PSYC 3350 Lecture Notes - Social Comparison Theory
5 Apr 2013
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Document Summary
Motivations for self enhancement and self esteem there are cultural differences in motivation. Self enhancement: motivation to view oneself positively research reveals(conducted on americans) that people have a strong need to view themselves positively. Also evidence for self enhancement motivations in measures of self serving biases (tendencies for people to exaggerate how good they think they are) Downward social comparison: comparing your performance with the performance of someone who is doing even worse than you (we do this to make ourselves feel good again) Upward social comparison: comparing our performance with someone who is doing better than we are. Compensatory self enhancement: exaggerate how good you are at something unrelated to your setback so that you can compensate for the pain of your failure (ex. Acknowledge the poor grade in math, but you instead start to think about your excellent guitar skills) Discounting: reducing the perceived importance of the domain in which you performed poorly (ex.
