Downward comparison principles in social psychology.

1981/09/01 by Thomas A. Wills · 19 citations
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology #Affect (linguistics) #Cognitive psychology #Communication #Face (sociological concept) #Process (computing) #Psychology #Psychology of Social Influence #Social and Intergroup Psychology #Social psychology #Social science #Sociology

paper · doi:10.1037/0033-2909.90.2.245

openalex publication_date 1981/09/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/08

Abstract

The literature of social psychology contains a number of phenomena that appear to be paradoxical. For example, persons who face a threatening experience prefer to affiliate with threatened others rather than with nonthreatened others (Schachter, 1959), and persons in groups in which reward is equally distributed are less satisfied compared with persons in groups that include one particularly unfortunate member (Brickman, 1975). The purpose of this article is to show that these phenomena are best construed as social comparison processes and that various phenomena derive from one basic process termed downward comparison; the essence of this process is that persons can enhance their own subjective well-being by comparing themselves with a less fortunate other. In this article I show that downward comparison is a process evoked by negative affect, that there is considerable evidence for self-enhancing comparison processes, and that downward comparison effects are involved in several areas of social-psycho logical research.

Citations

• The halo effect: Evidence for unconscious alteration of judgments.
• The “false consensus effect”: An egocentric bias in social perception and attribution processes
• A Theory of Social Comparison Processes
• Experiments in Intergroup Discrimination

Cited by

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• The affective consequences of social comparison: Either direction has its ups and downs.
• Motivated sensitivity to preference-inconsistent information.
• Particularistic and universalistic evaluation in the social comparison process.
• Social stigma and self-esteem: The self-protective properties of stigma.
• Contingencies of self-worth.
• Self-Threat Magnifies the Self-Serving Bias: A Meta-Analytic Integration
• Enhancement Bias in Descriptions of Self and Others
• Seff-Handicapping and Interpersonal Trade-Offs: The Effects of Claimed Self-Handicaps on Observers' Performance Evaluations and Feedback
• Is there a universal need for positive self-regard?
• Ambiguity and self-evaluation: The role of idiosyncratic trait definitions in self-serving assessments of ability.
• Assessment, enhancement, and verification determinants of the self-evaluation process.
• Accountability as a deterrent to self-enhancement: The search for mechanisms.
• The Self in Relationships: Whether, How, and When Close Others Put the Self “in Its Place”
• Better, Stronger, Faster: Self-Serving Judgment, Affect Regulation, and the Optimal Vigilance Hypothesis
• Self-Enhancement: Is it Restricted to Individualistic Cultures?
• The Intrinsic Self and Defensiveness: Evidence that Activating the Intrinsic Self Reduces Self-Handicapping and Conformity
• On Pancultural Self-Enhancement
• Self-enhancement [wikipedia]