Social Comparison by Young Children.

Abstract

Social comparisons are important determinants of behavior in any culture, even cultures which are not so achievement-oriented as ours. Comparison with others is often the sole source of judgments about the adequacy or the acceptability of behavior. Frequently, standards by which to judge one's own behavior do not exist other than those provided by the actions of others. For the growing child, the problem of standardizing one's behavior is particularly difficult because standards of appropriateness change with age. At age three, the child may receive comfort and solace when he cries after arguing or fighting with a friend but, by age five, his parents may point to his older brother and exhort the child to be a little man like his brother and not cry over small disagreements; still later, the child may incur his parents' disapproval when he reports a fight with a peer and, at this point, his attention may be directed quite specifically to a brother, a sister or a peer whose social life is less besmirched by altercations. Psychologists and other students of behavior often invoke social comparison opportunities in research. For example, in studies of the effects of success and failure upon children's behavior (e.g., Mischel, Coates & Raskoff, 1968) , children's actual performance may be held constant and only the norms concerning the performance of others varied. The subjects may receive a preset series of scores but are told that good scores, scores received by most children of the subject's age, are either: a) much lower than (success) , or b) much higher than (failure) the scores the subjects actually receive. Such procedures are quite effective. The fact that success and failure are defined purely in terms of social comparison judgments, which the subjects presumably make, is seldom mentioned.

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