摘要：The social comparison process is pervasive: parents monitor their children's progress by scrutinising developmental norms; students check the average class mark for an assignment to see how they compare to their peers; sports participants examine their own performance statistics alongside those of their teammates and rivals. Such comparisons can be made with objective measures such as goals scored or income but may also involve more intuitive observations about emotional stability, intelligence, competence and popularity.
The mechanisms underlying such comparisons have been of interest in social psychological theory for many years. Tajfel (1982) suggested that a fundamental feature of social identity is the categorisation of oneself as a member of an ingroup, while non-members are distinguished as outgroup members. People are motivated to hold more favourable perceptions of members of their own group than of outgroup members, even for minimal groups based on trivial characteristics such as ostensible preference for an artist (Tajfel, Billig, Bundy and Flament, 1971), where perceived affiliation with the group results in the belief that non-members are inferior. This effect is particularly strong for people whose self-esteem is threatened; a study by Fein and Spencer (1997) found that people who received negative feedback on their performance felt better about themselves if they were given an opportunity to denigrate an outgroup member.
