In many ways, social comparison parallels the counterfactual thinking process, but there is one very important difference. In principle, we have a great deal of control over both when we will engage in counterfactual thinking and what its content will be. We are limited only by our imaginations. We have less control over social comparison. If you live in a social world, as we all do, you are always being hit with information about how others are doing. The teacher reports the distribution of class grades, placing your B+ in a comparative social context. You and your spouse fight on the way to a party, only to find yourselves surrounded by couples who seem to delight in each other’s presence. You were just passed over for a promotion, and you hear from your sister about how well things are going in her job. This kind of information just can’t be avoided. The best you can do is keep yourself from brooding about it.
The Race for Status
PEOPLE ARE DRIVEN TO SOCIAL COMPARISON LARGELY BECAUSE they care about status, and status, of course, has social comparison built into it. Part of the satisfaction from achievements and possessions comes from the awareness that not everyone can match them. As others start to catch up, the desires of those who are ahead in the “race” escalate so that they can maintain their privileged position.
In his book Choosing the Right Pond, economist Robert Frank exposes just how much of social life is determined by our desire to be big fish in our own ponds. If there were only one pond—if everyone compared his position to the positions of everybody else—virtually all of us would be losers. After all, in the pond containing whales, even sharks are small. So instead of comparing ourselves to everyone, we try to mark off the world in such a way that in our pond, in comparison with our reference group, we are successful. Better to be the third-highest-paid lawyer in a small firm and make $120,000 a year than to be in the middle of the pack in a large firm and make $150,000. The way to be happy—the way to succeed in the quest for status—is to find the right pond and stay in it.
Just how profound is this concern for status? A few years ago, a study was conducted in which participants were presented with pairs of hypothetical personal circumstances and asked to state their preferences. For example, people were asked to choose between earning $50,000 a year with others earning $25,000 and earning $100,000 a year with others earning $200,000. They were asked to choose between 12 years of education (high school) when others have 8, and 16 years of education (college) when others have 20. They were asked to choose between an IQ of 110 when the IQ of others is 90 and an IQ of 130 when the IQ of others is 150. In most cases, more than half of the respondents chose the options that gave them better relative position. Better to be a big fish, earning $50,000, in a small pond than a small fish, earning $100,000, in a big one.
Status, Social Comparison, and Choice
CONCERN FOR STATUS IS NOTHING NEW. NONETHELESS, I BELIEVE that the problem is more acute now than in the past, and once again it comes back to having a plethora of choices. Given Frank’s “choosing the right pond” idea, what is the right pond? When we engage in our inevitable social comparisons, to whom do we compare ourselves? In earlier times, such comparisons were necessarily local. We looked around at our neighbors and family members. We didn’t have access to information about people outside our immediate social circle. But with the explosion of telecommunications—TV, movies, the Internet—almost everyone has access to information about almost everyone else. A person living in a blue-collar urban neighborhood forty years ago might have been content with his lower-middle-class-income because that brought him a life comparable to what he saw around him. There would have been little to incite his status-enhancing aspirations. But not anymore. Now this person gets to see how the wealthy live countless times every day. We all seem to be swimming in one giant pond nowadays, and anyone’s life could be ours. This essentially universal and unrealistically high standard of comparison decreases the satisfaction of those of us who are in the middle or below, even as the actual circumstances of our lives improve.
Positional Competition
IF WE STOPPED THE DISCUSSION HERE, IT WOULD BE TEMPTING TO conclude that the dissatisfaction that comes with social comparison can be fixed by teaching people to care less about status. Disappointment from social comparison would be understood as a problem that affects society by affecting individuals and that can be fixed by changing individual attitudes, one person at a time.
But even if people could be taught to care less about status, they would still not be satisfied with what they have, because they have legitimate reasons for believing that no matter how much a person has, it may not be enough. Our social and economic system, which is based in part on an unequal distribution of scarce and highly desirable commodities, inherently propels people into lives of perpetual social comparison and dissatisfaction, so that reforming people without paying attention to the system won’t work.
As I mentioned in Chapter 4, economist Fred Hirsch argued in his book Social Limits to Growth that while technological development may continue to increase the number of people who can be fed from an acre of farmland or the number of children who can be inoculated against polio for $1,000, there are certain kinds of goods that no amount of technological development will make universally available. For example, not everyone will be able to own a secluded acre of land at the seashore. Not everyone will have the most interesting job. Not everyone can be the boss. Not everyone can go to the best college or belong to the best country club. Not everyone can be treated by the “best” doctor in the “best” hospital. Hirsch calls goods like these positional goods, because how likely anyone is to get them depends upon his position in society. No matter how many resources a person has, if everyone else has at least as much, his chances of enjoying these positional goods are slim. Sometimes these kinds of goods are positional simply because the supply can’t be increased. Not everyone can have a van Gogh hanging in his living room. At other times, the problem is that as more consumers gain access to these goods, their value decreases due to overcrowding. The New York City area has several lovely beaches, enough to accommodate thousands. But as more and more people use these areas, they become so crowded that there is barely room to lie down, they become so noisy that people can hardly hear themselves think, they become so dirty that it is no longer pleasant even to look at them, and the highways that lead to them turn into parking lots. Under these conditions, the only way to get the kind of beach experience you want is to travel much farther from the city, which is time-consuming, or to own your own beach, which is expensive.
We might all agree that everyone would be better off if there were less positional competition. It’s stressful, it’s wasteful, and it distorts people’s lives. Parents wanting only the best for their child encourage her to study hard so she can get into a good college. But everyone is doing that. So the parents push harder. But so does everybody else. So they send their child to after-school enrichment programs and educational summer camps. And so does everyone else. So now they borrow money to switch to private school. Again, others follow. So they nag at their youngster to become a great musician or athlete or something that will make her distinctive. They hire tutors and trainers. But, of course, so does everyone else, or at least everyone who has not gone broke trying to keep up. The poor child, meanwhile, has been so tortured by parental aspirations for her that she loses interest in all the things they have forced her to do for the sake of her future.
Students work to get good grades even when they have no interest in their studies. People seek job advancement even when they are happy with the jobs they already have. It’s like being in a crowded football stadium, watching the crucial play. A spectator several rows in front stands up to get a better view, and a chain reaction follows. Soon everyone is standing, just to be able to see as well as before. Everyone is on their feet rather than sitting, but no one’s position has improved. And if someone, unilaterally and resolutely, refuses to stand, he might just as well not be at the game at all. When people pu
rsue goods that are positional, they can’t help being in the rat race. To choose not to run is to lose.
Social Comparison: Does Everybody Do It?
THOUGH SOCIAL COMPARISON INFORMATION IS SEEMINGLY ALL-PERVASIVE, it appears that not everyone pays attention to it, or at least, not everyone is affected by it. Psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky and her colleagues have done a series of studies that looked for differences among individuals in their responses to social comparison information, and what they have found is that this kind of data has relatively little impact on happy people.
To begin with, Lyubomirsky developed a questionnaire, which you’ll find on page 196, designed to measure what might be called people’s chronic level of happiness (as opposed to their moods at a particular moment in time) to categorize participants as relatively happy or unhappy.
Then, in one study, each individual was asked to unscramble anagrams while working alongside another individual (actually a confederate working for the experimenter) doing the same task. Sometimes this other person performed much better than the study participant, and sometimes much worse. Lyubomirsky found that happy people were only minimally affected by whether the person working next to them was better or worse at the anagram task than they were. When asked to assess their ability to unscramble anagrams, and how they felt about it, happy people gave higher ratings after doing the task than before it. Their assessment of ability and their mood were slightly better if they had been working beside a slower peer than if they’d been working beside a faster one, but either way, their self-assessments went up. In contrast, unhappy people showed increases in assessed ability and positive feelings after working beside a slower peer, and decreases in assessed ability and positive feelings if they’d been working beside a faster peer.
In a second study, participants were asked to videotape a lesson for preschool children. An “expert” (again, actually a confederate) gave the participants detailed feedback on their performance. Participants performed alongside a partner who gave the same lesson. The question of interest was how the feedback would affect participants’ moods. The moods of happy people improved when they got positive feedback and worsened when they got negative feedback, but whether they heard or didn’t hear the feedback given to their partner made no difference. Unhappy people, on the other hand, were very much affected by the feedback their partner received. If a participant got positive feedback, but her partner got better feedback, the participant’s mood worsened. If a participant got negative feedback, but her partner got worse feedback, the participant’s mood improved. Thus it seemed as though the only thing that mattered to the unhappy people was how they did in comparison to their partner. Better to be told that you’re a pretty bad teacher but that others are even worse than to be told that you’re a pretty good teacher, but others are better.
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SUBJECTIVE HAPPINESS SCALE
For each of the following statements and/or questions, please circle the point on the scale that you feel is most appropriate in describing you.
1. In general, I consider myself:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
not a very happy person a very happy person
2. Compared to most of my peers, I consider myself:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
less happy more happy
3. Some people are generally very happy. They enjoy life regardless of what is going on, getting the most out of everything. To what extent does this characterization describe you?
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
not at all a great deal
4. Some people are generally not very happy. Although they are not depressed, they never seem as happy as they might be. To what extent does this characterization describe you?
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
not at all a great deal
(With kind permission of Kluwer Academic Publishers)
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In a follow-up to this study, Lyubomirsky tried to determine which factors about happy and unhappy people make them respond so differently to the same situation. What she found was that when happy and unhappy people were induced to distract themselves by thinking about something else after they got some negative feedback about performance on a task, the difference between them in their reaction to the news went away: both groups responded like happy people. And if happy and unhappy people were induced, after getting negative feedback, to think about it, the difference between them again went away: this time, both groups responded like unhappy people. The inference here is that distraction versus rumination is the critical distinction. Happy people have the ability to distract themselves and move on, whereas unhappy people get stuck ruminating and make themselves more and more miserable.
We can’t say for sure in this research what is cause and what is effect. Do unhappy people ruminate more than happy ones about social comparison, or does ruminating more about social comparison make someone unhappy? My suspicion is that both are true—that the tendency to ruminate traps unhappy people in a downward psychological spiral that is fed by social comparison. Certainly, it is safe to say that, based on available research, social comparison does nothing to improve one’s satisfaction with the choices one makes.
Maximizing, Satisficing, and Social Comparison
YOUR LEVEL OF HAPPINESS IS NOT THE ONLY FACTOR THAT COLORS your response to social comparison. Once again, being either a maximizer or a satisficer is significant.
In the research I discussed in Chapter 4, we took participants who had filled out our Maximization Scale, and put them in a situation like the one I just described, in which they had to unscramble anagrams alongside another person who was doing the task faster or slower than they were. We found that maximizers were much more affected by the presence of another person than satisficers were. Solving anagrams alongside someone who seemed to be doing it better produced in maximizers both a deterioration of mood and a lowered assessment of their anagram-solving ability. The social comparison information had no such effect on satisficers.
In addition, when maximizers and satisficers were asked questions about how they shop, maximizers reported being much more concerned with social comparison than satisficers did. They were more attentive than satisficers to what other people were buying, and more influenced in judgments of their own satisfaction by the apparent satisfaction of others.
If you think about what maximizing requires of people, this result is not surprising. Maximizers want the best, but how do you know that you have the best, except by comparison? And to the extent that we have more options, determining the “best” can become overwhelmingly difficult. The maximizer becomes a slave in her judgments to the experiences of other people.
Satisficers don’t have this problem. Satisficers who are looking for results that are good enough can use the experiences of others to help them determine exactly what “good enough” is, but they don’t have to. They can rely on their own internal assessments to develop those standards. A “good enough” salary is one that enables them to afford a decent place to live, some nice clothes, an occasional night out, and so on. It doesn’t matter that others may earn more. A good enough stereo is one that satisfies their own concerns about sound fidelity, convenience, appearance, and reliability.
And in these two contrasting approaches we discover something of a paradox. The word “maximizing,” implying as it does a desire for the best, suggests standards that are absolute. There is, it would seem, only one “best,” no matter how hard it may be to figure out what that is. Presumably, someone with absolute standards would not be especially concerned or affected by what others are doing. Satisficing, in contrast, implying as it does a desire for good enough, suggests relative standards—relative to one’s own past experience and the past experience of others. Nonetheless, what we see is just the reverse. It is maximizers who have the relative standards and satisficers who have the absolute ones. While, in theory, “the best” is an ideal that exists independent of what other people have, in practice, determining the best is so difficult t
hat people fall back on comparisons with others. “Good enough” is not an objective standard that exists out there for all to see. It will always be relative to the person doing the judging. But critically, it will not, or need not, be relative to either the standards or the achievements of others. So, once again, satisficing appears the better way to maintain one’s autonomy in the face of an overwhelming array of choices.
Choice Options and Social Comparison
WE HAVE ALREADY SEEN HOW THE MORE OPTIONS WE HAVE, THE more difficulty we have gathering the information necessary to make a good decision. The more difficult information gathering is, the more likely it is that you will rely on the decisions of others. Even if you are not after the best wallpaper for your kitchen, when faced with a choice among hundreds or thousands of possibilities, the search for something good enough can be enormously simplified by knowing what others have chosen. So overwhelming choice is going to push you in the direction of looking over your shoulder at what others are doing. But the more social comparison you do, the more likely you are to be affected by it, and the direction of such effects tends to be negative. So by forcing us to look around at what others are doing before we make decisions, the world of bountiful options is encouraging a process that will often, if not always, leave us feeling worse about our decisions than we would if we hadn’t engaged in the process to begin with. Here is yet another reason why increasing the available options will decrease our satisfaction with what we choose.
The Paradox of Choice Page 17