What Do People Infer from Social Comparisons? Bridges between Social Comparison and Person Perception

Abstract

Human judgment is basically comparative, with self-judgments in particular being based on social comparison. Not surprisingly, much research has focused on how self-comparisons shape comparers’ self-views on the specific comparison dimension. We argue that both comparers and observers may, and do, draw various other inferences and that they do so from both self-comparisons and other-comparisons. In both cases they may draw inferences from (a) the fact that social comparison has taken place, (b) the allocation of the target and referent roles, and (c) the stated relationship between the target and the referent. In order to show how exploring these inferences may lead social comparison research into new and exciting directions, we point out some unanswered questions about them.