ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018
The culture of social comparison.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 31 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
31 citing papers in PubMed, 142 citations in OpenAlex.
- Social comparison threat and coping: affective, cognitive and behavioral outcomes in response to false performance-related feedback.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- Parental Social Comparisons and Parent-Child Closeness in Families with Preschool Children: The Roles of Mindful Parenting and Parents' Education Anxiety.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- A Cross-Cultural Examination of Intrasexual Competition: The Links Between Mating Competition, Aggression, Appearance Enhancement, and Sexuality.Archives of sexual behavior · 2026Article
- The relationship between personal growth initiative and college students' social anxiety: the mediating role of core self-evaluation and social comparison orientation.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- Developing Dietary Self-Management Personas for mHealth Tools Among Patients with Kidney Failure Undergoing Hemodialysis: A Multi-Method Study.Patient preference and adherence · 2026Article
- Are People More Averse of Their Peers Living in Hardship or Driving Luxury Cars? Individuals' Willingness to Accept Their Peers' Relative Circumstances.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Cybervictimization and eating disorders in university sample in Singapore: a moderated mediation model of deviant peer association and self-esteem.BMC public health · 2025Article
- Peer pressure, anxiety, and smartphone addiction among Chinese college students: a mediation analysis.BMC psychology · 2025Article
- Being the Best, or With the Best: A Developmental Examination of Children's Choices in a Social Comparison Dilemma.Developmental science · 2025Article
- The Loneliness of the Odd One Out: How Deviations From Social Norms Can Help Explain Loneliness Across Cultures.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2025Article
- The Relationship Between Social Anxiety and Depression Among Rural High School Adolescents: The Mediating Role of Social Comparison and Social Support.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Metacognitive strategies improve self-regulation skills in expert sports coaches.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The persuasive role of generic-you in online interactions.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Daily social comparisons among women in midlife with elevated risk for cardiovascular disease: A within-person test of the identification/contrast model.Applied psychology. Health and well-being · 2024Article
- Economic segregation is associated with reduced concerns about economic inequality.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Comparison Is the Thief of Joy? Introducing the Attitudes Towards Social Comparison Inventory.Assessment · 2024Article
- Shyness and self-consistency and congruence among Chinese adolescents: mediating role of social comparison orientation and moderating role of self-focused attention.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Chronic social comparison elicits depression- and anxiety-like behaviors and alterations in brain-derived neurotrophic factor expression in male rats.Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Are you better than me? Social comparisons in carrion crows (Corvus corone).Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Retirement Planning and Financial Anxiety among Nigerian Civil Servants: Insights from Social Comparison Theory.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Social comparison is one of the most ubiquitous features of human social life. This fundamental human tendency to look to others for information about how to think, feel, and behave has provided us with the ability to thrive in a highly complex and interconnected modern social world. Despite its prominent role, however, a detailed understanding of the cultural foundations of social comparison is lacking. The current research aims to fill this gap by showing that two prominent cultural dimensions, tightness-looseness and individualism-collectivism, uniquely explain variation in social-comparison proclivity across individuals, situations, and cultures. We first demonstrate the yet-undocumented link between cultural tightness and comparison proclivity across individuals, and further show that perceptions of ambient tightness and interdependence are uniquely associated with stronger social-comparison tendencies. Next, we show that these associations arise across social settings and can be attributed to properties of the settings themselves, not solely to individual differences. Finally, we show that both tight and collectivistic US states show a propensity to engage in Google searches related to specific social-comparison emotions, but that the tightness-comparison link arises from a unique psychological mechanism. Altogether, these findings show that social comparison-a fundamental aspect of human cognition-is linked to cultural practices based both in prevalence and strength of social norms as well as the tendency to construe the self in relation to others.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.