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Prepare to Compare: Effects of an Intervention Involving Upward and Downward Social Comparisons on Goal Pursuit in Daily Life

Research output: Journal contributions › Journal articles › Research › peer-review

Authors

  • Kathi Diel
  • Wilhelm Hofmann
  • Sonja Grelle
  • Lea Boecker
  • Malte Friese

In a preregistered ecological momentary intervention study, we alternately instructed participants to adopt an upward and downward comparison focus. In all, 349 participants reported 8,137 social comparison situations across 6 days and three comparison conditions (baseline, upward, downward). For each comparison, participants reported social comparison direction, motivation, effort intentions, and emotions in five daily reports and one daily end-of-day summary. As predicted, an upward comparison focus resulted in more self-improvement motivation (pushing) and more negative emotions, whereas days with a downward comparison focus resulted in decreased motivation (coasting) but more positive emotions (vs. baseline). However, at the end of the day, people experienced lower goal approach on upward but higher goal approach on downward comparison days. Hence, engaging in strategic upward comparison was motivating in the short term but resulted in surprisingly opposite effects at the end of the day. We offer possible explanations from cognitive and motivational perspectives.

Original languageEnglish
JournalPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin
Number of pages15
ISSN0146-1672
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 30.01.2024

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

    Research areas

  • emotions, goals, intervention, motivation, social comparison
  • Psychology

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DOI