Pushing, Coasting, Disengaging: How Social Comparison Impacts Self-Regulation

人们常常努力在重要的挑战性目标上有所改进，比如希望过上更健康的生活方式，存更多的钱，或在职业阶梯上攀登。然而，这些自我完善的斗争并不是在社会真空中发生的。相反，人们经常求助于他们的社会环境来评估他们目前的地位。根据这种社会比较的结果，人们可能会得到激励，在他们的项目上投入额外的努力(“推动”)，放慢脚步，自我感觉良好(“滑行”)，甚至完全脱离(“放弃”)。然而，尽管对社会比较过程进行了数十年的研究，但社会比较和动机之间的根本联系仍然不清楚。这在一定程度上是因为先前的社会比较研究主要集中在判断上，也因为它倾向于将动机过程仅仅视为自我三个相互竞争的背景动机的表现：自我评估、自我完善和自我提升。本提案试图更好地将这三个动机与目标追求的功能视角相结合。工作包1以自我调节理论(Carver&Scheier，1990)为基础，注重良好的校准和高精确度，旨在识别显著的社会比较标准与人们自己的能力评估相互作用的过程，以触发推动、滑行或脱离等动机状态，以及它们在许多与健康和成就相关的环境中的相应情绪和行为后果。在工作包2中，我们还将研究反向因果方向，调查动机状态如何反过来影响对社会比较标准生态的感知，例如在给定社会环境中的平均感知能力水平和对某些社会比较标准的偏好。最后，由于社会比较研究很少涉足日常生活环境，我们在工作包3中使用了更多外部有效的实地方法来补充我们的实验方法，例如关于社会比较的前因和结果的大规模经验抽样研究，这也将包括与研究单位其他项目相关的变量。通过这项综合建议，我们希望对社会环境和自我监管过程之间的相互作用得出更先进和生态上有效的图景。我们的框架和方法不仅可能提高对社会比较的动机含义的理论理解；它还可能有助于在那些自我提高动机或缺乏动机分别具有切实好处和代价的领域设计更好的活动和干预措施，包括健康科学、工作心理学和教育。

People often strive to improve on important challenging goals, such as the wish to lead a healthier lifestyle, to save more money, or to climb up the career ladder. However, these struggles for self-improvement do not occur in a social vacuum. Rather, people often turn to their social environment to assess their current standing. Depending on the outcome of such social comparisons, people may receive a motivational boost and invest additional effort into their projects (“pushing”), slow down and feel good about themselves (“coasting”), or even disengage entirely (“giving up”). However, despite decades of research into social comparison processes, the fundamental connection between social comparison and motivation remains ill-understood. This is, in part, because prior social comparison research has been dominated by an informational focus on judgment, and because it has tended to view motivational processes as mere manifestations of three competing “background” motives of the self: self-assessment, self-improvement, and self-enhancement.The present proposal seeks to better align these three motives with a functional perspective on goal pursuit. Building on self-regulation theory (Carver & Scheier, 1990), and placing a premium on good calibration and high precision, Work Package 1 seeks to identify the processes by which salient social comparison standards interact with people’s own ability assessment to trigger motivational states of pushing, coasting, or disengagement, as well as their corresponding emotional and behavioral consequences across a number of health- and achievement-related settings. In Work Package 2, we will also study the reverse causal direction by investigating how motivational states may, in turn, influence the perception of the social comparison standard ecology such as the average perceived level of ability in a given social environment and the preference for certain social comparison standards. Finally, because social comparison research has only rarely ventured into everyday-life settings, we complement our experimental approach in Work Package 3 with more externally valid field methods such as a large-scale experience-sampling study on antecedents and consequences of social comparison which will also include variables relevant for other projects of the research unit. With this integrative proposal, we hope to arrive at a more advanced and ecologically valid picture of the interplay between the social environment and self-regulatory processes. Our framework and approach may not only improve the theoretical understanding of the motivational implications of social comparison; It may also help to design better campaigns and interventions in those fields in which self-improvement motivation or lack thereof has tangible benefits and costs, respectively, including health science, work psychology, and education.