Festinger (1954) postulated people desire social comparison to assess their abilities. Performance satisfaction was predicted to vary directly with the size of the comparison group since the accuracy of the appraisal would increase. Recently, Brickman and Bulman (1976) postulated that a drive exists for people to avoid social comparison. This is due to negative consequences arising from such encounters. To assess these two viewpoints 90 male and 90 female subjects were randomly assigned to either a positive skew, negative skew or equal score distribution based on false feedback from various perceptual-motor exercises. Each subject also was randomly assigned to an expected future comparison situation with a large group, a small group or the experimenter. Subjects desired social comparison to a greater extent in the small group situation than in the large group setting and least when meeting only with the experimenter. It appears that a curvilinear relationship exists between the desire for social comparison and the number of others being compared against. The desire for comparison reaches an apex in small group situations but decreases with larger numbers of others and in situations where there are no others for comparison.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BSU/oai:cardinalscholar.bsu.edu:handle/181527 |
| Date | January 1977 |
| Creators | DeWitt, Daniel Jay |
| Contributors | Clark, William R. |
| Source Sets | Ball State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | ii, 63 leaves : ill. ; 28 cm. |
| Source | Virtual Press |
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