The research behind Social Comparison Theory
You find out what someone else earns and suddenly reconsider your own salary. A friend buys a house and you start thinking about whether you should own one. Someone your age gets promoted, runs a faster race or reaches a milestone you haven't reached yet and, without anything about your own circumstances changing, your perception of where you stand can shift.
Comparison is usually discussed as a bad habit, particularly in conversations about social media and self-esteem. We're told to stop comparing ourselves with other people and focus on our own lives instead. Psychologist Leon Festinger took a different approach. Rather than assuming comparison was inherently harmful, he wanted to understand why people do it in the first place. His Social Comparison Theory, first published in 1954, proposed that comparison serves an important psychological function: other people provide information that helps us evaluate ourselves.
THE RESEARCH
Festinger's original 1954 paper was a theoretical work rather than the report of one defining experiment. Drawing on existing experimental research, he proposed a series of hypotheses about how people evaluate their opinions and abilities and why other people become particularly important when objective standards aren't available.
His starting point was the idea that people have a drive to evaluate themselves. We want to know whether our opinions are reasonable and whether our abilities are good, poor or somewhere in between. When an objective measure exists, we can use it. If you want to know whether you can lift 100 pounds, you can try. If you want to know whether you can run three miles in under 30 minutes, a stopwatch provides a reasonably definitive answer.
A great deal of life is harder to measure. Are you progressing quickly enough in your career? Are you being paid well for what you do? Are you attractive? Are you successful? Is your reaction to a situation reasonable? Even when numbers exist, they often mean very little without context. An annual salary of $80,000 is simply a number until you know something about the job, location, industry and what comparable people earn.
Festinger proposed that when objective evaluation is difficult, people turn towards social reality instead. We use other people as reference points, and we tend to prefer comparisons with people who are reasonably similar to us because those comparisons provide more useful information. A recreational tennis player learns relatively little about their ability by comparing their serve with that of a professional. Another player with roughly the same amount of experience provides a far more informative benchmark.
This idea became the foundation for decades of subsequent research into social comparison and the circumstances that influence whom we compare ourselves with, how those comparisons make us feel and what we do with the information they provide.
THE FINDING
One of the useful implications of Social Comparison Theory is that comparing yourself with someone else isn't necessarily evidence that you're insecure or overly concerned with other people's lives. Comparison can simply be a way of establishing context.
Imagine starting a new job and completing a particular assignment in three hours. Without additional information, it's difficult to know whether that represents exceptional performance, average performance or a problem. If you discover that people in the same role generally take six hours, your assessment changes. The three hours haven't changed, but now you have information that helps you interpret them.
The same thing happens with an exam score. An 82% might feel excellent in a class where the average was 60% and disappointing in one where almost everyone scored above 90%. In both cases, the objective result remains exactly the same. What changes is the reference point against which you understand it.
Social information helps us establish what numbers, experiences and outcomes mean. This is part of the reason comparison is so difficult to eliminate entirely. It isn't simply an unpleasant mental habit that occasionally gets out of control. In many situations, it is one of the tools we use to work out where we stand.
THE THEORY
Research following Festinger's original theory expanded considerably on the different forms comparison can take. One of the most familiar distinctions is between upward and downward comparison.
Upward comparison occurs when we compare ourselves with someone we perceive as doing better than we are in an area that matters to us. Downward comparison involves someone we perceive as doing worse. It would be convenient if one reliably made us feel bad and the other reliably made us feel good, but research on social comparison has found that our responses are more complicated than that.
Someone further ahead in a career can make your own progress feel inadequate, but that same person can also provide a useful model of what is possible and how someone might get there. An accomplished athlete might make a beginner painfully aware of the gap between their abilities, or give them a clearer picture of what years of training can produce. Whether an upward comparison discourages or motivates us depends partly on how we interpret the distance between ourselves and the other person.
Downward comparisons can also have different effects. Seeing someone in a more difficult position can make us feel better about our own circumstances, particularly after a setback or threat. It can also show us an outcome we would like to avoid or remind us that a situation could deteriorate if we don't act.
This is why it is too simplistic to divide comparison into healthy and unhealthy categories based solely on whether we look upward or downward. The person we choose as a reference point, the dimension we're comparing and the conclusion we draw from the comparison all affect what the information does to us.
NOT THE SAME THING
Comparison is not automatically envy
Comparison and envy are often treated as though they are the same experience, but noticing that another person has more of something does not necessarily mean you resent them or even want what they have.
You might discover that a colleague earns considerably more than you and decide that the difference makes sense given the responsibilities they have accepted. You can admire someone's enormous house while knowing you wouldn't want the expense or maintenance that comes with it. You can recognize that another person has achieved considerably more professional status while preferring the amount of freedom your own career gives you.
Comparison can also reveal preferences that weren't obvious before. Perhaps you thought you didn't care about career progression until someone you know received a promotion and your reaction surprised you. Alternatively, you might watch someone achieve the milestone you assumed you were supposed to want and realize that you feel very little desire for it yourself.
Other people can therefore function as useful reference points without becoming instructions for how we should live. Sometimes the most interesting information in a comparison isn't what another person has. It's what our response to them tells us about what we value.
WHY IT MATTERS
Social media didn't create social comparison. Festinger published his theory in 1954, decades before anyone could open a phone and see the careers, bodies, homes, relationships and holidays of thousands of other people. What digital platforms have changed dramatically is the size and composition of the comparison group available to us.
Historically, many of our comparison targets came from relatively limited social environments: family members, colleagues, classmates, friends, neighbors and other people we encountered with some regularity. Those people weren't necessarily perfectly comparable to us, but we usually had contextual information about their lives. We knew roughly how old they were, where they came from, what they did and some of the circumstances surrounding their successes and failures.
Online, those boundaries largely disappear. Someone in Paris can compare their apartment with an interior designer's home in Copenhagen, their career with a technology founder in California, their appearance with a professional model and their holiday with a luxury travel creator, all within a few minutes. More importantly, the people most visible online aren't necessarily representative of the populations we're subconsciously using them to evaluate.
Exceptional outcomes attract attention. An unusually beautiful home, extremely successful business, remarkable transformation or extravagant holiday is more likely to circulate precisely because it is unusual. Repeated exposure, however, can make unusual outcomes begin to feel ordinary. If the reference group becomes distorted, our conclusions about where we stand can become distorted with it.
This doesn't mean the solution is to stop noticing other people. Festinger's basic insight helps explain why that advice has never been particularly realistic. Other people provide context, and context is useful. A better question is whether the people providing that context are actually reasonable reference points for the thing you're trying to understand.
TRY THIS
The next time you notice a comparison producing a strong reaction, resist the urge to immediately dismiss it as something you shouldn't be doing. Instead, examine whether the comparison is giving you useful information.
Start with the reference point. Is this person genuinely comparable to you in the area you're evaluating? Consider experience, age, resources, circumstances, opportunities and any other differences that materially affect the outcome. Someone can be interesting or inspiring without being a sensible benchmark for your own progress.
Then identify what specifically caught your attention. It may not be the obvious thing. You might think you're comparing careers when what you actually envy is someone's autonomy. You might think you want someone's house when what appeals to you is the sense of stability it represents. A reaction to someone else's life can sometimes help clarify something about your own priorities.
Finally, decide whether the information deserves to change anything. Some comparisons expose a gap you genuinely want to close. Others confirm that you're comfortable with the choices you've already made.
Social comparison is difficult to eliminate because it serves a purpose. We use other people to help understand ourselves and the environments we're operating in. The more useful skill isn't learning never to compare. It's becoming more selective about who gets to become a reference point and what conclusions you draw from the comparison.
References
Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7(2), 117-140.
Wills, T. A. (1981). Downward comparison principles in social psychology. Psychological Bulletin, 90(2), 245-271.
Wood, J. V. (1989). Theory and research concerning social comparisons of personal attributes. Psychological Bulletin, 106(2), 231-248.