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

人们经常努力实现具有挑战性的重要目标，比如希望过一种更健康的生活方式，存更多的钱，或者在职业阶梯上爬得更高。然而，这些自我提升的斗争不会发生在社会真空中。相反，人们往往转向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，人们可能会受到激励并为他们的项目投入额外的努力（“推动”），放慢速度并自我感觉良好（“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，但社会比较与动机之间的基本联系仍不清楚。在某种程度上，这是因为先前的社会比较研究一直被对判断的信息关注所主导，而且因为它倾向于将动机过程仅仅视为自我的三种相互竞争的“背景”动机的表现：自我评估、自我完善和自我提升。本建议力求将这三种动机与追求目标的职能观点更好地结合起来。在自我调节理论（Carver & Scheier, 1990）的基础上，并重视良好的校准和高精度，工作包1试图确定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，从而触发推动、滑行或脱离的动机状态，以及它们在许多与健康和成就相关的环境中相应的情绪和行为后果。在工作包2中，我们还将通过调查动机状态如何反过来影响社会比较标准生态的感知来研究反向因果方向，例如特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冒险进入日常生活环境，我们在工作包3中补充了更多外部有效的现场方法，例如对社会比较的前因和后果的大规模经验抽样研究，其中还包括与研究单位其他项目相关的变量。通过这一综合建议，我们希望对社会环境和自我调节过程之间的相互作用得出一个更先进、更有效的生态图景。我们的框架和方法不仅可以提高对社会比较动机含义的理论理解；它还可能有助于在那些自我完善动机或缺乏自我完善动机分别具有实际利益和成本的领域，包括卫生科学、工作心理学和教育，设计更好的运动和干预措施。

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.