The big two in social comparison : compensation between competence and warmth in interpersonal comparisons involving the self
(2020)
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- Authors
- Supervisors
- Yzerbyt, Vincent
- Abstract
- The way people compare to others has been the focal point of an incredibly large amount of research over the past decades. Yet, scholars primarily focused on situations that considered only one of the fundamental dimensions of social perception in which both the dimension of comparison and the outcome dimension were one and the same. However, a long tradition of social perception research established that not one but two dimensions together shape the social world, i.e., competence and warmth, and that both dimensions are intertwined such that judgements on one dimension may affect the other one as well. In fact, research on the “compensation effect” suggests that competence and warmth are related negatively when it comes to comparisons between groups. Nevertheless, this field never explored if these dynamics applied to more interpersonal forms of social comparison. To examine the relations between competence and warmth in such situations, we conducted series of experiments in which participants compared to more competent others and then evaluated themselves and their counterpart on both dimensions of judgements. Our results provide preliminary evidence of the role of compensation in interpersonal settings of comparison, and call attention to the complexity of studying the self in such situations. As a whole, the present research underline the importance of implementing a resolute social perception framework to the study of social comparison.
- Affiliations
UCLouvain SSH/IPSY - Psychological Sciences Research Institute
Citations
Terache, J. (2020). The big two in social comparison : compensation between competence and warmth in interpersonal comparisons involving the self. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/115945