Social Cognition Center Cologne, University of Cologne, 50931 Cologne, Germany;
Organizational Behavior Faculty, London Business School, London NW1 4SA, United Kingdom.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2018 Sep 25;115(39):E9067-E9074. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1721555115. Epub 2018 Sep 10.
Social comparison is one of the most ubiquitous features of human social life. This fundamental human tendency to look to others for information about how to think, feel, and behave has provided us with the ability to thrive in a highly complex and interconnected modern social world. Despite its prominent role, however, a detailed understanding of the cultural foundations of social comparison is lacking. The current research aims to fill this gap by showing that two prominent cultural dimensions, tightness-looseness and individualism-collectivism, uniquely explain variation in social-comparison proclivity across individuals, situations, and cultures. We first demonstrate the yet-undocumented link between cultural tightness and comparison proclivity across individuals, and further show that perceptions of ambient tightness and interdependence are uniquely associated with stronger social-comparison tendencies. Next, we show that these associations arise across social settings and can be attributed to properties of the settings themselves, not solely to individual differences. Finally, we show that both tight and collectivistic US states show a propensity to engage in Google searches related to specific social-comparison emotions, but that the tightness-comparison link arises from a unique psychological mechanism. Altogether, these findings show that social comparison-a fundamental aspect of human cognition-is linked to cultural practices based both in prevalence and strength of social norms as well as the tendency to construe the self in relation to others.
社会比较是人类社会生活中最普遍的特征之一。这种人类倾向于从他人那里获取有关如何思考、感受和行为的信息的基本趋势，使我们能够在高度复杂和相互关联的现代社会世界中茁壮成长。然而，尽管它的作用很突出，但对社会比较的文化基础的详细了解却很缺乏。目前的研究旨在通过展示两个突出的文化维度——紧密性-松散性和个体主义-集体主义，来填补这一空白，这些维度独特地解释了个体、情境和文化中社会比较倾向的变化。我们首先证明了文化紧密性与个体之间的比较倾向之间的联系，进一步表明，对环境紧密性和相互依存性的感知与更强的社会比较倾向有着独特的联系。接下来，我们表明这些关联存在于各种社会环境中，可以归因于环境本身的特性，而不仅仅是个体差异。最后，我们表明，紧密和集体主义的美国各州都表现出一种倾向，即参与与特定社会比较情绪相关的谷歌搜索，但紧密性与比较的联系源于一种独特的心理机制。总的来说，这些发现表明，社会比较——人类认知的一个基本方面——与基于社会规范的普遍性和强度以及将自我与他人联系起来的倾向的文化实践有关。
