Reading focus
Syllabus: How Do We Understand Ourselves and Other People?
Keep target selection separate from the effect of encountering a target. Use the authors' control-group distinction to interpret apparent changes in self-evaluation.
Why you’re reading it. Introduce the social standards against which people understand themselves, and connect competing theories with a synthesis of evidence.
A question to consider. If seeing a successful classmate lowers someone's confidence, what comparison would establish whether confidence fell, and what would remain unknown about actual ability?
Why this reading
Other people can become standards for evaluating ourselves. This synthesis separates choosing someone to compare with from reacting to a comparison, allowing theories about self-evaluation to be tested against different kinds of evidence.
Before you read
An upward comparison concerns someone judged better off on the relevant dimension; a downward comparison concerns someone worse off. Assimilation moves self-evaluation toward the standard; contrast moves it away. A meta-analysis combines results from studies selected using explicit criteria.
Read for
- Use Figure 1 to distinguish comparison direction from the direction of change in self-evaluation.
- Track which studies let participants choose a target and which assigned one.
- Ask what a no-comparison control adds, and how publication-bias adjustments affect the conclusions.
Consider afterwards
- A student chooses to see a high-performing peer's score and then feels less capable. Which two processes would you measure separately before explaining this outcome?
Editorial context
The reaction analyses use a restricted set of experimental comparisons, not every kind of comparison in daily life. Many studies lack a no-comparison baseline; some moderator estimates are uncertain. The authors excluded retracted studies and examined publication bias. Their proposed explanation for why people choose potentially discouraging comparisons remains a hypothesis, not a result established by combining the two literatures.