Is Everybody Above Average?

Is everybody above average? Doesn't seem possible, but when people were asked to judge themselves in comparison to similar people, almost everyone seemed to think they were far superior to their peers. This is what is known as "Social Comparison Theory" (Festinger, L., 1954), which states that people tend to compare themselves to their peers, when there is no real information to resort to. People particularly seem to make themselves seem much better when they are asked to judge certain immeasurable personality traits, such as tolerance, sincerity and so forth. However, more obvious measurable traits, such as athleticism and organization skills were ranked a lot more fairly. This goes to show that when people are not sure how to rank themselves on a scale in comparison to others, they make themselves look much better than they actually do.

One of my more recent uses of social comparison theory has to do with a class that I took last semester, with the famous Dr. Purdy, and even more famous, his suicide inducing exams. For those of you who don't know, you can study for weeks for one of Dr. Purdy's exams, and then when he hands them out to you, he'll make you feel that you belong in Kindergarten. If I had gotten those test scores in any other class I would have felt pretty terrible, but I pretty quickly realized that almost everyone in the class had similar scores and reactions. This knowledge made me feel much better about the scores that I had gotten, which ties into a more modern view of social comparison theory, which states that we compare ourselves to people around us that are relevant to what we are trying to compare (Goethals & Darley, 1977; Wheeler et al., 1982).

Here's a video that shows us examples of the social comparison theory in effect. It is pretty crazy how many people rank themselves on a 10 out of 10 scale on so many of these traits (especially sincerity...). Completely opposite to what I would have predicted, even in group settings people weren't afraid to rank themselves at a much higher level than most other people. So it turns out that we try to make ourselves seem way above average, when in fact some of us have to be just average.

References

Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7(2) 117-140

Goethals, G.R., & Darley, J. (1977). Social comparison theory: An attributional approach. In J.M Suls & R.L. Miller (Eds), Social comparison processes: Theoretical and empirical perspectives (pp. 259-278). 

Wheeler, L., Koesnter, R., & Driver, R.E. (1982). Related attributes in the choice of comparison others. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 18, 489-500.