7.4 The Self, Social Comparison, Self-Esteem, and the Need to Belong

The Self, Social Comparison, Self-Esteem, and the Need to Belong

"Social comparison, self" is a separate subtopic of the Social content area. Questions usually present a short scenario (a student comparing grades, a person who gets drunk before a test, a speaker sure the audience saw her nervousness) and ask which construct it illustrates.

1. Foundations: The Self as Knower and Known

• William James (1890) distinguished the "I" (the self as knower and agent) from the "Me" (the self as known object, including material, social, and spiritual selves).
• Charles Horton Cooley's looking-glass self (1902) holds that we come to see ourselves partly as we imagine others see us. George Herbert Mead extended this idea, arguing that the self emerges through social interaction and taking the perspective of others.
• Self-schemas: Hazel Markus (1977) showed that people who are "schematic" for a trait (for example, independence) judge trait-relevant adjectives faster, recall more relevant behaviors, and resist contradictory feedback. A self-schema is an organized knowledge structure about the self that guides attention and memory, which helps explain the self-reference effect in memory (Section 5.2).
• Self-perception: People sometimes infer their attitudes and traits by observing their own behavior (Bem's self-perception theory, Section 7.2).

2. Social Comparison Theory

Leon Festinger (1954) proposed that people have a drive to evaluate their opinions and abilities. When no objective, physical standard is available, they compare themselves with other people, especially similar others (a beginning tennis player compares herself with other beginners, not with professionals).

Related findings:

• Big-fish-little-pond effect: Students of equal ability have higher academic self-concepts in less selective schools, where their local comparison group is weaker (Herbert Marsh).
• Relative deprivation: Satisfaction depends on comparison with expected or reference outcomes rather than absolute outcomes. Bronze medalists often appear happier than silver medalists because they compare themselves with finishing fourth rather than with winning gold (Medvec, Madey, and Gilovich, 1995, on counterfactual thinking).
• Self-evaluation maintenance model: Abraham Tesser (1988) proposed that a close other's outstanding performance boosts our self-esteem through reflection (basking in reflected glory) when the domain is not important to our own identity, but threatens it through comparison when the domain is self-relevant. People may then distance themselves from the friend, change the importance of the domain, or try to outperform the friend.
• Basking in reflected glory (BIRGing): Robert Cialdini and colleagues (1976) found that students wore more school-logo clothing and said "we won" after their football team won, but "they lost" after defeats.

3. Self-Discrepancies and Self-Regulation

E. Tory Higgins's self-discrepancy theory (1987) distinguishes three self-representations:

• Actual self: attributes you believe you possess.
• Ideal self: attributes you (or significant others) hope you will possess.
• Ought self: attributes you believe you should possess as duties or obligations.

Actual-ideal discrepancies produce dejection-related emotions (sadness, disappointment, depression-like states). Actual-ought discrepancies produce agitation-related emotions (anxiety, guilt, fear). The theory connects to regulatory focus: ideal standards support a promotion focus (seeking gains), and ought standards support a prevention focus (avoiding losses).

• Self-efficacy: Albert Bandura's term for confidence in one's ability to perform a specific behavior. It predicts effort and persistence and grows mainly through mastery experiences, then through vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, and physiological states.
• Self-monitoring: Mark Snyder's construct of tailoring behavior to situational cues (high self-monitors) versus acting on inner dispositions (low self-monitors), discussed in Section 7.2.
• Ego depletion: Roy Baumeister and colleagues (1998) proposed that self-control draws on a limited resource; participants who resisted cookies (eating radishes instead) gave up sooner on unsolvable puzzles. A 23-laboratory registered replication (Martin Hagger and colleagues, 2016) found an effect near zero, so the model is now doubtful.

4. Self-Esteem and Self-Enhancement

• Self-esteem is a person's overall evaluation of self-worth, often measured with the 10-item Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. High self-esteem correlates with happiness and persistence but less strongly with objective performance than once assumed (Baumeister and colleagues, 2003).
• Sociometer theory: Mark Leary proposed that self-esteem works like a gauge of relational value, dropping when we sense rejection and rising when we feel accepted.
• Self-serving bias (Section 7.1): taking credit for success and blaming failure on circumstances.
• Better-than-average effect: Most people rate themselves above the median on desirable traits such as driving skill or fairness.
• Self-handicapping: Steven Berglas and Edward Jones (1978) found that students who had received unearned (noncontingent) success feedback, and therefore felt uncertain about repeating it, chose a drug they believed would impair performance. Creating obstacles in advance (procrastinating, drinking, not practicing) provides an excuse for failure and enhances credit for success, but it lowers actual performance.
• Self-verification: William Swann showed that people also seek feedback that confirms their existing self-views, even negative ones, because coherent self-views make the world predictable.
• Terror management theory (Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, and Sheldon Solomon): self-esteem and cultural worldviews buffer anxiety about death. Reminders of mortality (mortality salience) increase defense of one's worldview; in one study, judges reminded of death set much higher bail for a prostitution suspect (about $455 versus $50) than control judges did.

5. Egocentric Social Judgments

• Spotlight effect: Thomas Gilovich and colleagues (2000) had students wear an embarrassing Barry Manilow T-shirt into a room of peers. Wearers estimated that about half the observers noticed the shirt; in fact, only about a quarter did.
• Illusion of transparency: People overestimate how clearly others can read their internal states, such as nervousness during a speech.
• False consensus effect: Lee Ross, David Greene, and Pamela House (1977) found that students who agreed to walk around campus wearing an "Eat at Joe's" sandwich board estimated that most others would agree, whereas students who refused estimated that most others would refuse.
• False uniqueness effect: People underestimate how common their desirable abilities and behaviors are.

6. Culture and the Self

Hazel Markus and Shinobu Kitayama (1991) distinguished two self-construals:

These differences also appear in attribution (Section 7.1), conformity (Section 8.1), and emotion display rules (Section 8.5).

7. The Need to Belong

Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary (1995) argued that humans have a fundamental need to belong: a drive to form and maintain at least a minimum quantity of lasting, positive relationships. Evidence includes the ease with which social bonds form, resistance to breaking them, and the health costs of isolation.

• Ostracism: In Kipling Williams's Cyberball paradigm, participants who are excluded from a simple online ball-tossing game report lower belonging, self-esteem, control, and meaningful existence, even when they know the other players are computer programs. Exclusion activates brain regions also involved in physical pain, such as the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex.
• Affiliation under threat: Stanley Schachter (1959) found that participants anticipating painful shocks preferred to wait with others, specifically with others in the same situation ("misery loves miserable company"), consistent with social comparison as a way to evaluate one's emotional reactions.