Examples Essay

People have always endeavored to understand themselves better throughout history. It was a more challenging goal several centuries ago than nowadays, as there was little information available on the topic. Fortunately, it is less complicated in the modern world, as extensive and detailed research has been conducted about the self. Much information has been discovered and described on social comparison, impression management, mindsets, and motivation. Without any doubt, connecting my personal examples to these concepts can encourage me to understand myself better.

First, social comparisons occur when people compare themselves to others. According to Fox and Vendemia (2016), downward social comparisons can lead to self-enhancement, boosts in self-esteem, body satisfaction, and self-confidence. In contrast, upward social comparisons cause negative emotions, self-doubt, anxiety, and eating disturbance (Fox & Vendemia, 2016). For example, I used to attend dance classes and often experienced upward comparisons. I watched videos of professional dancers and doubted my abilities. At the same time, I compared myself with them and endeavored to work diligently on my skills. In general, I understand that comparing myself with professionals had its benefits and drawbacks.

Second, it is evident that my mindset type has a considerable impact on my life. Fortunately, I am able to change it by investing some time and effort. There are two main mindset types, and Haimovitz and Dweck (2016) describe them as focusing on qualities that can be improved (growth) and directing attention toward traits impossible to change (fixed). Undoubtedly, it is incredibly critical whether a student has a growth mindset or a fixed one, as it directly and significantly influences academic success and life prospects. I recall that it was easy to determine the mindset types of my classmates in high school. Some of them studied much and tried to improve their skills, while others claimed they were not good at humanities and sciences.

Third, motivation is crucial in succeeding in various aspects of life. However, intrinsic motivation differently influences people than extrinsic one. Mudrak et al. (2018) conclude that adolescent athletes intrinsically motivated negatively perceive cheating and doping, while extrinsically motivated athletes have positive attitudes toward the issues. I remember when I attended dance classes with enjoyment, I worked harder on my skills. In contrast, when I did it because of external rewards, I cheated and hoped my dance teacher would not notice it.

Finally, impression management is an essential tool for every individual in the modern world. People often try to do their best to present themselves to achieve a particular goal. Undoubtedly, impression management can work more effectively in face-to-face communication. In contrast, while written communication is less effective, it is more manageable. There are numerous ways to control and improve it. For example, I use emoji while texting with friends and try to appear polite and avoid grammatical errors while writing formal letters.

In conclusion, people need to know themselves better to make decisions that are more conscious and be aware of their surroundings. Fortunately, there are numerous concepts and theories discovered by scholars which can help everyone to achieve it. Linking personal experiences with such notions as social comparison, extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, growth and fixed mindset, and impression management have helped me better understand myself. Moreover, I discovered that almost every choice is connected to these ideas; thus, I can determine how to become more conscious and achieve better results.

Fox, J., & Vendemia, M. A. (2016). Selective self-presentation and social comparison through photographs on social networking sites . Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking , 19 (10), 593–600.

Haimovitz, K., & Dweck, C. S. (2017). The origins of children’s growth and fixed mindsets: New research and a new proposal. Child development , 88 (6), 1849–1859.

Mudrak, J., Slepicka, P., & Slepickova, I. (2018). Sport motivation and doping in adolescent athletes . PloS One , 13 (10).

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Social Comparison Theory

Reviewed by Psychology Today Staff

People constantly evaluate themselves, and others, in domains like attractiveness , wealth, intelligence , and success. According to some studies, as much as 10 percent of our thoughts involve comparisons of some kind. Social comparison theory is the idea that individuals determine their own social and personal worth based on how they stack up against others. The theory was developed in 1954 by psychologist Leon Festinger. Later research has shown that people who regularly compare themselves to others may find motivation to improve, but may also experience feelings of deep dissatisfaction, guilt , or remorse, and engage in destructive behaviors like lying or disordered eating .

The Benefits of Comparison
The Dangers of Comparison
Comparison and Bias

When individuals compare themselves to others as a way of measuring their personal development or to motivate themselves to improve and, in the process, develop a more positive self-image , comparisons can be beneficial. It takes discipline, however, to avoid the pitfalls of negative comparison. In large part, how we react to comparisons depends on who we compare ourselves to: When we just want to feel better about ourselves, we tend to engage in comparisons to people worse off than we are, although this can become an unhealthy habit. When we want to improve, though, we may compare ourselves to people roughly similar to us but higher achieving in one trait or another.

Social comparison can be highly beneficial when people use social networks to push themselves . In a study, friendly competition was highly effective in pushing people to exercise more, as peers pushed each other to keep up and do more. In such a "social ratchet effect," each person’s activity generates more activity among others. Social networks in which people simply offered each other positive encouragement were far less helpful.

People generally engage in either upward or downward comparisons. In upward comparisons, we compare ourselves with those we believe are better than us in some way; in downward comparisons, we do the opposite. Research, unsurprisingly, finds that downward comparisons make us feel better about ourselves , but that there are dangers to each approach—insecurity and jealousy , or overconfidence and arrogance.

Envy is usually an unpleasant feeling that can lead to brooding, resentment, or even violence. Some psychologists, however, have suggested that people can experience “benign” envy, in which they use envious feelings as motivation to improve themselves . Benign envy could lead someone, for example, to try to emulate the best qualities of a person who has what they want.

Theodore Roosevelt called comparison “the thief of joy,” and he may have been right. Social comparison can motivate people to improve, but it can also promote judgmental, biased, and overly competitive or superior attitudes. Most people have the social skills and impulse control to keep their standards for social comparison to themselves, and not to act on any envy or resentment spurred by comparison-making. But their true feelings may manifest in other ways.

Comparisons are likelier to make us feel bad when we make the error of only comparing ourselves to paragons of certain traits. For example, many people believe they have a less active social life than others. But when making such comparisons, people tend to compare themselves only to the most social people they know. Understanding this bias can help us make more realistic and motivating comparisons.

Constantly checking social-media feeds full of images from parties, concerts, or other aspirational events can diminish self-esteem and contribute to depression . But some studies have found that such risks primarily affect those high in the trait of neuroticism , and others suggest that social-media use can reinforce self-esteem; for example, when people review their own images of good times with friends.

To be less vulnerable to painful comparisons, notice the people or events that prompt the behavior. Commit to being deeply grateful for what’s good in your own life. And remember that the human propensity to want what others have is such a waste of time, unless what you see and “covet” in another is something of deep worth , such as their generosity or kindness.

Many people fall into the trap of positional bias, comparing "up" more often than "down" relative to their own standing. A fascination with celebrity culture and the prevalence of carefully-manicured social-media feeds only exacerbates the effect by exposing people to an endless stream of others’ seemingly perfect images, homes, jobs, skills, and families.

It's been widely proven that people tend to believe that they are above average when it comes to desirable traits such as intelligence . But this the belief may not be so stable. For example, people are generally quick to report that they are smarter than average, but somewhat more humble when asked to place themselves in a specific percentile or to rate themselves on specific skills.

Two-thirds of Americans believe their intelligence is above average, but men are much more likely to inflate themselves than women; in surveys, more than 70 percent of men state that they are smarter than average, compared to about 60 percent of women, and they are much more likely to “strongly agree” that they are smarter than average.

Grandiosity is a core trait of many individuals high in narcissism . But seeing themselves as superior also requires seeing everyone else as beneath them . Research finds that while most people are driven by a need for social inclusion and approval, those high in narcissism are motivated by a need for status—to stand above a group, rather than being welcomed into it.

Social media can foster digital flourishing and inspiration, especially among young adults, despite its challenges.

No one is exempt from self-doubt. Nobel prize-winners and successful entrepreneurs continue to feel anxiety about their projects and work. Let that awareness activate you now.

Comparing yourself to others can steal your sense of joy. Focusing, instead, on how you can beat your own personal record may be more productive.

When 50% of the workforce report burnout, the problem is more than a lack of resilience. Here are two unconventional reasons why so many of us struggle with our work-life balance.

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Examining the influence of solitude on spontaneous thought reveals how it alters spontaneous thought patterns, illuminating the social nature of our minds.

Despite being continually reminded that if we “see something, say something,” most people don’t. Research reveals how to boost benevolent bystander behavior.

5 strategies to put comparisons behind you.

Instead of allowing the comparing your mind does to steal joy in daily life, how about channelling your comparing in beneficial ways?

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Video transcript

What is Self-Concept Theory? A Psychologist Explains

What is Self-Concept Theory in Psychology? Definition + Examples (PDF)

You might answer with “ I’m a mother ,” or, “ I’m a therapist, ” or maybe, “ I’m a believer, ” “ I’m a good friend, ” “ I’m a brother. ”

Maybe you answer with, “ I am excellent at my job, ” “ I’m an accomplished musician, ” or “ I’m a successful athlete. ”

Other responses might fall into the category of traits: “ I’m a kind-hearted person, ” “ I’m intelligent and hard-working, ” or “ I’m laid-back and easy-going. ”

These responses come from your internal sense of who you are. This sense is developed early in life, but it goes through constant evaluation and adjustment throughout the lifespan.

In psychology, this sense of self has a specific term: self-concept.

Before you read on, we thought you might like to download our three Self-Compassion Exercises for free . These detailed, science-based exercises will not only help you understand and show more compassion and kindness to yourself but will also give you the tools to help your clients, students or employees improve their self-compassion.

This Article Contains:

What is self-concept a definition, self-concept theory, the components and elements of the self-concept model, the development stages of self-concept, 10 examples of self-concept, research on self-concept, measuring self-concept with scales, tests, and inventories, self-concept activities and lesson plans for preschoolers and older students (pdf), self-concept worksheets (pdf), 8 quotes on self-concept, a take-home message.

Self-concept is an overarching idea we have about who we are—physically, emotionally, socially, spiritually, and in terms of any other aspects that make up who we are (Neill, 2005). We form and regulate our self-concept as we grow, based on the knowledge we have about ourselves. It is multidimensional, and can be broken down into these individual aspects.

For example, you may have a very different idea of who you are in terms of your physical body, and who you are in terms of your spirit or soul.

The influential self-efficacy researcher Roy Baumeister (1999) defines self-concept as follows:

“The individual’s belief about himself or herself, including the person’s attributes and who and what the self is.”

A similar definition comes from Rosenberg’s 1979 book on the topic; he says self-concept is:

“…the totality of an individual’s thoughts and feelings having reference to himself as an object.”

Self-concept is related to several other “self” constructs, such as self-esteem, self-image, self-efficacy, and self-awareness. In the following section, we will explain these slight—yet important—differences.

Self-Concept vs. Self-Esteem

Self-concept is not self-esteem, although self-esteem may be a part of self-concept. Self-concept is the perception that we have of ourselves, our answer when we ask ourselves the question “Who am I?”

It is knowing about one’s own tendencies, thoughts, preferences and habits, hobbies, skills, and areas of weakness. According to Carl Rogers, founder of client-centered therapy , self-concept is an overarching construct that self-esteem is one of the components of it (McLeod, 2008).

Self-Concept vs. Self-Image

Self-image is related to self-concept but is less broad. Self-image is how an individual sees themselves, and it does not have to align with reality.

A person’s self-image is based on how they see themselves, while self-concept is a more comprehensive evaluation of the self, largely based on how a person sees themselves, values themselves, thinks about themselves, and feels about themselves.

Carl Rogers posited that self-image is a component of self-concept, along with self-esteem or self-worth and one’s “ideal self” (McLeod, 2008).

Self-Concept vs. Self-Efficacy

Self-concept is a more complex construct than self-efficacy. While self-efficacy refers to an individual’s judgments of their own abilities, self-concept is more general and includes both cognitive (thoughts about) and affective (feelings about) judgments about oneself (Bong & Clark, 1999).

Self-Concept vs. Self-Awareness

Self-awareness also influences self-concept. It is the quality or trait that involves conscious awareness of one’s own thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and traits (Cherry, 2018A). To have a fully developed self-concept (and one that is based in reality), a person must have at least some level of self-awareness .

We explore this further in The Science of Self-Acceptance Masterclass© .

Generally, theorists agree on the following points:

On the broadest level, self-concept is the overall idea we have about who we are and includes cognitive and affective judgments about ourselves;
Self-concept is multi-dimensional, incorporating our views of ourselves in terms of several different aspects (e.g., social, religious, spiritual, physical, emotional);
It is learned, not inherent;
It is influenced by biological and environmental factors, but social interaction plays a big role as well;
Self-concept develops through childhood and early adulthood when it is more easily changed or updated;
It can be changed in later years, but it is more of an uphill battle since people have established ideas about who they are;
Self-concept does not always align with reality. When it does, our self-concept is “congruent.” When it doesn’t, our self-concept is “incongruent.”

Identity and Self-Concept Theory in Psychology vs. Self-Concept in Sociology

Both psychology and sociology share an interest in self-concept, but they use slightly different ways to explore it. Individual researchers vary, of course, but generally, the divide can be thought of in these terms:

Sociology/social psychology focuses on how self-concept develops, specifically within the context of the individual’s social environment.
Psychology focuses on how self-concept impacts people (Gecas, 1982).

There are other differences between the two, including psychology’s general focus on the individual versus sociology’s focus on the group, community, or society; however, this difference in focus has led to two diverse research streams. Both have resulted in great insights and interesting findings, and they sometimes overlap, but this divide can still be seen in the literature today.

Carl Rogers and the Self-Concept Theory of Personality

Famed psychologist, theorist, and clinician Carl Rogers posited a theory of how self-concept influences and, indeed, acts as the framework for, one’s personality.

The image we have of who we are contributes to our personality, and our actions—combined with our personality —create a feedback loop into our image of ourselves. Rogers believed that our personality is driven by our desire for self-actualization . This is the condition that emerges when we reach our full potential and our self-concept, self-worth, and ideal self all overlap (Journal Psyche, n.d.).

How we develop our personalities and self-concepts varies, thus creating the unique individuals we are. According to Rogers, we always strive for self-actualization, some with more success than others.

How do people go about striving for self-actualization and congruence? This relates to the idea of how anyone “maintains” their idea of themselves. We explore that next.

Self-Concept Maintenance Theory

Self-Concept and Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

Self-concept maintenance refers to how people maintain or enhance their sense of self. It is relatively fixed after a person reaches adulthood, but it can—and does—change based on the person’s experiences.

The theory of self-concept maintenance states that we do not simply sit and wait for our self-concept to develop: we take an active role in shaping our self-concept at all ages (whether we are aware of this or not).

Although there are different theories about the processes of self-concept maintenance, it generally concerns:

Our evaluations of ourselves
Our comparison of our actual selves with our ideal selves
Our actions taken to move closer to our ideal selves (Munoz, 2012).

This may seem like a pretty logical and straightforward process, but we tend to give ourselves room for moral ambiguity. For example, a study by Mazar, Amir, and Ariely (2007) showed that people will generally engage in beneficial dishonesty when given the opportunity. However, these same people might not revise their self-concept to incorporate this dishonesty.

When participants in the study were prompted to be more aware of their internal standards for honesty , they were less likely to engage in beneficial dishonesty; on the other hand, when given a “degrees of freedom” (greater separation between their actions and the rewards they would receive for dishonesty), they were more likely to engage in dishonesty—with no impact to their self-concept.

This is one example of the work on self-concept maintenance, as humans constantly assess themselves and their moral code since it influences their identity and actions.

Self-Concept Clarity and Self-Concept Differentiation

Self-concept clarity is different from self-concept.

Self-concept clarity (SCC) refers to how clear, confident, and consistent an individual’s definitions of themselves are (Diehl & Hay, 2011). Self-concept differentiation (SCD) refers to how an individual’s self-representation may vary across contexts or social roles (e.g., self as a spouse, self as a parent, self as a student).

SCC and SCD are hot topics in psychology since they influence thought patterns and behavior.

Higher SCC indicates a firmer and more stable self-concept, while low SCC indicates that an individual is unclear or vague about who they really are. Those with low SCC may struggle with low self-esteem, self-consciousness, and neuroticism.

SCD is not as clear-cut. Having a high SCD may be viewed as a bad thing, but it can also be an effective coping mechanism for succeeding in the modern world where individuals have many different roles. If SCD is very high, it might mean that the individual does not have a stable self-concept and “wears a different mask” for each of their roles.

A very low level of SCD may indicate that the individual is authentically “them” across all of their roles—although it may also indicate that he cannot effectively switch from one role to another (Diehl & Hay, 2011).

Essentially, people who differentiate their roles slightly, yet maintain a clear image of themselves, may succeed most at finding balance in their identity and image.

The Components and Elements of the Self-Concept Model

There are different ideas about what self-concept consists of, and how it should be defined; however, there are some characteristics and dimensions that apply to the basic, agreed-upon conceptualization of self-concept.

Characteristics of Self-Concept

As a brief review, self-concept is the perspective we have on who we are. Each of us has a unique self-concept, different from the self-concept of others and from their concept of us.

However, there are some characteristics that all of our self-concepts have in common.

Self-concept:

Displays uniquely with each person.
Vary from very positive to very negative.
Carries emotional, intellectual, and functional dimensions.
Changes with the context.
Changes over time.
Influence the individual’s life (Delmar Learning, n.d.)

Dimensions of Self-Concept

Different dimensions may constitute different kinds of self-concept; for example, the dimensions that create “academic self-efficacy” will not have as much overlap with “social self-efficacy.”

There are some overarching dimensions that researchers understand with the self-concept puzzle. These dimensions include:

Self-esteem
Self-image (physical)
Identities or roles (social)
Personal traits and qualities (Elliot, 1984; Gecas, 1982)

Early childhood is a ripe time for young humans to perceive themselves in the world.

The Formation of Self-Concept During Early Childhood

There are three general stages of self-concept development during early childhood:

Stage 1 : 0 to 2 years-old a. Babies need consistent, loving relationships to develop a positive sense of self. b. Babies form preferences that align with their innate sense of self. c. Toddlers feel secure with gentle but firm limits d. At age two, language skill develops and toddlers have a sense of “me.”
Stage 2 : 3 to 4 years-old a. Three and four-year-olds begin to see themselves as separate and unique individuals. b. Their self-images tend to be descriptive rather than prescriptive or judgmental. c. Preschoolers are increasingly independent and curious about what they can do.
Stage 3 : 5 to 6 years-old a. They are transitioning from the “me” stage to the “us” stage, where they are more aware of the needs and interests of the larger group. b. Kindergarteners can use their words to communicate their wants, needs, and feelings. c. Five and six-year-olds can use even more advanced language to help define themselves within the context of the group (Miller, Church, & Poole, n.d.).

Self-Concept in Middle Childhood

During middle childhood (about 7 to 11 years old), children are beginning to develop a sense of their social selves and figuring out how they fit in with everyone else. They reference social groups and make social comparisons more often, and begin to think about how others see them.

Other characteristics of their self-concept at this stage include:

More balanced, less all-or-none descriptions
Development of the ideal and real self
Descriptions of the self by competencies instead of specific behaviors
Development of a personal sense of self (Berk, 2004)

Culture begins to play a big role at this stage, but we’ll talk more about that later.

The Development of Self-Concept in Adolescence

Adolescence is where the development of one’s self-concept really explodes.

This is the stage in which individuals (about age 12-18) play with their sense of self, including a time when they experiment with their identity, compare themselves with others, and develop the basis of a self-concept that may stay with them the rest of their life.

During this period, adolescents are prone to greater self-consciousness and susceptibility to the influence of their peers and chemical changes happening in the brain (Sebastian, Burnett, & Blakemore, 2008).

They enjoy greater freedom and independence, engage in increasingly competitive activities, compare themselves with their peers, and can value (even over-value) the perspective of others (Manning, 2007).

In adolescence, there are two important factors that influence self-concept and self-worth:

Success in areas in which the adolescent desires success
Approval from significant people in the adolescent’s life (Manning, 2007).

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You may have a good handle on what self-concept is but these examples can help explain it more.

Self-concepts are rarely all positive or all negative; someone may have both positive and some negative self-concepts in different domains (e.g., a husband who thinks of himself as a good father but sees his physical self as out-of-shape and unhealthy or a student who think so themselves as a great athlete who struggles academically).

Some examples of positive self-concepts include:

A person sees herself as an intelligent person;
A man perceives himself as an important member of his community;
A woman sees herself as an excellent spouse and friend;
A person thinks of himself as a nurturing and caring person;
A person views herself as a hard-working and competent employee.

On the flip side, these people could have negative self-concepts like:

A person sees herself as stupid and slow;
A man perceives himself as expendable and a burden on his community;
A woman sees herself as a terrible spouse and friend;
A person thinks of himself as a cold and unapproachable person;
A person views herself as a lazy and incompetent employee.

We all have many of these mini or domain-specific self-concepts that encompass our self-concept. Some may be more positive or negative than others, and each is an important piece of what makes us who we are.

Self concept, self identity and social identity – Khan Academy

Given the marked interest in this topic within sociology and psychology, there is quite a bit of research out there on the subject. Here are a few of the most interesting and impactful findings on self-concept.

Self-Concept in Marketing and How it Influences Consumer Behavior

It probably won’t shock you that the idea of self-concept has made its way into marketing—after all, brands and companies can profit from targeting certain desirable identities. In fact, it is the basis of fashion and consumerism.

Our self-concept influences our wants and needs, and can also shape our behavior. Whether it is true or not, we tend to believe that our purchases will help establish our identity. There is a reason why people buy certain clothing, cars, etc.

And this idea has a name: self-concept attachment.

Self-Concept Attachment

Self-concept attachment refers to the attachment we form to a product as it influences identity. For example, someone who loves their Patagonia jacket may also consider it as a status symbol that also represents their “outdoorsy” side.

Thus, this jacket has a strong self-concept attachment, in addition to its purpose of providing warmth.

Surprisingly, consumers become more attached to a brand when the brands match their “actual selves” rather than their ideal selves (Malär, Krohmer, Hoyer, & Nyffenegger, 2011). We tend to identify more with brands that “meet us where we are” rather than trying to connect with our higher, ideal selves.

Companies understand this and work to (1) get to know their target consumers better, and (2) mold their brand identity to match the self-concept of their consumers. The more they can get consumers to identify with their brand, the more they will buy that brand.

How Does Self-Concept Affect Interpersonal Communication?

Think about a cycle in which we develop, maintain, and revise our self-concept: we have an idea of who we are, and we act in accordance with that self-concept. Consequently, others form an idea about who we are, and they react in accordance with their idea of who we are, thus impacting our idea of who we are.

This feedback loop continues to shape us, and interpersonal communication plays a big role here.

Our self-concept drives our motivations, methods, and experiences with communicating with others. For example, if you see yourself as someone who is always right (or who must always be right), you may struggle in communicating with others when disagreements arise.

If that need is accompanied by an acceptance of aggression, you may use hostility, assertiveness , and argumentativeness to attack the self-concepts of the people you are debating instead of discussing their positions (Infante & Wigley, 1986).

Communication on social media is also a determinant and an outcome of an individual’s self-concept.

Sponcil and Gitimu (2012) suggested that, in general, the more friends an individual has on social networking sites, the more positively they feel about themselves as a whole. Conversely, the anxiety of social media and maintaining one’s image poses separate issues.

Self-Concept and Academic Achievement

Self-concept and academic achievement is also a positive feedback loop, as actions beget similar actions and identity to match.

In a longitudinal study, Marsh (1990) found that students with more positive academic self-concept achieved greater academic success the following year. Later studies confirmed the relationship between the two but indicated that achievement affects self-concept more than self-concept inherently influences achievement success (Muijs, 2011).

Research by Byrne (1986) offered instead that self-concept and academic self-concept can be considered two separate constructs; academic achievement may impact one’s overall self-concept, but it is most directly related to academic self-concept.

Self-Concept and Career Development

Self-concept develops throughout the lifespan and during any career.

According to researcher Donald Super, there are five life and career development stages:

Growth (Ages 0 to 14)
Exploration (Ages 15 to 24)
Establishment (Age 25 to 44)
Maintenance (Age 45 to 64)
Decline (Age 65+)

The first stage is marked by the development of one’s basic self-concept. In the second stage, able individuals experiment and try out new classes, experiences, and jobs. Stage 3 sees individuals establishing their career and building their skills, likely starting in an entry-level position.

In the fourth stage, individuals engage in a continuous management and adjustment process to both their self-concept and their career. Finally, the fifth stage is characterized by reduced output and preparations for retirement, activities which can have a huge impact on one’s self-concept (Super, Starishevsky, Matlin, & Jordaan, 1963).

Of course, this model assumes equal access and privilege upon entering the workforce, which is not truthful to reality. Not all humans, for example, have the opportunity to explore and establish themselves as easily as others.

Nevertheless, Super posited that self-concept drives career development and can act as a general framework and inspiration for future research in this area, including a social and racial unearthing of Rogers’ theory on self-actualization.

The research could also be conducted on Bandura’s work on self-efficacy, on role salience, and on the idea of multiple identities in career development (Betz, 1994).

Culture and Self-Concept

Unsurprisingly, culture can have a big impact on self-concept. For example, how children are treated in early childhood influences how their sense of self develops.

Many parents might be more concerned with emotions and satisfying the wants of their children, while others may be more firm and controlling of their child’s behavior, worrying about their needs rather than fulfilling their desires. This is a generalization, but one that holds under scrutiny: culture influence self-concept.

Research suggests that those from more collectivist cultures produced more group self-descriptions and fewer idiocentric self-descriptions than those from individualistic cultures (Bochner, 1994).

Further research also indicated that East Asian cultures are more accepting of contradictory beliefs about the self; this indicates that one’s self-concept in these cultures may be more flexible than, say, American culture (Choi & Choi, 2002).

Findings like these are fascinating, but they also reveal how and why it is difficult to measure self-concept. The next section summarizes those attempts.

One’s self-concept does not always align with “reality” or with how others view a person. However, there are still some tools that can measure self-concept.

If you are interested in using a self-concept measure for research purposes, look first at the development of the instrument, the definition it is based on, and the dimensions or components it measures. It’s important that you choose a tool that aligns with the idea of self-concept that your research uses.

Some of the most prominent tools to measure self-concept include:

The Robson Self-Concept Questionnaire (SCQ; Robson, 1989)
The Social Self-Concept Questionnaire (SSC; Fernández-Zabala, Rodríguez-Fernández, & Goñi, 2016)
The Academic Self-Concept Questionnaire (ASCQ; Liu & Wang, 2005)

Self-Concept Questionnaire by Dr. Saraswat

The Self-Concept Questionnaire from Dr. Saraswat (1984) has become a popular choice for measuring self-concept. It consists of 48 items measuring self-concept across six dimensions:

Temperamental;
Educational;
Intellectual.

For each item, the respondent rates how well each item describes their ideas about themselves on a 5-point scale. Higher scores indicate high self-concept, while low scores indicate low self-concept.

This self-concept questionnaire is generally thought of as reliable by researchers, but it is dated.

If you’re looking for a great resource with 10 simple but effective activities for cultivating self-concept in young children, Glori Chaika’s article “Ten Activities to Improve Students’ Self-Concepts” can be adapted to fit the context for several age ranges.

We summarize the 10 activities she suggests here:

1 – The Interview

This activity is great for the beginning of the year as students to get to know their peers.

Break the group into pairs, and make sure each student is paired with someone they don’t very well. Give them 10 minutes to interview each other (5 minutes per interview) with fun questions like “would you rather live on a boat or on an island?” or “what is your favorite subject at this school?”.

When all of the interviews have been completed, have each pair come to the front of the class and introduce their partner to the other children.

2 – The Journal

Journals can be beneficial in many ways, as keeping a journal allows you to self-examine. Help your students develop their sense of self by assigning journal entries that they keep in one notebook all year.

Tell your students that they can put whatever they want in their journal—they can write a poem, describe a dream they had, write about what they hope for, something they are happy about, something they are sad about, etc.—and that they must make at least three entries (or however many you decide is appropriate) per week.

Make sure to tell them that you will only read the entry if they give you permission, but that you will check to ensure they have at least three dated entries per week.

3 – Designing Self-Collages

Self-collages are a great activity from young children to high-schoolers. Tell the students they need to create a collage that represents who they are by using pictures, words, and/or symbols. They can cut things from magazines, print them out from the internet, or draw pictures themselves.

You may want to guide them by suggesting to focus on things they enjoy or are good at, places they’ve been or would like to go, and people they admire.

When everyone’s collage is complete, you can do an extra activity where students present their collage to the classroom, or maybe everyone tries to guess which collage belongs to which student.

4 – Ranking Traits

This activity is best for older students with writing skills. Have the students rip a piece of paper into ten strips and write a word or phrase on each strip that they feel describes them. Tell them that no one will see the things they write down, so they can be completely honest.

Once the students have written down their ten traits, have them arrange them in order from those they most like about themselves to those they least like about themselves.

Encourage them to reflect on their traits by asking questions like:

Do you like what you see?
Do you want to keep it?
Now give up one trait. How does the lack of that affect you?
Now give up another. Give up three. Now what kind of person are you?

After the students have reduced their traits to six, have them add the traits back, one by one. For an extra boost to this activity, you can have the students journal about their experience at the end, and how they want to use their strengths.

5 – Accentuate the Positive

Accentuating the positive is all about noticing and sharing the positive things about others (and themselves).

To try this activity, break the students up into groups of four to six. Instruct the groups to pick one person (to start with) and tell that person all the positive things about them. Encourage the students to focus on traits and skills that can be altered (e.g., work ethic, skill in soccer), rather than permanent features (e.g., eyes, skin).

One student in each group will act as a recorder, writing down all the positive things that are said about someone. Each member of the group takes a turn, and the recorder gives the individual the list of all the positive things said about them at the end of the activity.

This exercise can also make a great focus for a journal entry.

6 – Thumbprints

This activity requires an ink pad and the willingness to get a bit messy!

Have each of your students place his or her thumb on the inkpad and then on a piece of paper to get a thumbprint. Show them the five major fingerprint patterns and have them identify their print type. Explain how fingerprints are unique—both across their own fingers and from person to person.

Next, have each student create an animal out of their thumbprint. Bonus points if the animal is one the student feels represents him or her! Encourage them to write about this in their journal, or to add the thumbprint drawing to their journal.

7 – Create a “Me” Commercial

This activity can be especially fun for the drama-loving students. Tell them that they are each going to make a two or three-minute commercial on why you should hire them.

The commercial should focus on their special skills, talents, and positive qualities. It should highlight what is great about them and what they would bring to the fictional position they are auditioning for.

Give the students some time to write their commercial, then have them present their commercials to the class. An alternative method for this activity is to have small groups create commercials for each group member.

8 – Shared Learning

This is a simple activity if you’ve been having your students write in their journal for the whole term.

Tell the students to look through their journal entries and reflect. Have them choose one thing they have learned about themselves during this term.

When each student has chosen something they would like to share, sit in a circle and have each student share out on what they learned over the past three months (or four months, or six months, etc.).

9 – Write Yourself a Letter

This is another activity that is appropriate for older children since it requires somewhat advanced writing skills.

Tell the students that they will be writing a letter to themselves, and to be totally honest since no one else will be able to read it. They can write whatever they’d like in this letter to their future selves, but they may want to add in things that describe them today (e.g., height and weight, current friends, favorite music and movies, special things that happened to them this year).

On another piece of paper or on the back of this letter, tell students to write down ten goals they would like to accomplish by this time next year. Have your students seal the letter and their goals in an envelope, address the envelope to themselves, and give it to you. In one year, mail the letters out to the students.

This is a far-reaching activity that will encourage your students to think about how they change over time, and how they stay the same.

10 – Drawing Self Portraits

Make sure that each student has access to a mirror for this activity. If there isn’t one handy in your classroom, bring some small mirrors in for the students to use.

Tell your students to use the mirror to draw a picture of themselves. It doesn’t have to look exactly like them, but it should be a good representation of them. This simple activity can promote self-reflection in students (beyond the kind that involves a mirror).

To take this activity a bit further, have them divide the drawing in half—on the left side, each student should draw herself as she sees herself, and on the right side, she should draw herself as she thinks others see her. Along with this drawing, the students can make an entry in their journal on the differences between how they see themselves and how they think others see them.

Self-Concept Activities for Preschoolers

For example, a few of the activities that can help preschoolers develop a self-concept include:

Record each child’s voice during an activity period. Have the children listen to the voices and guess which voice goes with each child.
Have several children stand in a line in front of the class. Name the child who is first, second, third and so on. Ask the children to change positions. Then have each child in line name his or her new position. To vary the activity, have the children at their seats name each child in line and describe his or her position.
Make a friendship quilt. Cut several squares of brightly colored construction paper. Give each child one of the squares. Have them decorate the square or even glue a picture of himself, glitter, beads, sequins, or yarn to the square. Staple the squares, side by side, to the bulletin board. If extra squares are needed to fill in empty spaces, print the school’s name or teacher’s name on additional squares and intermingle them with the student’s squares.
Have the children think of some things they can’t do now, but can do when they grow older. What are some things they can do now that they couldn’t do when they were younger?
Role-play the growth process from baby to father or mother to grandparent. The child can interpret the process as he or she goes along. Children can also develop a short play about the family.

Any of these activities can be adapted to fit your children’s context, whether that is a classroom, at home, in a playgroup, in a therapy session, etc.

Lesson Plan on Self-Concept

If you’re looking for a good lesson plan on teaching self-concept, this plan from the Utah Education Network is a great choice.

It starts with a description of self-concept as “the person I think I am” and contrasts it with “the person others think I am” and “the person others think I think I am.”

A diagram on the first page shows a cycle with four “stops:”

As I see myself
As others see me
Other’s reactions to me

This diagram shows how each stop on the cycle feeds into the next, influencing each aspect and eventually coming back to the original stop. For example, how we see ourselves influences our actions. Our actions drive how others see us, and their image of us drives their reactions or behavior toward us.

Feedback on ourselves contributes to our overall image of ourselves, and the cycle continues.

Next, it describes several case studies to help drive the point home. There is the case of a 45-year old father who looks in the mirror and thinks about the wrinkle he just found, the weight he would like to lose, his desire to be a stay-at-home dad, his messy and unorganized house, and a commitment he made that has overextended him.

There is also a case of a middle-aged mother thinking about her miserable day at work, the last decade or so of overtime, her struggles to pay the bills and have a little money left for herself, and all the things she has on her to-do list.

A third case focuses on a teenage girl who is concerned about her skin, her haircut, whether her friends truly care about her, and an upcoming chemistry test that she has not studied for.

The final case concerns a teenage guy who was struggling to understand calculus and thinking back to the counselor that encouraged him to take it. He is also comparing himself to his straight-A brother and thinking about how he wished he could be the athlete his father wanted him to be. He is worrying about tryouts and doubting his ability to even make the team.

For each of these cases, the questions are:

How will the individual see himself or herself?
How will the individual act toward others?
How will the individual think others see him or her?
How will others act toward the individual?
What effect does this have on how the individual sees him- or herself?
Where is the spiral headed and how can its motion be reversed?

This is a great lesson for children to learn, whether you introduce it in elementary school (with some extra time and patience set aside!) or in high school.

Follow this link and click on “Self Concept Transparency” to see the example lesson plan for yourself, and feel free to invent examples most relevant to your class or client.

self-concept worksheets strengths self-esteem

Three of the most useful worksheets on self-concept are described below.

All About Me

This worksheet from the Utah Education Network is a good option for children of all ages.

It is only one page with 15 prompts to complete. These prompts are:

I feel good about…
I feel successful when…
My favorite person is…
My favorite activity is…
I wish I could…
If I could have three wishes, they would be: a. b. c.
I feel depressed when…
A character trait I need to improve is…
I am good at…
I wish I did not…
My family is…
I would like to be…
The most important thing to me is…
The thing I like best about myself…

You can find this worksheet and other worksheets and lesson plans on the Utah Education Network’s website here .

17 Exercises To Foster Self-Acceptance and Compassion

Help your clients develop a kinder, more accepting relationship with themselves using these 17 Self-Compassion Exercises [PDF] that promote self-care and self-compassion.

Created by Experts. 100% Science-based.

Learning about how others perceive a construct can be helpful in furthering our own understanding of that construct.

Use the quotes below to see how your idea of self-concept compares to the ideas of others.

What others think of us would of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves.

Paul Valéry

Know, first, who you are; and then adorn yourself accordingly.

Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, ‘This is the real me’, and when you have found that attitude, follow it.

William James

Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.

Act as if you are the person you want to be.

Bernie Siegel

The self is not something that one finds. It is something that one creates.

Thomas Szasz

There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man’s lack of faith in his true Self.

An individual’s self-concept is the core of his personality. It affects every aspect of human behavior: the ability to learn, the capacity to grow and change. A strong, positive self-image is the best possible preparation for success in life.

Joyce Brothers

In this piece, we learned about what self-concept is (an overarching idea about who we are), how it comes about (it develops throughout the lifespan, and is most flexible in the early years), what it is related to and affected by (just about everything, but namely consumer behavior, academic achievement, career development, and culture), and whether you can do anything to change it—you can.

Our self-concept is affected by how we feel about ourselves and how we judge our abilities, competencies, and worth as a person. When we put some effort into boosting these self-evaluations, our self-concept will adjust to accommodate these changes.

We have the ability to change how we think about ourselves by working to become more like our ideal selves.

It might seem daunting to put in the effort required to revise your self-esteem and self-image, but like most tasks, getting started is the hardest part. Refer to some of the quotes above to get a dose of inspiration, or find some quotes on the subject that inspire you and keep them nearby whenever you’re in need of some motivation.

What do you think about self-concept? Do you have any other good quotes about self-concept? Do you have a developed self-concept or is it vaguer? Do you think it’s good or bad to have self-concept differentiation?

Let us know in the comments, and thanks for reading.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don’t forget to download our three Self Compassion Exercises for free .

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Help me to make preparations for grade5 class about positive self concept.

Here is an idea: – Brief Introduction: Explain self-concept in simple terms—how we see ourselves, including our abilities, personality, and place in the world. Activities: – Positive Affirmation Cards: Students create and decorate cards with positive statements about themselves. Self-Portrait: Draw or paint self-portraits that express individual personalities and strengths. – Growth Mindset Chat: Discuss how effort and perseverance can improve abilities, showing that self-concept can grow and change. – Role-Playing: Practice scenarios that involve giving compliments, asking for help, and overcoming obstacles to understand how actions affect self-concept. – Reflection: Encourage journaling about personal growth, challenges, and successes to help students see their progress. – Parent Guide: Send home tips on reinforcing positive self-concept, including praise, open discussions, and setting a positive example.

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2.1: Self-Concept, Self-Esteem and Self-Efficacy

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Victoria Leonard
College of the Canyons

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Self-Concept

Self-concept refers to the overall idea of who a person thinks he or she is. If I said, “Tell me who you are,” your answers would be clues as to how you see yourself, your self-concept. Each person has an overall self-concept that might be encapsulated in a short list of overarching characteristics that he or she finds important. But each person’s self-concept is also influenced by context, meaning we think differently about ourselves depending on the situation we are in. In some situations, personal characteristics, such as our abilities, personality, and other distinguishing features, will best describe who we are. You might consider yourself laid back, traditional, funny, open minded, or driven, or you might label yourself a leader or a thrill seeker. In other situations, our self-concept may be tied to group or cultural membership. For example, you might consider yourself a member of the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity, or a member of the track team.

Our self-concept is also formed through our interactions with others and their reactions to us. The concept of the looking glass self explains that we see ourselves reflected in other people’s reactions to us and then form our self-concept based on how we believe other people see us. 1 This reflective process of building our self-concept is based on what other people have actually said, such as “You’re a good listener,” and other people’s actions, such as coming to you for advice. These thoughts evoke emotional responses that feed into our self-concept. For example, you may think, “I’m glad that people can count on me to listen to their problems.”

We also develop our self-concept through comparisons to other people. Social comparison theory states that we describe and evaluate ourselves in terms of how we compare to other people. Social comparisons are based on two dimensions: superiority/ inferiority and similarity/ difference . 2

In terms of superiority and inferiority , we evaluate characteristics like attractiveness, intelligence, athletic ability, and so on. For example, you may judge yourself to be more intelligent than your brother or less athletic than your best friend, and these judgments are incorporated into your self-concept. This process of comparison and evaluation isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it can have negative consequences if our reference group isn’t appropriate. Reference groups are the groups we use for social comparison, and they typically change based on what we are evaluating. In terms of athletic ability, many people choose unreasonable reference groups with which to engage in social comparison. If a man wants to get into better shape and starts an exercise routine, he may be discouraged by his difficulty keeping up with the aerobics instructor or running partner and judge himself as inferior, which could negatively affect his self-concept. Using as a reference group people who have only recently started a fitness program but have shown progress could help maintain a more accurate and hopefully positive self-concept.

We also engage in social comparison based on similarity and difference . Since self- concept is context specific, similarity may be desirable in some situations and difference more desirable in others. Factors like age and personality may influence whether or not we want to fit in or stand out. Although we compare ourselves to others throughout our lives, adolescent and teen years usually bring new pressure to be similar to or different from particular reference groups. Think of all the cliques in high school and how people voluntarily and involuntarily broke off into groups based on popularity, interest, culture, or grade level. Some kids in your high school probably wanted to fit in with and be similar to other people in the marching band but be different from the football players. Conversely, athletes were probably more apt to compare themselves, in terms of similar athletic ability, to other athletes rather than kids in show choir. But social comparison can be complicated by perceptual influences. As we learned earlier, we organize information based on similarity and difference, but these patterns don’t always hold true. Even though students involved in athletics and students involved in arts may seem very different, a dancer or singer may also be very athletic, perhaps even more so than a member of the football team. There are positive and negative consequences of social comparison.

We generally want to know where we fall in terms of ability and performance as compared to others, but what people do with this information and how it affects self-concept varies. Not all people feel they need to be at the top of the list, but some won’t stop until they get the high score on the video game or set a new school record in a track-and-field event. Some people strive to be first chair in the clarinet section of the orchestra, while another person may be content to be second chair. The education system promotes social comparison through grades and rewards such as honor rolls and dean’s lists. Although education and privacy laws prevent me from displaying each student’s grade on a test or paper for the whole class to see, I do typically report the aggregate grades, meaning the total number of As, Bs, Cs, and so on. This doesn’t violate anyone’s privacy rights, but it allows students to see where they fell in the distribution. This type of social comparison can be used as motivation. The student who was one of only three out of twenty-three to get a D on the exam knows that most of her classmates are performing better than she is, which may lead her to think, “If they can do it, I can do it.” But social comparison that isn’t reasoned can have negative effects and result in negative thoughts like “Look at how bad I did. Man, I’m stupid!” These negative thoughts can lead to negative behaviors, because we try to maintain internal consistency, meaning we act in ways that match up with our self-concept. So if the student begins to question her academic abilities and then incorporates an assessment of herself as a “bad student” into her self-concept, she may then behave in ways consistent with that, which is only going to worsen her academic performance. Additionally, a student might be comforted to learn that he isn’t the only person who got a D and then not feel the need to try to improve, since he has company. You can see in this example that evaluations we place on our self-concept can lead to cycles of thinking and acting. These cycles relate to self-esteem and self-efficacy, which are components of our self-concept.

Self-Esteem

Self-esteem refers to the judgments and evaluations we make about our self- concept. While self-concept is a broad description of the self, self-esteem is a more specifically an evaluation of the self. 3 If I again prompted you to “Tell me who you are,” and then asked you to evaluate (label as good/bad, positive/negative, desirable/undesirable) each of the things you listed about yourself, I would get clues about your self- esteem. Like self-concept, self-esteem has general and specific elements. Generally, some people are more likely to evaluate themselves positively while others are more likely to evaluate themselves negatively. 4 More specifically, our self-esteem varies across our life span and across contexts.

How we judge ourselves affects our communication and our behaviors, but not every negative or positive judgment carries the same weight. The negative evaluation of a trait that isn’t very important for our self-concept will likely not result in a loss of self-esteem. For example, I am not very good at drawing. While I appreciate drawing as an art form, I don’t consider drawing ability to be a very big part of my self-concept. If someone critiqued my drawing ability, my self-esteem wouldn’t take a big hit. I do consider myself a good teacher, however, and I have spent and continue to spend considerable time and effort on improving my knowledge of teaching and my teaching skills. If someone critiqued my teaching knowledge and/or abilities, my self-esteem would definitely be hurt. This doesn’t mean that we can’t be evaluated on something we find important. Even though teaching is very important to my self-concept, I am regularly evaluated on it. Periodically I am evaluated by my students, my dean, and my colleagues. Most of that feedback is in the form of praise and constructive criticism, (which can still be difficult to receive), but when taken in the spirit of self-improvement, it is valuable and may even enhance our self- concept and self-esteem. In fact, in professional contexts, people with higher self- esteem are more likely to work harder based on negative feedback, are less negatively affected by work stress, are able to handle workplace conflict better, and are better able to work independently and solve problems. 5 Self-esteem isn’t the only factor that contributes to our self-concept; perceptions about our competence also play a role in developing our sense of self.

Self-Efficacy refers to the judgments people make about their ability to perform a task within a specific context. 6 As you can see in Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\) "Relationship between Self-Efficacy, Self-Esteem, and Self-Concept", judgments about our self- efficacy influence our self-esteem, which influences our self-concept. The following example also illustrates these interconnections.

Pedro did a good job on his first college speech. During a meeting with his professor, Pedro indicates that he is confident going into the next speech and thinks he will do well. This skill-based assessment is an indication that Pedro has a high level of self-efficacy related to public speaking. If he does well on the speech, the praise from his classmates and professor will reinforce his self-efficacy and lead him to positively evaluate his speaking skills, which will contribute to his self- esteem. By the end of the class, Pedro likely thinks of himself as a good public speaker, which may then become an important part of his self-concept. Throughout these points of connection, it’s important to remember that self-perception affects how we communicate, behave, and perceive other things. Pedro’s increased feeling of self-efficacy may give him more confidence in his delivery, which will likely result in positive feedback that reinforces his self-perception. He may start to perceive his professor more positively since they share an interest in public speaking, and he may begin to notice other people’s speaking skills more during class presentations and public lectures. Over time, he may even start to think about changing his major to communication or pursuing career options that incorporate public speaking, which would further integrate being “a good public speaker” into his self-concept. You can hopefully see that these interconnections can create powerful positive or negative cycles. While some of this process is under our control, much of it is also shaped by the people in our lives.

The verbal and nonverbal feedback we get from people affect our feelings of self- efficacy and our self-esteem. As we saw in Pedro’s example, being given positive feedback can increase our self-efficacy, which may make us more likely to engage in a similar task in the future. 7 Obviously, negative feedback can lead to decreased self-efficacy and a declining interest in engaging with the activity again. In general, people adjust their expectations about their abilities based on feedback they get from others. Positive feedback tends to make people raise their expectations for themselves and negative feedback does the opposite, which ultimately affects behaviors and creates the cycle. When feedback from others is different from how we view ourselves, additional cycles may develop that impact self-esteem and self-concept.

Charles Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order (New York, NY: Scribner, 1902).
Owen Hargie, Skilled Interpersonal Interaction: Research, Theory, and Practice (London: Routledge, 2011), 261.
Barbara M. Byrne, Measuring Self-Concept across the Life Span: Issues and Instrumentation (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1996), 5.
Joel Brockner, Self-Esteem at Work (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1988), 11.
Joel Brockner, Self-Esteem at Work (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1988), 2.
Albert Bandura, Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control (New York, NY: W. H. Freeman, 1997).
Owen Hargie, Skilled Interpersonal Interaction: Research, Theory, and Practice (London: Routledge, 2011), 99.

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Social Comparison Theory

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Lu Haidong 2

It is a theory in which individuals conduct self-evaluation by comparing themselves to others in the absence of objective evaluation criteria. It is the classical social comparison theory put forward by American psychologist Leon Festinger in 1954. Festinger holds that there is a drive for human beings to evaluate their own opinions and abilities, and the process of comparing these opinions and abilities to those of other people is called social comparison. Affected by comparison, individuals would seek self-enhancement, which constitutes the driving force for the continuous development of human society. American psychologist Stanley Schachter extended the classical social comparison theory to the domain of emotion. He holds that individuals in an unprecedented or ambiguous emotional state can carry out self-evaluation through social comparison when physiological or empirical proof cannot be applied to judge whether the state is appropriate. As the study of social comparison unfolds,...

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Haidong, L. (2024). Social Comparison Theory. In: The ECPH Encyclopedia of Psychology. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6000-2_827-1

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Module 3: The Self

Module Overview

Human beings, by their very nature, are prone to focus on the self and to engage in behavior to protect it. Module 3 will cover some of the ways this occurs. We will start by focusing on the self-concept or who we are and self-schemas. We will also discuss self-perception theory, possible selves, the self-reference effect, self-discrepancies, how others affect our sense of self, and cultural differences of the self. Then we will tackle the issue of self-esteem and its two forms – global and domain specific. Self-esteem across the life span and gender and cross-cultural differences will be examined. We will discuss how self-esteem is affected, and protected, when mortality is made salient, self-efficacy and locus of control, self-regulation, self-awareness, and self-enhancement. Our third section will cover self-presentation and specific strategies we use such as self-promotion, ingratiation, false modesty, self-verification, and self-monitoring. Finally, we will discuss cognitive biases and heuristics used to defend the self, such as the self-serving bias, false consensus effect, false uniqueness effect, and unrealistic optimism and defensive pessimism.

Module Outline

3.1. The Self-Concept

3.2. self-esteem, 3.3. self-presentation, 3.4. cognitive biases and heuristics used to bolster the self.

Module Learning Outcomes

Define the self-concept and clarify how we learn about the self.
Define self-esteem and describe efforts we engage in to protect or improve it.
Describe ways we make ourselves appear in a more positive light to others.
Outline cognitive biases and heuristics used to defend the self.

Section Learning Objectives

Define self-concept and clarify whether it is stable or malleable.
Define and exemplify self-schemas.
Describe self-perception theory and how it helps us learn about the self.
Clarify the importance of possible selves.
Describe the self-reference effect.
Define self-discrepancy theory.
Describe Cooley’s concept of the looking-glass self.
Define reflected appraisal.
Describe the social comparison theory and how it helps us to learn about the self.
Clarify the importance of the two-factor-theory of emotion for the self.
Describe cultural differences in the conception of the self.

3.1.1. The Age-Old Question – Who Are You?

Quite possibly the fundamental question of human existence is who we are. If asked who you are by another person, how would you describe yourself? Are you smart, resourceful, compassionate, petty, empathetic, self-serving, or optimistic? Are you good at sports or do you write poetry well? Should any singing you do be reserved for the shower? These descriptors are what make up our self-concept or the way we see ourselves. This view is probably clear most of the time. If you are not talented at writing, you will likely avoid writing intensive classes as a student. Some classes you cannot avoid, and so in these instances you will seek out extra help so that you are successful with the class. If you are incredibly talented at football, you may go out for the team but will not likely try out for the baseball team. But are there times when you are not so sure about who you are? The answer is likely yes. Maybe you and your spouse are considering adopting. Though you consider yourself a compassionate person, you are not sure you can open your heart up to another child the same way you would to a biological child. In this case, you have no prior experience to reference to determine who you are in this situation.

3.1.1.1. Is self-concept stable or malleable? There are two contradictory views of the self. Though our self-concept is relatively stable and people resist any information that contradicts their view of themselves (Greenwald, 1980), specific social environments can cause different selves to appear (Martindale, 1980). Markus and Kunda (1986) explored this dual nature of the self-concept in a study of 40 female students at the University of Michigan who participated to earn credit in their introductory psychology class (recall our discussion in Module 2 of convenience samples and issues with generalizability as a result). The participants were run one at a time and with three female confederates who were also undergraduate students but paid for their involvement. The researchers used minimal deception and led the participants to believe the study was on attitudes and opinions. They were first shown posters in a series of three trials. The posters had three items on them, either three colors, cartoons, or greeting cards, and the participant was asked to record for each poster the number of the item she liked best (of the three). The experimenter then explained that she had to transfer the responses to a computer coding sheet and that it would make life easier if all participants (the actual participant and the three confederates) could read their responses out loud. On each trial the participant went first, followed by the confederates. Her responses determined what the confederates would say. In the uniqueness condition, on all but 3 of the 18 trials the confederates all disagreed with the participant but agreed with one another. So if the participant preferred Color A the confederates all chose C. On the other three trials, the first confederate agreed with the participant while the other two disagreed with her and with each other. In the similarity condition, on all but 3 of the trials, the confederates agreed with the participant. If she chose Color C, then so did the three confederates. On the other three trials, none of the confederates agreed with the participant and two agreed with each other (meaning if the participant chose C, one chose A and two chose B, for instance). The participant then completed a series of dependent measures to include judgments of similarity to reference groups, self-categorization judgments, and word association. There was also a manipulation check such that participants were asked what percentage of the time they thought other participants agreed with their preference judgment in the first part of the study. Debriefing then occurred.

Results showed that for the manipulation check, subjects were aware of the extent to which participants agreed with them. The uniqueness group stated that the others agreed with them just 8% of the time while the similarity subjects estimated 77% of the time. The authors note that there was actually 17% and 83% agreement, respectively. In terms of how stable self-concept is, results showed that neither group appeared to have been influenced by the information about their similarity or uniqueness. In terms of the malleability of self-concept, the differences in the latencies between the two conditions for self-categorization judgments (i.e. their reaction times), suggests that different types of self-conceptions were mediating these judgments. This was also seen in the similarity to reference groups task such that both conditions felt more similar to in-groups than out-groups. It should be noted that the effect was not as strong for the similarity condition as their mean judgment of similarity to the in-group ( M = 4.93) was not as strong as the uniqueness condition ( M = 5.13), and their judgment of out-groups was higher ( M = 2.26) than the uniqueness condition ( M = 1.82).

Markus and Kunda (1986) conclude that both the stability and malleability of the self-concept were demonstrated in their study, though if one only looked at the results of the first part of the study (the showing of the posters with the three items to choose from) “one would tend to infer that the self-conceptions of these individuals were relatively unresponsive to the self-relevant information provided by the study” (pg. 864). Further examination of the word association, latency, and similarity tasks show that “…underlying these similar general self-descriptions were very different temporary self-conceptions” (pg. 864). When individuals were led to feel unique, they became disturbed by this and following the preference manipulation viewed their uniqueness as negative while the state of similarity to others became positive and desirable. They recruited conceptions of themselves as similar to others and made these endorsements relatively quickly (as shown through shorter latencies). Those made to feel extremely similar to others responded in the exact opposite way.

Finally, they say that the self-concept is a set of self-conceptions and from it, “the individual constructs a working self-concept that integrates the core self-conceptions with those elicited by the immediate context. In this sense, the self-concept becomes similar to that suggested by the symbolic interactionists. Thus, for Mead (1934) there was no fixed self-concept, only the current self-concept that was negotiated from the available set of self-conceptions” (Markus and Kunda, 1986, pg. 865).

3.1.2. Self-Schemas

As we interact with our world, we gather information that we need to organize in a way that we can obtain it again when needed. Basically, we store it away in memory and retrieve it when we encounter the person, object, or concept at a later time. This element of cognition is called a schema and as we can have schemas concerning external objects or ideas, we too can have them about ourselves, called a self-schema. These self-schemas make up our self-concept in much the same way that the words on this page make up the module you are reading, and this module is just one of many in the textbook. Markus (1977) defined self-schemata as, “cognitive generalizations about the self, derived from past experience, that organize and guide the processing of the self-related information contained in an individual’s social experiences (pg. 64).”

Self-schemas represent a person’s domain specific attributes or abilities and experiences as they relate to that domain. This allows for quicker encoding, more confident evaluation, accurate retrieval of domain-relevant information, and the ability to adapt to different information processing goals (Carpenter, 1988; Greenwald, 1980; Markus, 1977). Individuals with a self-schema in a domain are said to be schematic while those lacking one are aschematic for that ability (Cross & Markus, 1994). According to Markus (1977), aschematic individuals are not able to recognize their ability in a given domain and do not assign their ability any critical personal importance.

They can also help to shape social perception when the description of person is ambiguous. One study showed that when a target (Chris) is described as equally likely to be independent or dependent, participants classified as independence-schematics rated Chris as more independent and dependence-schematics rated him as more dependent or less likely to act independently compared to aschematics. The authors say that self-schemas serve a motivational role such that they help to foster the self-system’s stability, validation, and perpetuation (Green & Sedikides, 2001).

3.1.2.1. Types of self-schemas. Prieto, Cole, and Tageson (1992) compared depressed, clinic-referred children; nondepressed, clinic-referred children; and nondepressed, non-clinic referred children on three cognitive measures of positive and negative self-schemas. On a word recognition measure and an incidental word recall measure, depressed individuals had a less positive self-schema compared to the other two groups. Only non-depressed groups recalled significantly more positive words than negative ones. The results suggest that such negative self-schemas affect how new information is stored and accessed. Another study found that depressive self-schemas were a result of peer victimization such that individuals who experienced relational and verbal victimization more so than physical victimization by their peers had stronger negative and weaker positive self-cognitions and an elimination of the “normative memorial bias for recall of positive self-referential words” (Cole et al., 2014).

Self-schemas have also been identified for race-ethnicity (Oyserman, 2008; Oyserman et al., 2003), body weight (Altabe & Thompson, 1996; Markus, Hamill, & Sentis, 1987), gender (Markus, Crane, Bernstein, & Siladi, 1982), exercise (Kendzierski, 1990), religion (McIntosh, 1995), and illness (Clemmey & Nicassio, 1997), to name a few. Lodge and Hamill (1986) even propose a partisan schema related to political knowledge and interest. Those described as schematics are high in interest and knowledge and show a “consistency bias” such that they recall more policy statements consistent with a congressman’s party affiliation than those inconsistent with it. They also can classify campaign statements as Republican or Democrat. Aschematics, or those low in interest and knowledge, perform at no better than chance levels in the same task. The authors note that the restructuring of memory shown by schematics, and in particular those scoring especially high on interest and knowledge which they call sophisticates, demonstrates a serious bias in how political information is processed.

3.1.2.2. Self-perception theory. One way we gain knowledge about ourselves is through observing ourselves, called introspection or looking inward. We notice food preferences, particular music genres we like, the types of clothing we prefer to wear, and the type of person we consider to be a friend. But what we gain self-knowledge about tends to be things that are not central or critical (Bem, 1972). Why is that? The things about us that are most important make up the attitudes we express, the beliefs we hold, the traits we display, and the emotions we prefer to display and so are at our core. Self-perception helps us to learn about the more secondary aspects of the self.

3.1.2.3. Possible selves. Not only are we concerned about the person we are right now, but we focus on the person we might become, which Markus and Nurius (1986) call possible selves . These could be positive conceptions of our future self, but likewise, they could be something we are afraid of becoming and could elicit guilt and anxiety in the individual (Carver et al., 1999). According to Inglehart, Markus, and Brown (1988) our possible selves allow us to focus attention on specific, task-relevant cognitions, emotions and actions, thereby allowing us to move from our current state to the desired one (Oyserman & Markus, 1990a), especially when a possible self is seen as a self-regulator (i.e. a student who spends more time on homework, improved grades, and participated in class more because they realize they are not doing well now, but could in the future if they engage in specific types of behaviors; Oyserman et al., 2004). Across two studies, Cross and Markus (1994) showed that schematic individuals were better able to direct their attention to the problem at hand and concentrate on it while aschematic individuals were quicker to endorse negative possible selves related to logical reasoning ability. Hence, self-schemas can help foster competence by “providing a foundation for the development of possible selves related to that ability” (pg. 434). They continue, “…the possible self may link effective steps and strategies for solving reasoning problems with beliefs about one’s ability and competence in the domain. Bringing to mind a positive, desired view of oneself in the future as logical and analytical may also help the student dispel anxiety or worry during the task” (pg. 435). Research has also shown that when balance between feared and expected possible selves does not exist, the outcomes can be negative such as the initiation and maintenance of delinquent activity in adolescents (Oyserman and Markus, 1990b).

3.1.2.4. The self-reference effect. Would it surprise you to learn that humans have a tendency to more efficiently process, and recall more accurately, information about ourselves? Probably not. This is called the self-reference effect (Higgins & Bargh, 1987). Craik and Lockhart (1972) proposed the depth of processing (DOP) framework which says that how well a memory trace is retained is determined by the nature of the encoding operations such that deep, meaningful analyses result in a more durable trace than shallow, structural analyses of a stimulus. Up to 1977 it was believed that better retention could be achieved by semantic encoding though Rogers, Kuiper, and Kriker (1977) showed that self-referent encoding produced even better recall. The self-reference effect has since been replicated in numerous studies (for an overview of this research, please see Symons & Johnson, 1997).

Since the self-reference effect is a property of memory, we might expect that it is affected by the aging process. Across three studies, Gutchess, et al., (2007) showed that under some circumstances, older adults can benefit from self-referencing as much as young adults can but in general, they are more limited in their application of it. The authors speculate that “older adults may be limited in their application of self-referencing due to its demand on cognitive resources and their diminished ability to apply the strategy flexibly and broadly in other types of evaluative judgments” (pg. 834).

In terms of what area of the brain might control the self-reference effect, research using lesioning has found a role for the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). Patients with focal brain damage to the mPFC were given a standard trait judgment paradigm and damage to this area was found to abolish the self-reference effect, suggesting that the structure is important for self-referential processing and the neural representation of the self (Philippi et al., 2012). The implications of this research go beyond social psychology, too. The authors write, “The ability to detect and encode information for self-relevance might contribute not only to the formation of a self-concept, but also more broadly to psychological and social functioning. Across a variety of psychopathological conditions and personality disorders, self-referential processing appears to be dysfunctional, making it a major target for psychotherapy.” To read this article yourself, please visit: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3297026/ .

3.1.3. Self-Discrepancies

Self-discrepancy theory was postulated by Higgins (1987) to distinguish between the various self-states proposed by sociology, psychology, and even philosophy. Higgins says there are two cognitive dimensions which underlie the various self-state representations. The first is the domains of the self , numbering three total – the actual, ideal, and ought selves. The actual self includes the attributes that you are believed to possess, whether by yourself or another person. The ideal self includes all attributes that someone, whether you or another person, hope or wishes for you to possess. The ought self are the attributes that someone (yourself or another person) believes you should possess (i.e. linked to a sense of duty, obligation, or responsibility). Higgins exemplifies the ideal and ought self through the example of the conflict a hero faces between their personal wishes and their sense of duty.

The second cognitive dimension is what he calls standpoints on the self , or whose perspective on the self is involved. The two basic standpoints are your own personal standpoint and the standpoint from a significant other such as a spouse, parent, sibling, or close friend. A person can have a self-state representation for any number of these significant others.

The two cognitive dimensions can then be combined to form six basic types of self-state representations: actual/own, actual/other, ideal/own, ideal/other, ought/own, and ought/other. Our self-concept is derived from the first two, while the last four are self-directive standards or acquired guides for being, or as he calls them, self-guides . Self-discrepancy theory therefore proposes that people differ as to which self-guide they are motivated to meet, and that people do not necessarily possess all four (we might have only ought or ideal self-guides). We are motivated to “reach a condition where our self-concept matches our personally relevant self-guides” (pg. 321).

If this does not happen, we can experience sadness, disappointment, fear, dissatisfaction, apprehension, or feel threatened. For instance, if a discrepancy exists between the actual/own and ideal/own states, meaning the person feels their personal hopes or wishes have not been fulfilled, they will be vulnerable to dejected-related emotions such as disappointment, frustration, and dissatisfaction. If the discrepancy is between actual/own and ideal/other, meaning they have failed to obtain a significant other’s hopes or wishes for them, they may feel shame, embarrassment, or feel downcast. If the discrepancy is between actual/own and ought/other, meaning the current state of our attributes from our standpoint does not match the state the person believes some significant other considers to be our duty or obligation to obtain, then we might experience agitation-related emotions and feel fear or threatened. Finally, an actual/own and ought/own discrepancy occurs when the current state of our attributes, from our standpoint, do not match the state we believe is our duty or obligation to obtain and so we feel self-contempt, guilt, and uneasiness (Higgins, 1987).

In sum, self-discrepancy theory helps us to understand discrepancies between our view of our self and who we would ideally like to be or believe other people think we should be.

3.1.4. How Others Affect Our Sense of Self

3.1.4.1. The looking-glass self. Sociologist Charles Cooley (1902) stated that people based their sense of self on how they think others see them. This social interaction serves as a sort of mirror in which people use the judgments of others to measure their own worth, behavior, and values. He calls this the looking-glass self , and it occurs in three steps. First, we imagine how we appear to others when in a social situation. Second, we imagine what others think of our appearance. Third, we form opinions and feelings about this perceived judgment and then respond to it. Let’s say for instance you are assigned to a small group in your social psychology class and are asked to discuss the topic of self-discrepancy theory. You have not interacted with these individuals thus far this semester, and so you want to demonstrate to these fellow students that you are knowledgeable of the concept. As you discuss the material, you take note of how your fellow classmates respond to your thoughts and applications of the concept of self-discrepancy theory. What is their body language? Do they maintain eye contact with you? Do they seem to be distracted or are they focused? What words do they use in response to your comments? If your classmates generally have positive feedback such as commenting constructively on your thoughts or listening intently, you will feel confident that they see you as competent and knowledgeable. If, on the other hand, they look away often, are playing a game on their phone, or have negative comments, you will likely feel that they do not see you as knowledgeable. To make matters more complicated, in the future your professor has you work with a different group of classmates for a different activity. The new task provides a different context for the interaction and the new set of students changes the nature of those involved. So, how you use the information obtained from this new group of individuals will likely be different than the first group. And of course, not all feedback carries the same weight. Maybe you know one of your group members is an A student and doing very well in the class. If they provide positive feedback this will mean more to you than a student praising your analysis who you know is struggling.

3.1.4.2. Reflected appraisals. Building off Cooley’s work, Felson (1985) said that we come to see ourselves as those important to us see us, called a reflected appraisal. In an interesting study of adolescents from the Netherlands, Verkuyten (1988) found that the general self-esteem of ethnic minorities was relatively high, despite the fact that they have low status, experience discrimination and prejudice, and have little power to influence policymakers. So why was their self-esteem higher than expected? As support for the reflected appraisal process, they derived their self-esteem from fellow family members who regarded them highly.

3.1.4.3. Social comparison theory. Oftentimes, we are uncertain of our abilities and so look to others for a clue. A college baseball player may compare his batting average against those of his teammates to see how well he is doing. Festinger (1954) called this the social comparison theory . We make such comparisons as a way to bring about self-improvement or to motivate us to be better. If the players’ batting average is not the lowest, but close, he may ask for additional batting practice or tips from the batting coach. We also compare ourselves to others to enhance our positive self-image. If the player learns that his batting average is better than most of his teammates, he will feel good about his hitting ability. Of course, he might also develop a superior attitude or become biased or judgmental.

How might social media affect the social comparisons we make? Social networking sites such as Facebook give the impression that others are doing better than they are which can be detrimental to how we view ourselves. In a study of 231 adults aged 18-25, Facebook use was found to lead to greater levels of negative social comparison which resulted in seeing oneself as less socially competent and less physically attractive. This effect was weaker among happier individuals (de Vries & Kuhne, 2015). A similar study of Instagram “likes” found that exposing female undergraduates to thin-ideal images led to greater levels of body and facial dissatisfaction than average images and that greater investment in Instagram likes led to higher levels of appearance comparison and facial dissatisfaction (Tiggerman et al., 2018).

The benefit of social comparison is that it can lead to efforts to self-improve. How so? We could make a specific type of social comparison called an upward social comparison in which we compare our traits and abilities against someone who is more skilled than we are. This can lead us to engage in motivated behavior to improve, but it could also leave us feeling incompetent, shameful, or jealous (Collins, 1996).

3.1.4.4. Arousal as information about us. Stimuli are forever present in our sensory world and we have perceptions of them. These perceptions lead us to respond. For example, if you are walking down a street and hear footsteps behind you, you might perceive this as a threat if it is late at night and you thought you were alone on the street. This could lead you to walk quicker to your car or house or turnaround to confront the person behind you. What if you heard footsteps but is the middle of the day, on campus, and in between classes? You would likely perceive this as just another student going to class and have no reaction. Schachter (1964) proposed his two-factor theory of emotion which states that how we perceive our own emotions depends on two factors: 1) how much physiological arousal we experience such as rapid breathing, sweating, and/or a pounding heart, and 2) the cognitive interpretation or label we apply such as angry, scared, or happy. Others help us with the second factor such that we will examine their reactions to a given situation to help us interpret the arousal we are experiencing. Say for instance we are at a movie and out of nowhere the killer jumps out and attacks the protagonist. When this happens, we jump in our seat and scream, and notice that other moviegoers have the same reaction. We thus realize we experienced a high level of arousal and label the emotion as scared. Soon after we likely laugh at ourselves since we knew all along the event was not real but a mere fiction on the screen.

3.1.5. The Self and Culture

The self does not exist on an island but in the context of the society and culture in which it lives. As such, there is a great deal of variability in terms of what the self-concept is from culture to culture. First, culture includes all the beliefs, customs, institutions, experience, values, attitudes, art, religion, etc. of a group of people. Each culture establishes norms , or rules, for how its members should behave. For instance, Western cultures view the self as independent or individualistic , meaning that individuals reject conformity, focus on individual traits and goals, and seek personal achievement while Asian cultures are interdependent or collectivistic and identify the self in a social context, believe in blending in, focus on group goals, promote solidarity, and are against egotism. According to Markus and Kitayma (1991) the independent construal of self is bounded, unitary, and stable; focuses on being unique, realizing internal attributes, and promoting ones’ goals; and sees the role of others as self-appraisal and linked to social comparison and reflected appraisal. In terms of the interdependent self, they say the structure is flexible; the task is to belong and fit in, occupy one’s place and promote other’s goals; and our relationships with others in specific contexts define the self. The independent is internal and private, focused on one’s abilities, thoughts, and feelings while the interdependent is external and public, and focused on statuses, roles, and relationships (Markus & Kitayma, 1991).

Research shows that East Asians, namely those from Korea, have more flexibility in their self-concept compared to Americans (Choi & Choi, 2002) and that Asian Americans, compared to European Americans, show variability across relationship contexts but stability within them (English & Serena, 2007). In another study, when trait self-perceptions across different relationships were inconsistent, relationship quality and authenticity was lower for European Americans but not East Asian Americans. When there was inconsistency within the same relationship, both ethnic groups showed negative outcomes (English & Chen, 2011).

Describe how self-esteem is a need.
Identify and define types of self-esteem.
Clarify what happens to self-esteem across the life span.
Clarify if there are gender and cross-cultural differences in self-esteem.
Define Terror Management Theory and clarify its relevance to self-esteem.
Describe self-efficacy and locus of control and how they relate to the self.
Define self-regulation.
Define self-awareness and describe issues related to it.
Differentiate public and private self-consciousness.
Define self-enhancement and describe strategies used in it.

3.2.1. Self-Esteem Defined and Described

3.2.1.1. Self-esteem as a need. Psychologist Abraham Maslow described a hierarchy of needs as one way to understand motivation and specifically the push of motivated behavior (contrasted with the pull that comes from outside us). According to Maslow, there are five types of needs arranged in a hierarchy, or more so in a pyramid formation. Lower level needs must be fulfilled before higher level ones can be. At the bottom are the physiological needs which are what we need to survive. They include food, water, sex, temperature, oxygen, etc. At the next level are needs centered on our safety and security , or living in a safe environment, being safe from Mother Nature, and having enough money to pay the bills. With this level satisfied, we can next focus on feeling socially connected to others and being in mature relationships, which he called the love and belonginess needs . Fourth are our self-esteem needs or being independent, gaining mastery, how we feel about ourselves, and being responsible. At the pinnacle of the pyramid are our self-actualization needs , which Carl Rogers and other humanistic psychologists discussed. This level focuses on realizing our full potential, feeling fulfilled and satisfied, and seeking personal growth. We also pursue interests out of intrinsic interest and not extrinsic demands. For our purposes, Maslow’s fourth level will be focused on and self-esteem can be defined as how we see ourselves, including both positive and negative evaluative components.

3.2.1.2. Types of self-esteem. Is self-esteem a unitary concept though? Rosenberg (1979) proposed a global self-esteem and subsequent research has supported domain specific self-esteem such as for academic matters (Rosenberg et al., 1995). So, which causes which? Does global self-esteem lead to specific or vice versa? The authors propose that global could be the result of specific self-esteem since it is “based on the judgments of various parts of the self, the parts (specifics) might be seen as responsible for the whole (global)” (pg. 148). In terms of the specific arising from global, they say, “assessments of particular facets of the self may well be based on one’s overall feelings of self-worth” (pg. 148). They conclude that global and specific self-esteem are in fact neither equivalent nor interchangeable, global appears to be heavily affective in nature and associated with psychological well-being while specific is more judgmental and evaluative arising from a cognitive component; specific facets of the self vary in their level of abstraction and some types such as academic self-esteem affect global self-esteem more than other types; the degree to which we value our behavior affects how much specific self-esteem affects global; and finally, in the case of school performance it is affected by self-esteem but in terms of the specific type and not global (Rosenberg et al., 1995).

What are some of the specific types of self-esteem.? According to Gentile et al. (2009) they might include:

Physical appearance – what we look like
Athletics – how good we are in sports
Academics – our general performance in school
Social Acceptance – our friendships, peer relationships, and social approval
Family – Our family can serve as a source support and help affirm our beliefs about our own self-worth
Behavioral conduct – includes our perception of how socially unacceptable our behavior is
Affect – Feeling happy, satisfied, and free from anxiety which lead to better emotional well-being
Personal self – Our evaluation of our personality independent from the physical body or others
Self-satisfaction – Our measure of happiness with oneself as a person
Moral-ethical self-concept – Our perception of moral-ethical attributes and how satisfied we are with our religion or lack of one

3.2.1.3. Self-esteem across the life span. Our next question centers on whether self-esteem can change throughout our life. Trzesniewski et al., (2003) tested this very question across two studies and found that, “stability is relatively low during early childhood, increases through adolescence and young adulthood, and then declines during midlife and old age” (pg. 215). This effect held across gender, nationality, and ethnicity. How can we account for these trends? First, self-esteem was least stable during childhood, though the authors question whether self-esteem measures are valid for young children as they may not fully understand the meaning of questions on such scales or cannot form abstract concepts of themselves, such as being good or bad. Second, self-esteem is lower in early adolescence and increases after this likely due to the turmoil puberty brings about in terms of rapid maturational changes. By late adolescence and early adulthood, the individual has the resources and autonomy necessary to deal with these changes. Finally, self-esteem stability decreases from midlife to old age likely because in midlife there are few environmental changes but as we transition into late adulthood, there are a great deal of life changes and shifting social circumstances such as children moving out, retirement, health problems and the death of loved ones. In regard to late adulthood, they add, “Another possibility is that as individuals age they may begin to review their lifelong accomplishments and experiences, leading in some cases to more critical self-appraisals and in other cases to greater acceptance of their faults and limitations” (pg. 216).

Interestingly, data from 187 newlywed couples shows that the birth of the first child does affect self-esteem over the first five years of marriage. Changes mostly affect the mother and are negative in nature with a sudden decline in self-esteem the first year after the child’s birth and a gradual decline continuing over the next four years. The study utilized a control group of parents who had no child during the same period and for which there was no change in self-esteem. This suggests that the change in self-esteem of the parents with a child was likely due to the birth of their first child (Bleidorn et al., 2016).

3.2.1.4. Gender and cross-cultural differences in self-esteem. Gentile et al. (2009) conducted a meta-analysis of 115 studies and assessed the 10 different domains of self-esteem mentioned at the end of the previous section. They found that gender differences vary greatly across the different domains of self-esteem. In some cases, there was no difference at all (i.e. academic, social acceptance, family, and affect), while other domains showed a moderate amount of variation (i.e. males higher on physical appearance, athletics, personal, and self-satisfaction; females higher on behavioral conduct and moral-ethical).

But are there cross-cultural differences in gender and self-esteem? Bleidorn et al. (2016) tackled the issue in an Internet sample of 985,937 individuals from 48 nations and found that self-esteem increased from late adolescence to middle adulthood, there were significant gender gaps, and that males consistently report higher self-esteem than females. These findings are important as they show that the trends, which are consistent with the literature but previous studies only examined Western samples, are in fact cross-culturally valid and suggest universal mechanisms at least in part. These mechanisms might include biological sources including genetics or hormones or universal sociocultural factors such as socially learned gender roles and stereotypes.

Despite these cross-cultural similarities, there was a difference across nations in terms of the magnitude of gender-specific trajectories, suggesting that universal explanations may not be at work but culture-specific influences such as a nation’s GDP (Gross Domestic Product) per capita, mean age at marriage, and HDI (Human Development Index; measures of living a long life, being educated, and having a decent standard of living) are responsible. Their data suggests that wealthy, developed, egalitarian, and individualistic nations had relatively large gender differences in self-esteem, though they decrease throughout early and middle adulthood. In contrast, collectivistic, poorer, developing nations marked by greater gender inequality and an earlier age at marriage show smaller gender gaps, though these increase during early and middle adulthood.

Bleidorn et. al. (2016) conclude that universal influences on self-esteem do not tell the whole story, and that “systematic cultural differences in the magnitude and shape of gender and age differences in self-esteem provide evidence for contextual influences on the self-esteem development in men and women” (pg. 408).

3.2.2. Terror Management Theory (TMT)

3.2.2.1. What is TMT? Ernest Becker (1962, 1973, & 1975) stated that it is the human capacity for intelligence, to be able to make decisions, think creatively, and infer cause and effect, that leads us to an awareness that we will someday die. This awareness manifests itself as terror and any cultural worldviews that are created need to provide ways to deal with this terror, create concepts and structures to understand our world, answer cosmological questions, and give us a sense of meaning in the world.

Based on this notion, Terror Management Theory (TMT; Greenberg, Pyszczynski, and Solomon, 1986) posits that worldviews serve as a buffer against the anxiety we experience from knowing we will die someday. This cultural anxiety buffer has two main parts. First, we must have faith in our worldviews and be willing to defend them. Second, we derive self-esteem from living up to these worldviews and behaving in culturally approved ways. So, culture supports a belief in a just world and meeting the standards of value of the culture provides us with immortality in one of two ways. Literal immortality is arrived at via religious concepts such as the soul and the afterlife. Symbolic immortality is provided by linking our identity to something higher such as the nation or corporation and by leaving something behind such as children or cultural valued products. It has also been linked to the appeal of fame (Greenberg, Kosloff, Solomon, Cohen, and Landau, 2010).

Finally, based on whether death thoughts are in focal attention or are unconscious, we employ either proximal or distal defenses. Proximal defenses involve the suppression of death-related thoughts, a denial of one’s vulnerability, or participating in behavior that will reduce the threat of demise (i.e. exercise) and occur when thought of death is in focal attention. On the other hand, distal defenses are called upon when death thoughts are unconscious and involve strivings for self-esteem and faith in one’s worldview and assuage these unconscious mortality concerns through the symbolic protection a sense of meaning offers.

3.2.2.2. The typical mortality salience study. In a typical mortality salience (MS) study, participants are told they are to take part in an investigation of the relationship between personality traits and interpersonal judgments. They complete a few standardized personality assessments which are actually filler items to sustain the cover story. Embedded in the personality assessments is a projective personality test which consists of two open ended questions which vary based on which condition the participant is in. Participants in the MS condition are asked to write about what they think will happen to them when they die and the emotions that the thought of their own death arouses in them. Individuals in the control condition are asked to write about concerns such as eating a meal, watching television, experiencing dental pain, or taking an exam. Next, they complete a self-report measure of affect, typically the PANAS (Positive-Affect, Negative-Affect Scale), to determine the effect of MS manipulation on their mood. Finally, they are asked to make judgments about individuals who either directly or indirectly threaten or bolster their cultural worldviews.

3.2.2.3. Worldview defense. General findings on TMT have shown that when mortality is made salient, we generally display unfavorable attitudes toward those who threaten our worldview and celebrate those who uphold our view. This effect has been demonstrated in relation to anxious individuals even when part of one’s in-group (Martens, Greenberg, Schimel, Kosloff, and Weise, 2010) such that mortality reminders led participants to react more negatively toward an anxious police liaison from their community (Study 1) or to a fellow university student who was anxious (Study 2). Mortality salience has also been found to elevate preference for political candidates who are charismatic and espouse the same values associated with the participant’s political worldview, whether conservative or liberal (Kosloff, Greenberg, Weise, and Solomon, 2010).

Rosenblatt, Greenberg, Solomon, Pyszczynski, and Lyon (1989) examined reactions of participants to those who violated or upheld cultural worldviews across a series of six experiments. In general, they hypothesized that when people are reminded of their own mortality, they are motivated to maintain their cultural anxiety buffer and are punitive toward those who violate it and benevolent to those who uphold it. Experiments 1 and 3 provided support for the hypothesis that subjects induced to think about their own mortality increased their desire to punish the moral transgressor (i.e. to recommend higher bonds for an accused prostitute) while rewarding the hero (Experiment 3). Experiment 2 replicated the findings of Experiment 1 and extended them by showing that increasing MS does not lead subjects to derogate just any target as it had no effect on evaluations of the experimenter. Also, MS increased punishment of the transgressor only among subjects who believed the target’s behavior was truly immoral.

Experiments 4 – 6 tested alternative explanations for the findings. First, self-awareness could lead individuals to behave in a manner consistent with their attitudes and standards. The results of Study 4 showed that unlike MS, self-awareness does not encourage harsher bond recommendations and in fact, heightened self-awareness reduces how harshly a prostitute is treated among individuals with positive attitudes toward prostitution. In Study 5, physiological arousal was monitored and MS was found not to arise from mere heightened arousal. Finally, Experiment 6 showed that particular features of the open-ended death questionnaire did not lead to the findings of Studies 1-5, but rather to requiring subjects to think about their own deaths.

McGregor, Lieberman, Greenberg, Solomon, Arndt, Simon, and Pyszcznski (1998) tested the hypothesis that MS increases aggression against those who threaten one’s worldview by measuring the amount of hot sauce allocated to the author of a derogatory essay. In the study, politically conservative and liberal participants were asked to think about their own death (MS) or their next important exam (control). They were then asked to read an essay that was derogatory toward either conservatives or liberals. Finally, participants allocated a quantity of very spicy hot sauce to the author of the essay, knowing that the author did not like spicy foods and would have to consume the entire sample of hot sauce. As expected, MS participants allocated significantly more hot sauce to the author of the worldview-threatening essay than did control participants.

In a second study, participants thought about their own mortality or dental pain and were given an opportunity to aggress against someone who threatened their worldview. Half of the MS participants allocated the hot sauce before evaluating the target while the other half evaluated the target before allocating the hot sauce. Results of Study 2 showed that MS participants allocated significantly more hot sauce when they were not able to verbally derogate the targets prior to the administration of hot sauce. However, when MS participants were able to first express their attitudes toward the target, the amount of hot sauce allocated was not significantly greater than for the controls. This finding suggests that people will choose the first mode of worldview defense provided to them.

3.2.2.4. Self-esteem. According to the anxiety buffer hypothesis, if a psychological structure provides protection against anxiety, then strengthening that structure should make an individual less prone to displays of anxiety or anxiety related behavior in response to threats while weakening that structure should make a person more prone to exhibit anxiety or anxiety related behavior in response to threats. In support of this, Greenberg et al. (1992) showed that by increasing self-esteem, self-reported anxiety in response to death images and physiological arousal in response to the threat of pain could be reduced. Furthermore, the authors found no evidence that this effect was mediated by positive affect. Additional support for the function of self-esteem in reducing anxiety was provided by Harmon-Jones, Simon, Greenberg, Pyszcynski, Solomon, and McGregor (1997) who showed that individuals with high self-esteem, whether induced experimentally (Experiment 1) or dispositionally (Experiment 2), did not respond to MS with increased worldview defense and that this occurred due to the suppression of death constructs (Experiment 3).

3.2.3. Self-Efficacy and Locus of Control

Self-Efficacy (Bandura, 1986) is our sense of competence and feeling like we can deal with life’s problems. It includes our beliefs about our ability to complete a task and affects how we think, feel, and motivate ourselves. When our self-efficacy is high, we feel like we can cope with life events and overcome obstacles. Difficult tasks are seen as challenges and we set challenging goals. In contrast, if it is low, we feel hopeless, helpless, and that we cannot handle what life throws at us. We avoid difficult tasks and throw in the towel quickly when things get tough. These individuals are easily depressed and stressed.

Our sense of competence is affected by the degree to which we blame internal or external forces for our success and failures. Using Julian Rotter’s (1973) concept of locus of control, we have an internal locus of control if we believe we are in control of our own destiny, but if we believe outside forces determine our life, we have an external locus of control.

So how do self-efficacy and locus of control intersect with one another. A study of students from a mid-sized public university in the northeastern area of the United States showed that students with an external locus of control and who are low in academic self-efficacy should be identified as they enter college and interventions directed at them to help them perform better in their classes (Drago, Rheinheimer, & Detweiler, 2018). A study of 147 women with type 1 diabetes examined the relationship between self-efficacy, locus of control, and what their expectations were of preconception counseling (Grady & Geller, 2016). Using the Diabetes-Specific Locus of Control (DLC) measure which assesses beliefs about internal, chance, and powerful others loci of control in terms of how diabetes is managed (the measure has 5 subscales: internal-autonomy, internal-blame, chance, powerful other – health professionals, and powerful other – nonmedical), a measure to assess preconception planning, and sociodemographic data, the researchers tested the hypothesis that expectations of preconception counseling would be associated with beliefs about disease control and self-efficacy. The results showed that self-efficacy for planning a healthy pregnancy predicted outcome expectations of preconception counseling. The authors write, “…women’s self-efficacy was positively associated with their perceived usefulness of preconception counseling and birth control use, whereas self-blame about disease management negatively correlated with these views” (pg. 41). The authors suggest that efforts should be taken to improve self-efficacy and empower women with diabetes to confidently control their disease” (Grady & Geller, 2016).

3.2.4. Self-Regulation

We cannot always act or say what we feel. At times, we have to practice what social psychologists call self-regulation or controlling and directing our thoughts, feelings, and actions so that we can achieve a societal or personal goal. The good news is that much of our self-regulation occurs outside of conscious awareness but if we are trying to engage in meaningful behavioral change, we might have to focus much of our energy into self-control. One study linked successful self-regulation to executive functions to include updating, inhibiting, and shifting, which results in the ability to take goal-direction action such as losing weight (Dohle, Diel, & Hofmann, 2018).

Do concerted efforts at self-regulation reduce the amount of energy available for such activities in subsequent tasks? The question implies that self-regulation is a limited resource. Baumeister, Bratslasky, Muraven, and Tice (1998) tested this over four experiments and described this temporary reduction in the self’s ability to engage in volitional action caused by engaging in a volitional act previously ego depletion . The researchers first attempted to show that exerting self-control in terms of resisting temptation (Experiment 1) or a preliminary act of choice and responsibility (Experiment 2) would reduce the person’s ability to self-regulate on a subsequent, frustrating and difficult task. Results showed that people asked to resist eating chocolates and to make themselves eat radishes instead gave up much faster when next asked to complete a difficult puzzle than those who could indulge and eat the chocolate. Likewise, people who freely and deliberately consented to make a counterattitudinal or proattitudindal speech gave up quickly when asked to do the puzzle while those who expected to make the counterattitudinal speech under low-choice conditions showed no reduction in self-control. They state that it was the act of responsible choice, and not the behavior itself, that depleted the self and reduced persistence on the subsequent task. Experiments 3 and 4 further confirmed the finding that an initial act of volition leads to ego depletion in subsequent tasks. The good news is that this resource is replenished with time and specific factors could hasten or delay this replenishment (Baumeister et al., 1998).

3.2.5. Self-Awareness

Duval and Wicklund (1972) proposed that our self-regulation can either be directed inward and toward the self or directed outward and toward the environment. We are usually focused outward, but there are times when our attention is turned inward. For instance, if you walk by a mirror you might stop to see how you look in your new jeans. If we see a video of ourselves, are asked to talk about ourselves in an interview, or are required to give a presentation in our social psychology class, we experience an increased level of self-awareness and compare ourselves against a high standard which leads to reduced self-esteem since we realize we do not meet the standard. We then engage in motivated behavior to meet the standard, reassess whether we have, and then continue making adjustments until we finally meet the standard or give up and turn away from the self (Carver & Scheier, 1981). As you might expect, the process is aversive and so we want to resolve it (Flory et al., 2000). If we do not, we could experience depression (Pyszczynski & Greenberg, 1987), engage in binge eating (Heatherton & Baumeister), and engage in counternormative behavior such as cheating (Diener & Wallbom, 1976) to name a few of the negative effects. Two recent studies found that when male participants were exposed to an intervention designed to focus their attention onto inhibitory, self-awareness cues, they engaged in significantly less alcohol-related physical aggression behaviors toward a female confederate compared to controls (Gallagher & Parrott, 2016) but for men with an internal and not an external locus of control (Purvis, Gallagher, & Parrott, 2016).

It is possible that some individuals are more self-focused than others, a distinction referred to as public vs. private self-consciousness (Fenigstein, Scheier, & Buss, 1975). Public self-consciousness refers to an individual who focuses on themselves as a social object and is concerned by how they appear to others. In contrast, private self-consciousness refers to an individual who focuses on the internal self, is introspective, and attends to one’s thoughts, feelings, and motives. Scheier, Buss, and Buss (1978) found that for those high in private self-consciousness, the correlation between aggressive behavior and self-report of aggressiveness was significantly higher than for those low in private self-consciousness or high or low public self-consciousness. Public self-consciousness has also been found to relate to social aspects of identity while private self-consciousness was related to personal aspects (Cheek & Briggs, 1982).

3.2.6. Self-Enhancement

Self-enhancement is a fundamental component of human nature and involves our tendency to see ourselves in a positive light. This often occurs after our self-esteem has been negatively affected in some way (Beauregard & Dunning, 1998).

According to Sedikides & Gregg (2008), self-enhancement can be done in one of several ways. First, we might self-advance or self-protect either by augmenting positivity or reducing the negativity of the self-concept. Second, self-enhancement can occur either publicly or privately whereby in the case of the former we engage in favorable self-presentation and the latter is an internal affair. Third, we tend to self-enhance in domains that matter most to us. Finally, self-enhancement is either candid or tactical, meaning “one can both seize an opportunity for overt and immediate self-advancement, or one can forgo it in favor of other activities liable to facilitate delayed self-enhancement” (pg. 104).

People can also engage in positive illusions (Taylor & Brown, 1988) in which they hold opinions of themselves that are exaggerated or falsely positive regarding abilities and skills. These positive illusions include inflating their perceptions of themselves (i.e. self-aggrandizement), believing they have more control over events than they do (i.e. exaggerated perceptions of control), and being overly optimistic about their future (i.e. unrealistic optimism). Positive illusions have been shown to lead to successful adjustment to stressful events (Taylor & Armor, 1996); increased satisfaction in close relationships when an individual idealized their partner and is in turn idealized by them (Barelds & Dijkstra, 2011; Murray, Holmes, & Griffin, 1996); and better outcomes for physical health later in life in terms of more satisfaction with leisure time, higher self-esteem, better perceived health, and less boredom proneness when retirees hold an exaggerated youthful bias (Gana, Alaphillippe, & Bailly, 2002). Positive illusions have been reported in parenting as well in which parents have a tendency to rate their own children as possessing more positive and less negative attributes than other children (Wenger & Fowers, 2008).

Have you ever worried about doing well on a test and so create an excuse to cover poor performance such as saying you were sick when you took it? If so, you engaged in behavioral self-handicapping (Jones & Berglas, 1978). We self-handicap when we are uncertain about our abilities and anticipate a threat to our self-esteem. Instead of saying we failed the exam because our ability was low or we did not study, we instead blame it on being sick or not sleeping well the night before. Self-handicapping can take two forms – behavioral and claimed. Behavioral self-handicapping occurs when we actively acquire an impediment such as drug or alcohol abuse (Arkin & Baumgardner, 1985) or do not have enough time to practice (Baumeister, Hamilton, & Tice, 1985). Claimed self-handicapping occurs when a person only reports obstacles to their success such as suffering from test anxiety (Smith, Snyder, and Handelsman, 1982) or being in a bad mood (Baumgarder, Lake, and Arkin, 1985). Between the two, behavioral handicaps are more convincingly tied to performance and so more credible, while claimed handicaps serve as an excuse for failure but do not necessarily decrease the person’s chance of success (Zuckerman & Tsai, 2005). Finally, Stewart & Walker (2014) found that self-handicapping was predicted by perfectionism and an external locus of control in a study of 79 university students (they also found that perfectionism predicted low self-efficacy).

We might even engage in the social comparison process to feel better about ourselves. How so? Instead of comparing our performance to others to see where we rate, we will look for someone we know performs worse than we do or is worse off than we are, and then make a downward social comparison (Wills, 1981). This makes us feel better about ourselves because no matter how bad off we are at the time, that person is in a far worse predicament. Maybe we know we are in a batting slump over the past 10 games and have experienced a reduction in our self-esteem as a result. We might compare ourselves against another teammate who has underperformed all year and realize that our situation is temporary and not seemingly permanent like theirs.

People have a tendency to evaluate themselves much higher than they evaluate others. For instance, they are smarter, better looking, more capable, and more honest than other people. This is called the “better than average” ( BTA) effect. Across five studies, Brown (2012) showed that the BTA is stronger for important attributes than ones that do not matter and when participants experienced a threat to their feelings of self-worth. It has also been shown that the effect holds for easy tasks which produce underconfidence, but not for difficult ones which lead to overconfidence and making a worse-than-average bias (Larrick, Burson, & Soll, 2007). Finally, Kanten and Teigen (2008) asked 385 students to rate themselves or an acquaintance relative to their peers on several personality traits. The results showed that participants saw themselves as superior to most others at all points in time. The authors describe a better than average improvement effect such that participants said they were more superior now compared to the past and expected to be even more superior in the future.

Finally, Cialdini et al. (1976) said that people have a tendency to publicly announce their associations with successful others in a process they called “ bask in reflected glory ” (BIRG). In a series of three field experiments involving 300 university students across seven universities in the United States, Cialdini et al. (1976) found that participants strived to bask in the glory of successful others even though they were not the cause of their success, such as wearing school apparel and saying ‘we’ after their team was victorious but not when they lost (in the case of a loss, participants often said ‘they lost’ instead of ‘we lost’). In another study, two days before the 1999 general election in Flanders researchers counted and recorded houses displaying at least one poster or one removable lawn sign supporting a political party (a total of 462 addresses for posters and 177 addresses for lawn signs). The day after the elections, the houses were checked to see if the poster or lawn sign (s) was/were still present. The results showed that the better the election result, the more houses that still displayed the sign/poster. Winners flaunted their association with the winning party, supporting BIRG while supporters of the losing party tried to conceal their association (Boen et al., 2002).

Define self-presentation.
Define self-promotion and describe how it is used in self-presentation.
Define ingratiation and describe how it is used in self-presentation.
Define false modesty and describe how it is used in self-presentation.
Define self-verification and describe how it is used in self-presentation.
Define self-monitoring and describe how it is used in self-presentation.

3.3.1. Self-Presentation Defined

Think about the last date you went on, especially a first date. What did you do beforehand? You likely showered and groomed yourself, maybe even rehearsed what you would say in the mirror. You also likely took great care to pick your clothes out to make a good first impression. Any strategies we use to make ourselves appear in a more positive light to others is called self-presentation. We intentionally try to control or shape their impressions of us (Schlenker, 2012). First impressions are especially important. Oftentimes, if we make a bad first impression it can be virtually impossible to overcome even if subsequent interactions are much more positive.

3.3.2. Specific Strategies Used in Self-Presentation

So that we can successfully shape the view others have of us to be positive, we need to engage in effortful behavior. How so? One strategy is to use self-promotion or engaging in behaviors or saying positive things about oneself. We often engage in this type of behavior on a first date or in an interview. Research has also shown that individuals higher in narcissism and lower in self-esteem engage in greater levels of online activity on social networking sites such as Facebook and use more self-promotional content to include About Me, Main Photo, View Photos, and status updates. The study also found gender differences insofar as males engaged in more self-promotion in the About Me and Notes sections while females displayed more self-promotional main photos (Mehdizadeh, 2010).

Another strategy is called ingratiation or complimenting, flattering, or engaging in other acts that lead a person to do things for you or like you. This is a typical strategy used by salespeople to have you engage in one clear behavior – buy a car or other product. Politicians are known to use the strategy also so that you come to like them while they are campaigning and then subsequently vote for them on election day. Cialdini (2007) writes in his book Influence: The Power of Persuasion , “Apparently we have such an automatically positive reaction to compliments that we can fall victim to someone who uses them in an obvious attempt to win our favor” (pg. 176).

Maybe you have been on a team at work before and had an idea that completely revolutionized the way your company completed a service for its clients. Did you gloat about your performance? Not likely. You were more likely to downplay your performance and talk about the contributions of your fellow teammates instead. The end result is that you will be seen as likeable and competent by others but for what is called false modesty , you must have been successful in your performance and others must know about it already (i.e. a fan was watching the big game and saw the wide receiver catch the game winning touchdown).

Another strategy is to choose situations or interpret behavior in ways that confirm already held beliefs or to avoid situations and criticism that might contradict these beliefs. Essentially, we want to confirm our existing self-concept but from the eyes of others. This behavior can best be described as self-verification .

Finally, we engage in self-monitoring or observing our own behavior so that we can make adjustments to produce the impression we desire in others and to meet the demands of the situation (Snyder, 1987). For instance, a literature review of self-monitoring through paper diaries, the internet, personal digital assistants, and digital scales in relation to weight loss, found that more frequent self-monitoring of diet, physical activity, or weight led to more successful outcomes for weight management (Burke, Wang, & Sevick, 2011).

Define the self-serving bias.
Describe how social desirability is a form of the self-serving bias.
Contrast the false consensus and false uniqueness effects.
Outline the benefits, and perils, of optimism and pessimism.

Our final section covers cognitive biases and heuristics used to increase our sense of self, though we have discussed others already throughout this module.

3.4.1. The Self-Serving Bias

First, the self-serving bias is our tendency to see ourselves in a favorable light. We take credit for our successes but blame failures on outside forces. This bias is often displayed by students who are quicker to explain a bad grade on a test as the instructor creating a test that was too difficult or testing on information not in the study guide. When the student does well, though, it is due to their skill and time spent studying, and not necessarily to the test being extra easy.

We even have a tendency to see ourselves as less likely to exhibit a self-serving bias than others (Friedrich, 1996; Myers, 1990). Friedrich (1996) documented this effect across two studies. First, 47 upper level undergraduates enrolled in either a statistics or industrial/organizational psychology course completed an anonymous survey at the beginning of class having them read a paragraph about the results of a SAT survey and then respond to a paragraph describing the self-serving bias. At the end they were asked, “How often do you think (you; the average person) make this kind of mistake when judging or evaluating (yourself; him- or herself)?” and indicated their answer on a 9-point scale (1 meaning almost never and 9 indicating nearly all the time). The results showed that students generally saw themselves as significantly less likely to distort their self-perceptions. In the second study, 38 introductory psychology students were lectured on research related to the self-serving bias during the last third of a regularly scheduled class. At the beginning of the next class they were given a questionnaire asking them to what degree they thought that they or the average person (depending on the condition they were in) would make the mistake. The same 9-point scale was used. Results of the second study were consistent with the first such that students believed others are more likely to commit the self-serving bias than they are.

Another way we see the self-serving bias play out in research is through the social desirability effect or when participants only provide information that appears to be what is expected by society or is desirable. If asked questions about sexual activity, some may report lower levels of activity than is true or not mention acts of sexual impropriety. Though our society has become sexually charged, there are still limits to what is acceptable. We will talk more about self-serving behavior when we discuss attribution theory in Module 4.

3.4.1.1. Explaining self-serving bias. So, what are potential causes of the self-serving bias? In a 2008 article, Shepperd, Malone, and Sweeny cite a few different classes of explanations. First, the previously discussed self-enhancement and self-presentation are offered as motivation-driven reasons (please see the previous sections for a discussion).

Second, they offer cognitive-driven explanations. The outcomes might be inconsistent with expectations such that our expectations are grounded in experience and we utilize cognitive mechanisms that might mute, dampen, or even erase previous negative experiences but not positive ones. Our outcomes may also not be consistent with our self-schema meaning that our views of our skills and abilities are often overly positive and that we view ourselves as the kind of person who produces positive outcomes, not negative ones. Positive outcomes are consistent with our self-schema while negative outcomes lead to two possible conclusions: the negative outcome had an internal cause and our positive self-schema is not correct, or the negative outcome had an external cause and our positive self-schema remains intact. A third possibility is that outcomes are inconsistent with actions . Positive expectations usually lead to goal-directed behavior. The authors offer the example of a boy who prepares to ask a girl out on a date by rehearsing what he will say, dressing nice, and acting charming. If she accepts his offer, he will see it as due to his efforts but if she rejects him, he will likely regroup and try again a few times. If the answer continues to be ‘no’ then he will believe the cause is not with him but something external.

A fourth cognitive explanation is called biased hypothesis-testing . When failure occurs in place of expected success, we are likely to ask ‘why did this happen?’ Like scientist’s, people form hypotheses to answer the question and then collect data to test it. But they are often not good scientists and engage in confirmation bias and see only information that confirms rather than disconfirms their hypothesis. People also find case-positive information more diagnostic than case-negative. Finally, people engage in different standards of proof in which they form a proposition or hypothesis and proceed to evaluate evidence. Unlike biased hypothesis-testing though, they consider all information and do not omit disconfirming evidence. How much information is needed to accept or reject their hypothesis also varies insofar as they require more information to accept an undesired hypothesis and less for a desired hypothesis. For instance, the specific hypothesis tested (i.e. ‘Am I smart?’ or ‘Am I stupid?’) determines what information is sought out in biased hypothesis testing while in different standards of proof the exact hypothesis determines how much information is required to draw a conclusion (more proof for the question centered on whether they are stupid and less for if they are smart).

Shepperd, Malone, and Sweeny (2008) conclude that the self-serving bias can only be understood using both motivational and cognitive driven explanations.

3.4.2. Overestimating Our Opinions and Skills

People often overestimate to what degree their opinion is shared by others. This tendency is called the false consensus effect (Ross, Greene, & House, 1977). It may occur because people are biased in viewing their own positions as what everyone else subscribes to as well, or because they overgeneralize from case information with their opinion serving as one salient type of case information (Alicke & Largo, 1995). The false consensus effect has been demonstrated in regard to smoking behavior (thinking that half or more than half of adults or peers smoked led to the most smoking involvement; Botvin et al., 1992); drug use (Wolfson, 2000); engaging in health protective or defeating behaviors (Suls, Wan, & Sanders, 1988); a willingness to escalate a disturbance (Russell & Arms, 1995); presidential preferences such that supporters of a candidate predicted a higher percentage of support for the candidate than other candidates (Brown, 1982); determining the extent to which other voters would vote like you (Koestner et al., 1995); and illicit drug use by elite athletes (Dunn, Thomas, Swift, & Burns, 2011).

Likewise, we tend to underestimate to what degree others share our abilities and skills. This tendency is called the false uniqueness effect . We might see our math ability as rare, our future to be brighter, or our opinion of a social matter to be more desirable. One study found that participants believed their first name to be unique, whether it was rare or common. The effect held for both male and female names and the researchers also found that when we consider making a name change, rare names are often considered (Kulig, 2013).

3.4.3. Optimism…to the Extreme

Of course, seeing the jar as half full and not half empty has obvious benefits for mental health. This is the essence of the difference between being optimistic and pessimistic. Scheier and Carver (1985) offered a theory of dispositional optimism which defines it as, “a stable individual difference that reflects the general perception that future positive outcomes will be common and future negative outcomes will be rare” (Gallagher, Lopez, & Pressman, 2012). Research has shown that being optimistic results in higher levels of subjective well-being for college students (Gallagher & Lopez, 2009) and adults (Isaacowitz, 2005), leads to more adaptive coping mechanisms (Carver et al., 2009; Nes & Segerstrom, 2006), can bring about greater success on the job (Seligman & Schulman, 1986), results in goal attainment (Segerstrom & Nes, 2006), and brings about better physical health (Giltay et al., 2004).

Is optimism universal? Gallagher, Lopez, and Pressman (2012) conducted a study using representative samples from 142 countries numbering over 150,000 participants and found that individuals of all ages, races, education levels, and socioeconomic backgrounds and most countries are optimistic and that this optimism leads to better subjective well-being and health. Optimism is not merely a benefit of living in an industrialized nation either.

But is there such a thing as being too optimistic to the point of being unrealistic? The answer is yes and Weinstein (1980) identified a tendency people have to think they are invulnerable and that others will be the victims of misfortune but not themselves. He called this error in judgment, which results in a bias towards favorable outcomes, unrealistic optimism . For instance, college students in one study were unrealistically optimistic about the likelihood they would develop alcohol related problems in the future such as having a hangover, missing classes, or having an argument with a friend over their drinking. The negative consequences of unrealistic optimism were found to be both proximal and distal (Dillard, Midboe, & Klein, 2009). Another study found that patient’s participating in early-phase oncology trials display the unrealistic optimism bias in relation to their expectation of the therapeutic benefit of the trial and that this tendency can undermine the informed consent of participants (Jansen et al., 2011).

Everything is not always roses and so expressing some pessimism can actually help us to be realistic. Defensive pessimism can help us manage our anxiety and pursue our goals by setting low expectations and mentally exploring possible outcomes of goal-relevant tasks (Norem, 2008; Norem & Cantor, 1986). Hazlett, Molden, and Sackett (2011) found that participants who were focused on growth and advancement preferred optimistic forecasts and perform better when they express an optimistic outlook while those who were concerned with safety and security preferred pessimistic forecasts and perform better when they express a pessimistic outlook.

Module Recap

That’s it. We spent an entire module talking about our – self and should feel no guilt over it. Kidding. To be serious though, we all try and answer the question of who we are and philosophers have been tackling issues related to what it means to be human and matters of human existence since the dawn of time. Our discussion focused on the self-concept, self-esteem, self-presentation, and biases and heuristics we make/use to protect our sense of self. We hope you enjoyed the wide array of issues we covered and with this topic out of the way, we can now continue our discussion in Part II of how we think about ourselves and others by focusing on ‘others.’ After this, we will round out Part II by discussing the attitudes we have about ourselves, others, and things in our world.

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4.3 The Social Self: The Role of the Social Situation

Learning objectives.

Define social comparison, and summarize how people use it to define their self-concepts and self-esteem.
Give examples of the use of upward and downward social comparison and their influences on social cognition and affect.
Explain the concept of social identity and why it is important to human behavior.
Summarize the research evidence regarding cultural differences in self-concept and self-esteem.

To this point, we have argued that human beings have complex and well-developed self-concepts and that they generally attempt to come to view themselves as positively as they can. In this section, we will consider in more detail the social aspects of the self by considering the many ways that the social situation determines our self-concept. Our selves are not created in isolation; we are not born with perceptions of ourselves as shy, interested in jazz, or charitable to others. Rather, these beliefs are determined by our observations of and interactions with others. Are you rich or poor? Beautiful or ugly? Smart or not? Good or poor at video games? And how do you know? These questions can be answered only by comparing ourselves with those around us. The self has meaning only within the social context, and it is not wrong to say that the social situation defines our self-concept and our self-esteem. We rely on others to provide a “social reality”—to help us determine what to think, feel, and do (Hardin & Higgins, 1996). Hardin, C., & Higgins, T. (1996). Shared reality: How social verification makes the subjective objective. In R. M. Sorrentino & E. T. Higgins (Eds.), Handbook of motivation and cognition: Foundations of social behavior (Vol. 3, pp. 28–84). New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Social Comparison Helps Create the Self-Concept

The self-concept and self-esteem are determined in large part through the process of social comparison (Buunk & Gibbons, 2007; Van Lange, 2008). Buunk, A. P., & Gibbons, F. X. (2007). Social comparison: The end of a theory and the emergence of a field. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 102 (1), 3–21; Van Lange, P. A. M. (2008). Social comparison is basic to social psychology. American Journal of Psychology, 121 (1), 169–172. Social comparison The process of learning about our abilities and skills, about the appropriateness and validity of our opinions, and about our relative social status by comparing our own attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors with those of others. occurs when we learn about our abilities and skills, about the appropriateness and validity of our opinions, and about our relative social status by comparing our own attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors with those of others . These comparisons can be with people that we know and interact with, with those that we read about or see on TV, or with anyone else that we view as important.

Social comparison occurs primarily on dimensions upon which there is no objectively correct answer and thus on which we can rely only on the beliefs of others for information. Answers to questions such as “What should I wear to the formal?” or “What kind of music should I have at my wedding?” are frequently determined at least in part by using the behavior of others as a basis of comparison. We also use social comparison to help us determine our skills or abilities—how good we are at performing a task or doing a job, for example. When a student looks at another student’s paper to see what grade he or she got, or when we join a tennis club to compare our performance and progress with those of others, we are using social comparison to evaluate our abilities.

Research Focus

Affiliation and Social Comparison

The extent to which individuals use social comparison to determine their evaluations of events was demonstrated in a set of classic research studies conducted by Stanley Schachter (1959). Schachter, S. (1959). The psychology of affiliation . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Schachter’s experiments tested the hypothesis that people who were feeling anxious would prefer to affiliate with others rather than be alone because having others around would reduce their anxiety. Female college students at the University of Minnesota volunteered to participate in one of his experiments for extra credit in their introductory psychology class. They arrived at the experimental room to find a scientist dressed in a white lab coat, standing in front of a large array of electrical machinery. The scientist introduced himself as Dr. Zilstein of the Department of Neurology and Psychiatry, and he told the women that they would be serving as participants in an experiment concerning the effects of electrical shock. Dr. Zilstein stressed how important it was to learn about the effects of shocks, since electroshock therapy was being used more and more commonly and because the number of accidents due to electricity was also increasing!

Each of the women was then told that before the experiment could continue, the experimenter would have to prepare the equipment and that they would have to wait for a while until he was finished. He asked them if they would prefer to wait alone or to wait with others. The outcome of Schachter’s research was clear—while only 33% of the women who were expecting mild shocks preferred to wait with others, 63% of the women expecting to get painful shocks wanted to wait with others. This was a statistically significant difference, and Schachter concluded that the women chose to affiliate with each other in order to reduce their anxiety about the upcoming shocks.

Although Schachter’s studies were conducted in relatively artificial lab settings, similar effects have been found in field studies in more naturally occurring settings. For instance, Kulik, Mahler, and Moore (1996) Kulik, J. A., Mahler, H. I. M., & Moore, P. J. (1996). Social comparison and affiliation under threat: Effects on recovery from major surgery. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71 (5), 967–979. found that hospital patients who were awaiting surgery preferred to talk to other individuals who were expecting to have similar procedures rather than to patients who were having different procedures, so that they could share information about what they might expect to experience. Furthermore, Kulik and his colleagues found that sharing information was helpful—people who were able to share more information had shorter hospital stays.

Upward and Downward Comparisons Influence Our Self-Esteem

Although we use social comparison in part to develop our self-concept—that is, to form accurate conclusions about our attitudes, abilities, and opinions—social comparison has perhaps an even bigger impact on our self-esteem. When we are able to compare ourselves favorably with others, we feel good about ourselves, but when the outcome of comparison suggests that others are better or better off than we are, then our self-esteem is likely to suffer. This is why good students who attend high schools in which the other students are only average may suddenly find their self-esteem threatened when they move on to more selective colleges in which they are no longer better than the other students (Marsh, Kong, & Hau, 2000). Marsh, H. W., Kong, C.-K., & Hau, K-T. (2000). Longitudinal multilevel models of the big-fish-little-pond effect on academic self-concept: Counterbalancing contrast and reflected-glory effects in Hong Kong schools. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 337–349. I’m sure you’ve had the experience yourself of the changes in self-esteem that occur when you have moved into a new grade in school, got a new job, or changed your circle of friends. In these cases, you may have felt much better about yourself or much worse, depending on the nature of the change. You can see that in these cases the actual characteristics of the individual person has not changed at all; only the social situation and the comparison others have changed. And yet the social situation can make a big difference in one’s self-esteem.

Because we naturally want to have positive self-esteem, we frequently attempt to compare ourselves positively with others. Downward social comparison Social comparison with those we perceive as worse off than we are. occurs when we attempt to create a positive image of ourselves through favorable comparisons with others who are worse off than we are. Morse and Gergen (1970) Morse, S., & Gergen, K. (1970). Social comparison, self-consistency, and the concept of self. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 16 (1), 148–156. had students apply for a job, and they also presented the students with another individual who was supposedly applying for the same job. When the other candidate was made to appear to be less qualified for the job than they were, the downward comparison with the less qualified applicant made the students feel better about their own qualifications. As a result, the students reported higher self-esteem than they did when the other applicant was seen as a highly competent job candidate. Research has also found that people who are suffering from serious diseases prefer to compare their condition with other individuals whose current condition and likely prognosis is worse than their own (Buunk, Gibbons, & Visser, 2002). Buunk, A. P., Gibbons, F. X., & Visser, A. (2002). The relevance of social comparison processes for prevention and health care. Patient Education and Counseling, 47, 1–3. These comparisons make them feel better about their own possible outcomes.

Although downward comparison provides us with positive feelings, upward social comparison Social comparison with those we perceive as better off than we are. , which occurs when we compare ourselves with others who are better off than we are , is also possible (Blanton, Buunk, Gibbons, & Kuyper, 1999; Vrugt & Koenis, 2002). Blanton, H., Buunk, B. P., Gibbons, F. X., & Kuyper, H. (1999). When better-than-others compare upward: Choice of comparison and comparative evaluation as independent predictors of academic performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76 (3), 420–430; Vrugt, A., & Koenis, S. (2002). Perceived self-efficacy, personal goals, social comparison, and scientific productivity. Applied Psychology: An International Review, 51 (4), 593–607. Although upward comparison may lower our self-esteem by reminding us that we are not as well off as others, it is useful because it can provide information that can help us do better, help us imagine ourselves as part of the group of successful people that we want to be like (Collins, 2000), Collins, R. L. (2000). Among the better ones: Upward assimilation in social comparison. In J. Suls & L. Wheeler (Eds.), Handbook of social comparison (pp. 159–172). New York, NY: Kulwer Academic/Plenum. and give us hope (Snyder, Cheavens, & Sympson, 1997). Snyder, C., Cheavens, J., & Sympson, S. (1997). Hope: An individual motive for social commerce. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 1 , 107–118.

The outcomes of upward and downward social comparisons can have a substantial impact on our feelings, on our attempts to do better, and even on whether or not we want to continue performing an activity. When we compare positively with others and we feel that we are meeting our goals and living up to the expectations set by ourselves and others, we feel good about ourselves, enjoy the activity, and work harder at it. When we compare negatively with others, however, we are more likely to feel poorly about ourselves and enjoy the activity less, and we may even stop performing it entirely. When social comparisons come up poorly for us, we experience depression or anxiety, and these discrepancies are important determinants of our self-esteem (Higgins, Loeb, & Moretti, 1995; Strauman & Higgins, 1988). Higgins, E. T., Loeb, I., & Moretti, M. (Eds.). (1995). Self-discrepancies and developmental shifts in vulnerability: Life transitions in the regulatory significance of others . Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press; Strauman, T. J., & Higgins, E. T. (1988). Self-discrepancies as predictors of vulnerability to distinct syndromes of chronic emotional distress. Journal of Personality, 56 (4), 685–707.

Social Groups Provide Social Identity

Still another way that we use other people to create positive self-esteem is through our group memberships. We use the social situation to gain self-esteem by perceiving ourselves as members of important and valued groups that make us feel good about ourselves. Social identity The positive emotions that we experience as a member of an important social group. refers to the positive emotions that we experience as a member of an important social group (Hogg, 2003; Oakes, Haslam, & Turner, 1994; Tajfel, 1981). Hogg, M. A. (2003). Social identity. In M. R. Leary, J. P. Tangney, M. R. E. Leary, & J. P. E. Tangney (Eds.), Handbook of self and identity (pp. 462–479). New York, NY: Guilford Press; Oakes, P. J., Haslam, S. A., & Turner, J. C. (1994). Sterotyping and social reality . Oxford, England: Blackwell; Tajfel, H. (1981). Human groups and social categories: Studies in social psychology . Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Normally, our group memberships result in positive feelings, which occur because we perceive our own groups and thus ourselves in a positive light. If you are a “Midwesterner at heart,” or if you live in the “best fraternity house on campus,” your membership in the group becomes part of what you are, and the membership makes you feel good about yourself. The list that follows presents a measure of the strength of social identity with a group of university students, which might give you a good idea of the variable. If you complete the measure for your own university or college, I would imagine that you would agree mostly with the statements that indicate that you do identify with the group.

A Measure of Social Identity

This 10-item scale is used to measure identification with students at the University of Maryland, but it could be modified to assess identification with any group. The items marked with an “R” are reversed (such that low numbers become high numbers and vice versa) before the average of the scale is computed. The scale was originally reported by Luhtanen and Crocker (1992). Luhtanen, R., & Crocker, J. (1992). A collective self-esteem scale: Self-evaluation of one’s social identity. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 18 , 302–318.

For each of the following items, please indicate your response on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree) by writing a number in the blank next to the question.

___ I identify with the group of University of Maryland students.
___ I am glad to belong to the group of University of Maryland students.
___ I make excuses for belonging to the group of University of Maryland students.
___ I consider the group of University of Maryland students to be important.
___ I feel held back by the group of University of Maryland students.
___ I criticize the group of University of Maryland students.
___ I see myself as belonging to the group of University of Maryland students.
___ I try to hide belonging to the group of University of Maryland students.
___ I feel strong ties with the group of University of Maryland students.
___ I am annoyed to say that I am a member of the group of University of Maryland students.

Kay Deaux and her colleagues (Deaux, Reid, Mizrahi, & Ethier, 1995) Deaux, K., Reid, A., Mizrahi, K., & Ethier, K. A. (1995). Parameters of social identity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68 (2), 280–291. asked college students to list the groups that they identified with. As you can see in Table 4.1 "Varieties of Social Identities" , the students reported belonging to a wide variety of groups and claimed that many of these groups provided them with social identities. The categories that they listed included ethnic and religious groups (e.g., Asian, Jewish), political affiliations (conservative, Democratic), occupations and hobbies (gardener, tennis player), personal relationships (husband, girlfriend), and stigmatized groups (gay, homeless). You can see that these identities were likely to provide a lot of positive feelings for the individuals.

Table 4.1 Varieties of Social Identities

Which of our many category identities is most accessible for us will vary from day to day as a function of the particular situation we are in. Seeing a U.S. flag outside a post office may remind of us our national identity, whereas walking across campus and seeing the football stadium may remind us of our identification with our college. Identity can also be heightened when our identity is threatened by conflict with another group—such as during an important sports game with another university. Each individual has multiple potential social identities, including school and religious memberships, preferred sports and hobbies, and many other social groups, each of which is a potential source of social identity. As a result, which of the many group memberships a person emphasizes at a given time will depend on the situation as well as the person’s goals in that situation.

Social identity refers to the positive emotions we experience as a member of an important social group.

Image courtesy of Foxhunt king, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DSCN0602.JPG .

Robert Cialdini and his colleagues (Cialdini et al., 1976) Cialdini, R. B., Borden, R. J., Thorne, A., Walker, M. R., Freeman, S., & Sloan, L. R. (1976). Basking in reflected glory: Three (football) field studies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 34 , 366–374. studied the idea that we can sometimes enhance our self-esteem by “ b asking i n the r eflected g lory” of our ingroups or of other people that we know . They called this basking process BIRGing The process of improving our self-esteem by “basking in the reflected glory” of other people and groups. . To test this idea, they observed the clothes and clothing accessories that students at different U.S. universities wore to classes on Mondays. They found that when the university’s football team had won its game on Saturday, students were likely to emphasize their university memberships by wearing clothing, such as sweatshirts and hats, with the symbols of their university on them. However, they were significantly less likely to wear university clothing on the Mondays that followed a football loss. Furthermore, in a study in which students from a university were asked to describe a victory by their university team, they frequently used the term “we,” whereas when asked to describe a game in which their school lost, they used the term “we” significantly less frequently. Emphasizing that “we’re a good school” and “we beat them” evidently provided a social identity for these students, allowing them to feel good about themselves.

It is not always possible to bask in the glory of others, however, because in some cases the other person’s successes may create a comparison standard that leads to upward comparison and thus more negative emotions. Basking can only occur when the performance is on a dimension that is not relevant to our own self-concept because being outperformed by someone on a task that is personally important leads to upward social comparison, resulting in decreased self-esteem (Tesser, 1988). Tesser, A. (1988). Toward a self-evaluation maintenance model of social behavior. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 21 , 181–227.

To take an example from my own experience, I have found that although I can bask in my good friend Tom’s accomplishments in his career as a lawyer, it is more difficult for me to bask in my colleague Thane’s success in his career as a social psychologist. When the successes are on a dimension that I don’t care about very much (such as when Tom recently won a prize from the American Bar Association), I’m happy to accept and enjoy the positive news, but it was much harder for me to bask when I found that Thane had won an important social psychology prize that I might have liked to win myself. When we are outperformed by others on a dimension that we care about, we attempt to save our self-esteem, for instance, by downplaying the importance of the task or by attributing the success to the other person’s luck or other external factors (Tesser, 1988). Tesser, A. (1988). Toward a self-evaluation maintenance model of social behavior. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 21 , 181–227.

Different Cultures Create Different Selves

Because our culture is a powerful social situation, it naturally has a profound influence on our self-concept, and it influences how we think about and relate to others (Breakwell, 1993). Breakwell, G. M. (1993). Integrating paradigms, methodological implications. In G. M. Breakwell & D. V. Canter (Eds.), Empirical approaches to social representations (pp. 180–201). Oxford, England: Clarendon Press. For instance, East Asian students, who come from a collectivistic culture, are more likely to describe themselves in terms of group identities (“I am a member of a church,” “I am a student at my university”) and to make references to other people (“I try to make other people happy,” “I cook dinner with my sister”) than are European and American students, who come from an individualistic culture (Trafimow, Triandis, & Goto, 1991). Trafimow, D., Triandis, H. C., & Goto, S. G. (1991). Some tests of the distinction between the private self and the collective self. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60 (5), 649–655. And Europeans and Americans make more positive statements about themselves (“I am an excellent cook,” “I am intelligent”), whereas East Asians are more likely to make positive statements about others (Markus, Kitayama, & Heiman, 1996; Smith & Bond, 1999). Markus, H. R., Kitayama, S., & Heiman, R. J. (1996). Culture and “basic” psychological principles. In E. T. Higgins & A. W. Kruglanski (Eds.), Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles (pp. 857–913). New York, NY: Guilford Press; Smith, P. B., & Bond, M. H. (1999). Social psychology: Across cultures (2nd ed.). Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

One simple yet powerful demonstration of how the culture influences our self-concept is a study that was conducted by Kim and Markus (1999). Kim, H., & Markus, H. (1999). Deviance or uniqueness, harmony or conformity: A cultural analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77 , 785–800. In this study, participants were contacted in the waiting area of the San Francisco airport and asked to fill out a short questionnaire for the researcher. The participants were selected according to their cultural background, such that about one half of them indicated they were European Americans whose parents were born in the United States, whereas the other half indicated they were Asian Americans whose parents were born in China and who spoke Chinese at home. After completing the questionnaires (which were not used in the data analysis except to determine the cultural backgrounds), participants were asked if they would like to take a pen with them as a token of appreciation. The experimenter extended his or her hand, which contained five pens. It was arranged such that the pens offered to the participants were either three or four of one color and either two or one of another color (the ink in the pens was always black). As shown in Figure 4.7 "Cultural Differences in Desire for Uniqueness" , and consistent with the hypothesized preference for uniqueness in Western, but not Eastern, cultures, the European Americans preferred to take a pen with the more unusual color, whereas the Asian American participants preferred one with the more common color.

Figure 4.7 Cultural Differences in Desire for Uniqueness

In this study, participants from European American and East Asian cultures were asked to choose a pen as a token of appreciation for completing a questionnaire. It was arranged such that there were either four pens of one color and one of another color or three pens of one color and two of another. European Americans were significantly more likely to choose the more uncommon pen color in both cases. Data are from Kim and Markus (1999, Experiment 3). Kim, H., & Markus, H. (1999). Deviance or uniqueness, harmony or conformity: A cultural analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77 , 785–800.

Culture also influences behavior, through its influence on the self-concept. Western individualistic people generally use techniques of self-presentation to stand out and express themselves as better than others, whereas Eastern collectivistic individuals are more likely to gain status and self-esteem by trying to conform to the norms of the group and be good group members (Heine, 2005; Sedikides, Gaertner, & Toguchi, 2003). Heine, S. J. (2005). Where is the evidence for pancultural self-enhancement? A reply to Sedikides, Gaertner, and Toguchi (2003). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89 (4), 531–538; Sedikides, C., Gaertner, L., & Toguchi, Y. (2003). Pancultural self-enhancement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84 (1), 60–79. Supporting the idea that people from Eastern cultures are less likely to need to self-enhance, Heine and Lehman (1999) Heine, S. J., & Lehman, D. R. (1999). Culture, self-discrepancies, and self-satisfaction. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25 (8), 915–925. doi: 10.1177/01461672992511001 found that Japanese students were more critical of themselves and thus had larger discrepancies between their ideal selves and actual selves than did Canadian students, and yet at the same time, the Japanese students were less distressed by these discrepancies.

Key Takeaways

The self-concept and self-esteem are determined in large part through social comparison. We use social comparison to determine the accuracy and appropriateness of our thoughts, feelings, and behavior.
When we are able to compare ourselves favorably with others through downward social comparison, we feel good about ourselves. Upward social comparison with others who are better or better off than we are leads to negative emotions.
Social identity refers to the positive emotions that we experience as a member of an important social group.
Normally, our group memberships result in positive feelings, which occur because we perceive our own groups, and thus ourselves, in a positive light.
Which of our many category identities is most accessible for us will vary from day to day as a function of the particular situation we are in.
We may enhance our self-esteem by “ b asking i n the r eflected g lory” of our in-groups or of other people we know.
Our culture has a profound influence on our self-concept, and it influences how we think about and relate to others.

Exercises and Critical Thinking

Name some aspects of your self-concept that have been created through social comparison.
Describe times when you have engaged in downward and upward social comparison and the effects these comparisons have had on your emotions.
What are your social identities? How do they create positive feelings for you?

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Comparative Essay
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VIDEO

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Social Comparison Theory in Psychology

How Social Comparison Process Works

Upward Social Comparison

Downward Social Comparison

Upward Comparison

Downward Comparison

A Word From Verywell

3.3 The Social Self: The Role of the Social Situation

The Looking-Glass Self: Our Sense of Self is Influenced by Others’ Views of Us

Social Comparison Theory: Our Sense of Self Is Influenced by Comparisons with Others

Research Focus

Upward and Downward Comparisons Influence Our Self-Esteem

Social Identity Theory: Our Sense of Self Is Influenced by the Groups We Belong To

Figure 3.10 A Measure of Social Identity

Self-Presentation: Our Sense of Self Is Influenced by the Audiences We Have

References

Media Attributions

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Social Comparison Effects on Academic Self-Concepts—Which Peers Matter Most?

Zsófia Boda

Georg Lorenz

Associated Data

Social Comparison Theory

Social Comparisons in the Classroom: The Big-Fish-Little-Pond Effect

Social Comparisons With Specific Peers as Social Comparison Targets

Availability of Information on the Target’s Performance

Status and (Perceived) Popularity

Summary and State of Research

Analysis Sample

Social Ties

Academic Self-Concept

Academic Achievement

Further Covariates

Data Analysis

Model Specification

Treatment of Missing Data

Social Selection Model

Social Comparisons With the Class Average: Replicating the BFLPE (Hypothesis 1)

Social Comparisons With Friends, Study Partners, and Student-Perceived Popular Peers (Hypotheses 2 to 4)

The Role of Same-Gender and Same-Ethnic Classmates (Hypothesis 5)

Implications for Social Comparison Theory

Limitations and Open Questions

Supplementary Material

Essay on Self-Concept by Barry Joel Desaine

Related Papers

RELATED PAPERS

RELATED TOPICS

4.1 The Cognitive Self: The Self-Concept

Development and Characteristics of the Self-Concept

Self-Complexity Provides a Buffer Against Negative Emotions

Studying the Self-Concept

Self-Awareness

Overestimating How Others View Us

Key Takeaways

Exercises and Critical Thinking

4 Social Comparison

Introduction: Social Comparison

Social Comparison: Basics

Relevance and Similarity

Direction of Comparison

Consequences of Social Comparison

Self-Evaluation Maintenance Model

Individual Differences

Situational factors

Proximity to a Standard

Social Category Lines

Related Phenomena

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

Text Attribution

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Social Comparisons: Personal Examples Essay

Social Comparison Theory

Course: MCAT > Unit 12

Self concept, self identity, and social identity

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Video transcript

What is Self-Concept Theory? A Psychologist Explains

This Article Contains:

Self-Concept vs. Self-Esteem

Self-Concept vs. Self-Image