Social Comparion for Self-Evaluation

Article Summary 

This article offers a summary of the research on the subject of social comparison, the act of comparing one's self to others for the purposes of self-evaluation. In this way, we use others similar to ourselves as proxies, and their past and current opinions and behavior to interpret and predict our own inclinations and abilities.

Research has shown that in comparing our abilities with others, both the effort and attributes of our social proxies are important considerations, and in the absense of our knowledge of one, we tend to base our comparisons solely on the other. For instance, if one MSI student was hired for a desirable position, but it is not known how hard that student had to work to get it, that studen'ts peers might conclude that they would be equally likely to secure similar positions if they share the same general attributes of the student.

The authors suggest that there are three basic types of opinions for which we use social comparison to evaluation:

• Current preferences
• Future preferences
• Beliefs

With beliefs, we tend to choose proxies who are share similar attributes to ourselves, such as background, religion, politics or general world views. In fact, although we often base our beliefs on those of experts, our trust in expert opinion can be overriden when an expert does not have these attributes in common. For this reason, researchers have identified the role of similar expert as a highly important one in trend-setting and opinion leadership.

With  preferences, it  seems that similar past behavior is more important than attributes in proxy selection. This is the case with the collaborative filtering mechanism on Amazon.com: users are given recommendations based the buying patterns of users with similar behavior patterns.

(I could go on, but I'm hoping someone will take up the torch of summarizing the second half of the article...)

Social Comparison in the BaWer Community

I see many of the concepts introduced in this article at work in the Becoming a Webhead community, both in ability- and opinion-based social comparions. I imagine that BaWers self-evaluate through social comparison privately as well, but the type I've been able to observe is of a more overt, deliberate nature. The directors and moderators (i.e., the community leaders) position themselves as proxies for the rest of the community (particularly the newcomers), in a way of conveying a kind of "if I can do it, you can do it" attitude towards learning and adopting new technology for teaching. This seems to allay community member's fears about feeing ignorant or unskilled in technical matters, and create an open and supportive atmosphere for learning and informal mentoring.