Social Comparison Theory, initially proposed by social psychologist Leon Festinger in 1954, centers on the belief that there is a drive within individuals to gain accurate self-evaluations. The theory explains how individuals evaluate their own opinions and abilities by comparing themselves to others in order to reduce uncertainty in these domains, and learn how to define the self.
Upward and Downward Social Comparisons
- Downward social comparison is a defensive tendency that is used as a means of self-evaluation. When a person looks to another individual or group that they consider to be worse off than themselves in order to feel better about their self or personal situation, they are making a downward social comparison.
- Research has suggested that social comparisons with others who are better off or superior, or upward comparisons, can lower self-regard, whereas downward comparisons can elevate self-regard.
Although social comparison research has suggested that upward comparisons can lower self-regard… Individuals make upward comparisons, whether consciously or subconsciously, when they compare themselves with an individual or comparison group that they perceive as superior or better than themselves in order to improve their views of self or to create a more positive perception of their personal reality. Upward social comparisons are made to self-evaluate and self-improve in the hopes that self-enhancement will also occur.
- In an upward social comparison, people want to believe themselves to be part of the elite or superior, and make comparisons highlighting the similarities between themselves and the comparison group,
- unlike a downward social comparison, where similarities between individuals or groups are disassociated.
It has also been suggested that upward comparisons may provide an inspiration to improve, and in one study it was found that while breast cancer patients made more downward comparisons, they showed a preference for information about more fortunate others.
Another study indicated that people who were dieting often used upward social comparisons by posting pictures of thinner people on their refrigerators. These pictures served as not only a reminder of an individuals current weight, but also as an inspiration of a goal to be reached. In simple terms, downward social comparisons are more likely to make us feel better about ourselves, while upward social comparisons are more likely to motivate us to achieve more or reach higher…
Media influence
The media has been found to play a large role in social comparisons. Researchers examining the social effects of the media have used social comparison theory have found that in most cases women tend to engage in upward social comparisons with a target other, which results in more negative feelings about the self. The majority of women have a daily opportunity to make upward comparison by measuring themselves against some form of societal ideal. Social comparisons have become a relevant mechanism for learning about the appearance-related social expectations among peers and for evaluating the self in terms of those standards.
Although men do make upward comparisons, research finds that more women make upward comparisons and are comparing themselves with unrealistically high standards presented in the media. As women are shown more mainstream media images of powerful, successful and thin women, they perceive the "ideal" to be the norm for societal views of attractive. In recent years, social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram have made this more widespread, since social media makes it easier to compare yourself to the "ideal". Some women have reported making upward comparisons in a positive manner for the purposes of self-motivation, but the majority of upward comparisons are made when the individual is feeling lesser and therefore evoke a negative connotation.
Self-perceived similarities with role models on social media can also affect self-esteem for both men and women. Having more self-perceived similarities with a role model can help increase self-esteem, while having less can decrease self-esteem. Social comparison with peers on social media can also lead to feelings of self-pity or satisfaction. The desire for social comparison can cause FoMO and compulsive checking of social media sites.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_comparison_theory
Payne argues that;
Explaining that while poor decisions are a factor in keeping some of the low-income population where they are, Payne argues that there is also a complex network of human instincts, social conditioning, societal structures and chance that contribute to some of those same decisions, and can be detrimental for both the rich and poor alike...
Insecurities driven by poverty foster "us-versus-them" divisions, and "provoke us to embrace simplistic beliefs, extreme ideologies, and prejudices that provide easy answers, but do so by sabotaging the healthy functioning of civil society," Payne said.
When asked what values they treasure, survey respondents stress love, faith, loyalty, honesty and integrity.
"And yet," Payne writes, "no one ever mentions something that we know to be true, both from scientific studies and from simply being human: 'I crave status.'"
That instinct, he said, is prevalent even at the highest levels of income and wealth, where luxury cars and prestigious homes are perceived as necessities.
"We are unconsciously comparing what we have to what someone else has -- our friends, our neighbors, that handsome couple in the magazine -- and we are aware only of the conclusion our brain has silently computed: Compared to that, this isn't sufficient."
Inequality in society is a blight everywhere
https://buffalonews.com/entertainment/books/inequality-in-society-is-a-blight-everywhere/article_b7392a66-03b5-5d8a-8579-4b072ab204f1.html
Sean Illing Is it fair to say that economic inequality produces more political tribalism?
Keith Payne I would call it more polarization, but you can call it political tribalism. And it happens on the left and the right. Again, people look for ways to make sense of a world that seems unfair, and often they do that by retreating into tribal identities — whether it’s political or religious or ethnic or whatever.
Sean Illing A lot of the psychological problems you point to stem from our tendency to measure ourselves in terms of our social status. But humans have done this since we started living in groups, and certainly since the emergence of private property and individual rights. We’re just hardwired to detect relative differences. Is there something unique about what we’re seeing now?
Keith Payne There’s nothing new about this psychological tendency to measure ourselves against others; that’s no different than it was 100 years ago or 1,000 years ago. What’s different today is the scale of the inequality around us, which is about as high as we’ve seen since we started keeping records of it.
Sean Illing Do you think we would be healthier and happier if we had more poverty and less inequality?
Keith Payne I think there’s a case to be made that trading off some measures of wealth, like the gross domestic product, would be worth it for the benefits that come with reduced inequality. The problem now isn’t that there’s too much wealth; it’s that nearly all of the increases are going to the wealthiest members of society.
Even if by some miracle we doubled everyone’s income tomorrow, that would only increase the inequality because when you double the income of millionaires, they get a lot richer than when you double the income of somebody making $20,000.
Usually, there isn’t a trade-off between more wealth and less inequality, because if you look across countries, the countries with lower levels of inequality actually have greater levels of social mobility. It’s easier to climb up that economic ladder if you’re in a place where inequality is on a human scale, as opposed to the astronomical levels of inequality that we see in America.
Income inequality is changing how we think, live, and die
https://www.vox.com/2018/5/24/17368308/income-inequality-poverty-in-america
Even more relevant to the question of "economic anxiety" is the research that shows perceptions of inequality are just as important as actual numbers. When people feel poor — regardless of whether or not they objectively are — they exhibit risk-taking behavior and act in their short-term interests. When they feel richer, they practice delayed gratification and plan ahead.
"We have to look at ordinary middle-class people and ask why it is that, regardless of actual money, so many of them feel that they are barely getting by, that they are living paycheck to paycheck to paycheck, that the neighbors know something they don't, and that if they could just earn a little more, then everything would be a bit better," he writes.
These perceptions have real outcomes, according to Payne. People who locate themselves on a lower "rung" of perceived affluence are more likely to suffer from depression, anxiety and chronic pain, and it's more probable that they will make bad decisions, underperform at work, suffer health issues like obesity and heart problems, and even believe in conspiracy theories.
Contrary to the "bubble" argument, it's also not true across the board that poor people vote Republican and the affluent vote liberal. Higher incomes result in a higher probability of voting GOP. But feeling poor — or well-off — plays a role.
"The tendency for the rich to vote Republican is stronger in poor states than in rich ones," Payne writes. "If you are a wealthy Mississippian, you are much more likely to vote Republican than if you have the same wealth in New York or Connecticut." Social comparisons — a six-figure income makes you feel more well-off in Tunica than in Manhattan — affect how people think about politics and therefore how they vote.
Payne's book encourages us to look beyond bank statements at how people think and feel as a better predictor of behavior. The incomes of the poor and middle class, when adjusted for inflation, have been fairly stagnant since 1980, while the wealth of the 1 percent continues to rise. Feeling poor — and the anxiety that goes along with that — is relative…
…Subjective perception is incredibly important. Think about how much it takes to feel like you are getting by OK today as opposed to 100 years ago. It takes much more. Think about how much it takes to feel like you are getting by OK in America as opposed to, say, in Bangladesh. It’s very different. And in the same way, it takes more to feel like you are getting by if you are in a context in which some people are really getting ahead. It feels like other people are all passing you by. That feeling of being left behind is something that a lot of journalistic accounts of the 2016 election have pointed out as a major motivator for people who voted for Donald Trump, and I think that’s probably right.
But the feeling of being left behind isn’t inconsistent with the idea that people actually have above-average incomes, [as] Trump voters [did] on average. If you look at how incomes have changed over the last 50 years or so, the bottom two-fifths are making — with inflation, in adjusted dollars — almost exactly the same as they were making in the late 1960s. That hasn’t changed.
What’s changed is that the top 5 percent, the top 10 percent, the top 1 percent have been making drastically more over time. Making the exact same amount today as maybe your grandparents’ family made in the ’60s feels like you are being left behind, because other people are getting so far ahead.
What is it that makes some people think, well, the enemy, so to speak, is that 1 percent, or that fraction of the 1 percent, who are getting wildly ahead while the rest of us are being held back? While other people think, well, the enemy is other people around me who I perceive are getting unfair advantages? There’s a big divide there between progressive and conservative voters, in terms of who they see as their economic opponents…
It's the wealth gap, stupid: Inequality drives "economic anxiety" — both real and perceived
More quotes about comparison theory from - The Broken Ladder
--Status and Mismatch;
... Why do we care so much about status? This is the point in most books where the argument is made that human beings are unique among the animal kingdom, but in this case the craving for status does not set us apart. In fact, it is such an ancient part of our nature that we share it with our primate cousins. Watching baboons or chimpanzees compete openly, physically, and sometimes violently for their position in the hierarchy feels simultaneously foreign and familiar to us. It’s as uncomfortable as watching them mate: We feel embarrassed by their vulgarity and yet we recognize exactly what is driving them.
Nonhuman primates turn out to behave a lot like humans when it comes to celebrity gawking...
--Equality, Fairness and Acceptable Inequality;
...In reality, the main reason that hunter-gatherers were egalitarian was not that they were more benevolent than we are today, but rather that it was difficult to accumulate dramatically more wealth than others in a group given that there was no real wealth beyond today’s kill or tomorrow’s berry haul. Sharing simply made good sense. If I kill a mastodon, what am I going to do with all the meat? The best way to store it would be in the stomachs of my friends and family. There, it would become converted into the currency of goodwill, so that the next time I needed help, they would be there for me.
This system of reciprocal sharing works because people remembered. They remembered who got what and how much effort each person put in, and they got upset when some got more than others. A study of capuchin monkeys (the kind you’ve seen grinding music from an old-timey street organ) suggests that this talent for social accounting is also ancient. Like humans, monkeys become distraught when they get the wrong end of a deal...
...The discovery that capuchin monkeys are averse to receiving unequal outcomes, much like humans, suggests that these tendencies are evolved rather than learned. If people really are born caring about equality, then we should be able to find evidence of it even in young children. And, in fact, children as young as three years old do show reactions much like those of the capuchins...
The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Dieby Keith Payne
https://www.amazon.com/Broken-Ladder-Inequality-Affects-Think/dp/0525429816
...Early human groups almost certainly had a status hierarchy, with some people ranking higher than others. But without the ability to accrue significant amounts of wealth, and with populations numbering in the dozens rather than the thousands, it was simply impossible for the difference between the top and the bottom of the hierarchy to be very big. Like our primate relatives, early humans would have cared deeply about status within their small bands. The natural social structure of early Homo sapiens was a Status Ladder, but it was a very short one.
What changed since then was not human nature. What changed instead was very practical, very concrete, and very recent: Humans invented farming. After a thousand centuries during which hunting and gathering was the only way of life, agriculture appeared a mere hundred centuries ago at more or less the same time in many places around the planet. On an evolutionary time scale, this is a blink of an eye. Suddenly, for the first time, people were able to settle in one place, plant crops, and store the harvest, such as in the form of clay pots full of grain. Humans also began to raise livestock, which, from the herder’s point of view, are walking meat storage devices. Once food could be accumulated in large quantities, it became possible for some people to amass a lot more of it than others. And they did. It was not long before cities sprang up in places like Egypt, the Middle East, China, India, and the Americas. Along with these larger, denser, agricultural societies, wealth inequality began to climb...
... If humans are not unique when it comes to caring about status, one distinction that we can claim is that we have built social ladders of such height that they dwarf those of our primate relatives and ancient hunter-gatherers. This quantitative difference sets the stage for conflicts between the scale of inequality in which we evolved and the scale that we confront today...
The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Dieby Keith Payne
https://www.amazon.com/Broken-Ladder-Inequality-Affects-Think/dp/0525429816
...Our modern economy proves to be an uncomfortable fit for the kinds of creatures we have become over the last thousand centuries or so.
Mismatches between slowly evolving appetites on the one hand and quickly changing environments on the other are a source of much misery in the modern world...
... There is likewise a mismatch between our evolved yearning for status and our modern economic environment. ...high status comes with many benefits for both survival and reproduction. Our ancestors who were status strivers left behind more descendants than their more languid competitors. As a result, they bequeathed to us a visceral appetite for status. Money, power, and the admiration of other people seem just as irresistible to many people as food and sex. The meek may eventually inherit the earth, but the proud have been in firm possession of it so far.
- For thousands of centuries the
- social ladders our minds and bodies
- have evolved to climb were
- only a few rungs high.
If the contemporary world’s ladder were still on the kind of human scale to which we were once accustomed, then our urge for status might not be a problem, but instead we are facing the equivalent of scaling skyscrapers. Likewise, if we were a species that didn’t care much about status, then today’s massive inequality might be tolerable.
- But our intrinsic appetite for high status
- crashes against the towering inequality
- we see around us with enormous
- consequences for everyone, not
- just the poor, but the middle
- class as well...
...When we examine the human hunger for social status, together with the fact that many of the world’s economies have become extraordinarily unequal in recent decades, our perspective on inequality changes. If our response to inequality is shaped by our need for status, then inequality is not simply a matter of how much money we have; it’s about where we stand compared with other people. Money, from that perspective, is simply one way we keep score. Feeling poor matters, not just being poor. That is why your subjective standing on the Status Ladder reveals so much about what you are likely to become...
The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Dieby Keith Payne
https://www.amazon.com/Broken-Ladder-Inequality-Affects-Think/dp/0525429816
...The study of University of California employees demonstrated that workers can be dissatisfied about inequality only when they are cognizant of it. Recent research in both the United States and globally has indicated that people are unaware of just how unequal most corporations are. One study, which surveyed citizens from forty countries around the world, asked respondents to estimate how much the average unskilled worker was paid per year in their country and how much the average chairperson of a large company made. They then asked how much the average worker and the average chief executive should ideally earn. The researchers then computed the ratio of CEO pay to the average worker’s pay.
In every country, people’s ideal degree of inequality was less than their estimates of actual inequality. On average, respondents thought that CEOs made 10 times as much as the average worker. Their ideal scenario, in contrast, was that CEOs would average 4.6 times as much. One of the striking aspects of these findings is the degree of consensus. People who described themselves as politically left of center thought that CEOs should make 4 times as much as average workers, while those who identified themselves as right of center thought the ideal would be 5 times. Respondents in the lowest 20 percent of the income bracket thought that CEOs should make 4.3 times as much as average workers, while those in the richest 20 percent thought it should be 5 times. People’s ideals were surprisingly uniform across age, education levels, and every variable the researchers examined...
The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Dieby Keith Payne
https://www.amazon.com/Broken-Ladder-Inequality-Affects-Think/dp/0525429816
...the button was hooked up to a battery that would stimulate the brain directly. When they did this, the rats pressed the lever compulsively. In later versions of the experiment, they would not only forgo both food and water to keep pressing the button, but would cross an electrified floor, enduring painful shocks...
...They would keep hitting that button until they collapsed from exhaustion...
Concerning the possibility that “status craving” is identical to “drug addiction” in the brain;
...The brain pathways of the reward circuit evolved to make us keep seeking out things that are good for survival and reproduction—that is to say, things like food and sex. But substances that give people a high, from an earthy Pinot to crack cocaine, all stimulate this same brain network, as they happen to have chemical structures that mimic the brain’s natural reward-signaling chemicals...
...Regardless of the actual amount of money the player won, the reward circuit was activated more strongly when the player won more than the other player. Simply knowing they were doing better than other players drew the same brain responses as sex, money, or drugs. Status is clearly a powerful motivator, and studies like this suggest that when we say people crave status, “craving” is more than a metaphor...
...Because the same brain network responds to all these very different kinds of experiences, the reward network creates a kind of “common currency” across many different kinds of stimuli. You may not be surprised, then, to learn that it responds the same way when we make money. Dozens of studies have shown that when research participants gamble, pick stocks, or make financial decisions and earn money doing so, the reward circuit responds just as it does for food, sex, or drugs...
The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die - Keith Payne
https://www.amazon.com/Broken-Ladder-Inequality-Affects-Think/dp/0525429816
Relative Deprivation Theory
Relative deprivation is the lack of resources to sustain the diet, lifestyle, activities and amenities that an individual or group are accustomed to or that are widely encouraged or approved in the society to which they belong. Measuring relative deprivation allows an objective comparison between the situation of the individual or group compared to the rest of society. Relative deprivation may also emphasise the individual experience of discontent when being deprived of something to which one believes oneself to be entitled, however emphasizing the perspective of the individual makes objective measurement problematic.
It is a term used in social sciences to describe feelings or measures of economic, political, or social deprivation that are relative rather than absolute. The term is inextricably linked to the similar terms poverty and social exclusion. The concept of relative deprivation has important consequences for both behaviour and attitudes, including feelings of stress, political attitudes, and participation in collective action. It is relevant to researchers studying multiple fields in social sciences. The concept was first used systematically by the authors of The American Soldier who studied army units and found out that it is the perceived discrepancy between anticipation and attainment which results in feelings of relative deprivation.
Social scientists, particularly political scientists and sociologists, have cited relative deprivation, especially temporal relative deprivation, as a potential cause of social movements and deviance, leading in extreme situations to political violence such as rioting, terrorism, civil wars and other instances of social deviance such as crime. For example, some scholars of social movements explain their rise by citing grievances of people who feel deprived of what they perceive as values to which they are entitled. Similarly, individuals engage in deviant behaviours when their means do not match their goals.
In response to exploration of the concept of relative deprivation, the term 'relative gratification' has emerged in social psychology to discuss the opposite phenomenon.
Walter Runciman noted that there are four preconditions of relative deprivation (of object X by person A):
- Person A does not have X
- Person A knows of other persons that have X
- Person A wants to have X
- Person A believes obtaining X is realistic
Runciman distinguished between egoistic and fraternalistic relative deprivation. The former is caused by unfavorable social position when compared to other, better off members of a specific group (of which A is the member) and the latter, by unfavorable comparison to other, better off groups.
- Egoistic relative deprivation can be seen in the example of a worker who believes he should have been promoted faster and may lead that person to take actions intended to improve his position within the group; those actions are, however, unlikely to affect many people.
- Fraternalism can be seen in the example of racial discrimination and are much more likely to result in the creation and growth of large social movement, like the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Another example of fraternalistic relative deprivation is the envy that teenagers feel towards the wealthy characters who are portrayed in movies and on television as being "middle class" or "normal" despite wearing expensive clothes, driving expensive cars, and living in mansions. Fraternalistic group deprivation has also been linked to voting behaviours, particularly in the case of voting for the far-right.
Deprivation Theory is that people who are deprived of things deemed valuable in society, money, justice, status or privilege, join social movements with the hope of redressing their grievances. That is a beginning point for looking at why people join social movements; however, it is even more important to look at relative deprivation theory, a belief that people join social movement based on their evaluations of what they think they should have, compared with what others have. On the contrary, absolute deprivation is people's actual negative condition; relative deprivation is what people think they should have relative to what others have, or even compared with their own past or perceived future. Improved conditions fuel human desires for even better conditions and so can spark revolutions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_deprivation
Relative Deprivation Theory Definition
As defined by social theorists and political scientists, relative deprivation theory suggests that people who feel they are being deprived of something considered essential in their society (e.g. money, rights, political voice, status) will organize or join social movements dedicated to obtaining the things of which they feel deprived. For example, relative deprivation has been cited as one of the causes of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, which was rooted in Black Americans' struggle to gain social and legal equality with white Americans. Similarly, many gay people joined the same-sex marriage movement in order to acquire the same legal recognition of their marriages enjoyed by straight people.
In some cases, relative deprivation has been cited as a factor driving incidents of social disorder like rioting, looting, terrorism, and civil wars. In this nature, social movements and their associated disorderly acts can often be attributed to the grievances of people who feel they are being denied resources to which they are entitled.
Relative Deprivation Theory History
Development of the concept of relative deprivation is often attributed to American sociologist Robert K. Merton, whose study of American soldiers during World War II revealed that soldiers in the Military Police were far less satisfied with their opportunities for promotion than regular GIs.
In proposing one the first formal definitions of relative deprivation, British statesman and sociologist Walter Runciman listed four required conditions:
- A person does not have something.
- That person knows other people who have the thing.
- That person wants to have the thing.
- That person believes they have a reasonable chance of getting the thing.
Runciman also drew a distinction between “egoistic” and “fraternalistic” relative deprivation. According to Runciman, egoistic relative deprivation is driven by an individual’s feelings of being treated unfairly compared to others in their group. For example, an employee who feels they should have gotten a promotion that went to another employee may feel egoistically relatively deprived. Fraternalistic relative deprivation is more often associated with massive group social movements like the Civil Rights Movement.
Another more common example of fraternal deprivation is the feeling of envy felt by middle-class individuals when they see people on television portrayed as being middle-class driving luxury cars and wearing designed clothes. According to Runciman, fraternal deprivation also affects voting behavior, especially when appealing to extreme right-wing political candidates or movements.
Another viewpoint on relative deprivation was developed by American author and professor of political science Ted Robert Gurr. In his 1970 book Why Men Rebel, Gurr explains the link between relative deprivation and political violence. Gurr examines the probability that the frustration-aggression mechanism, triggered by feelings of relative deprivation, is the primary source of the human capacity for violence. While such frustration does not always result in violence, Gurr contends that the longer individuals or groups are subjected to relative deprivation the more likely it is that their frustration will lead to anger and ultimately violence.
https://www.thoughtco.com/relative-deprivation-theory-4177591
The psychology of social class: How socioeconomic status impacts thought, feelings, and behaviour https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5901394/
