Self-perception and behavior do not occur in a social vacuum: who we are, and what we do, is often a function of what other people are and do. Others can inform us of who we are ("I am the only sane person here"), or where we stand ("I am quite intelligent compared to him"); others can inspire us ("I want to be like her"), or discourage us ("I can never be like her"). In effect, social comparison is a fundamental process of self-conception through the perception of others-self, as it is identified with others.
Social Comparison Theories: Key Readings offers a core and comprehensive collection of readings that focus on the motivations and mechanisms underlying social comparison effects, the role of social comparison processes in everyday life, the similarities and differences between interpersonal and inter-group social comparisons, and the strategies people employ to disregard detrimental social comparison outcomes. This volume of works shows the wide range of topics that concern social comparisons researchers and also the shared beliefs that bind them together.
Biography
Diederik A. Stapel is Professor of Consumer Science and Director of the Tilburg Institute for Behavioral Economics Research (TIBER) at Tilburg University, in the Netherlands. He is associate editor of Psychological Science, the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, a former associate editor of the British Journal of Social Psychology, and has served on the editorial boards of Self and Identity, the European Journal of Social Psychology, and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. For his research on knowledge accessibility effects, he earned the Jos Jaspars Award of the European Association of Experimental Social Psychology. Stapel’s publications concern judgment and decision making and unconscious affective and evaluative processes.
Hart Blanton is Associate Professor of Psychology at Texas A&M University. He is associate editor of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology; on the editorial boards for Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin and Self and Identity; and has served on the editorial board of Psychology and Health. For his work on Deviance
Regulation Theory, a comparison-based theory of behavioral self-regulation, he received the 2002 Theoretical Innovation Award from the Society of Personality and Social Psychology. Blanton’s publications concern individual and group comparison processes, behavioral self-regulation, normative social influence, research methods, and the measurement of implicit attitudes.