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Comparison

Psychologists and others have studied ways in which we compare ourselves to each other. One man named Leon Festinger argued that we tend to compare ourselves to other people when we don’t know how good or bad we are at something (like football or playing the guitar).

One way we do this is when we compare ourselves to those who are not as good as we are, to protect our self-esteem (called “downward social comparison;” example: we’re playing basketball and miss most of our shots, but we feel okay because a teammate wasn’t even given the ball).
Another comparison we make is when we compare ourselves to others who are doing much better than we are (called “upward social comparison”). When we see others who appear to be doing better than we are, we can respond by trying to improve ourselves, or by trying to protect ourselves by telling ourselves it’s not that important.

There was a study published in 1953 by Solomon Asch, who asked students to take part in a “vision test.” The participants were seated in a classroom and asked to tell the experimenter to look at different lines on a card and tell him which line was longest, which were the same length, etc. What one of the students didn’t know was that the others in the room were part of the experiment and purposely gave the wrong answer, to see if the last person would also give the wrong answer. Asch found that a full 32% followed the others and gave an incorrect answer, even though it was obvious that this was the wrong answer (they said two lines were the same length, even though they differed in length by several inches). Even those who gave the correct answer appeared highly uncomfortable, because they were responding differently than the others.
(http://college.hmco.com/psychology/bernstein/psychology/6e/students/chapter_outlines/ch17.html)

It may be a good idea to compare yourselves to others to see if you need to improve at what you’re doing (like guitar). When it comes to your self-worth, however, it’s never a good thing to compare yourselves to others. Even when you feel good about yourself because you find you’re doing better than the other person, it can sometimes lead to pride.

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