Consistency in Choice of Social Referent

Abstract

Similarity has been an important but ill-defined concept in social comparison theory. For social comparisons of competence, similarity should be defined within the same evaluative social context, for example, the same school for students or the same workplace for workers. 104 postsecondary school students, 96 full-time university students, and 81 part-time mature university students were recruited to participate in this study. They filled out a questionnaire to indicate whether they compared themselves with each of 11 categories of social referent in each of 10 domains of competence. Comparers preferred to choose those in the same evaluative social context as referents for social comparisons in domains of competence, and their comparisons with dissimilar others were rare. This preference was consistent across the three different samples.