People have many ways of protecting themselves against unfavorable social comparisons. Sometimes, however, the unfavorableness of a comparison is too unambiguous to deny. In such circumstances, people may indirectly protect their self-images by exaggerating the ability of those who outperform them. Aggrandizing the outperformer is conceived to be a construal mechanism that permits inferior performers to deflect the self-esteem threat of being outperformed while maintaining believability. The tendency to exaggerate an outperformer's ability was demonstrated in a context in which subjects learned they had been outperformed by a confederate on a perceptual intelligence test. Subjects' and observers' ratings of the confederate's intelligence showed that subjects consistently rated the confederate more favorably than did observers. Using a similar methodology in which subjects outperformed confederates, another study showed that subjects exaggerated the ability of the people they outperformed. The conditions in which these effects are most likely to be obtained are discussed. 9arison From the time Festinger (1954) had the foresight to note what in hindsight appears obvious-that people define their social characteristics by comparing themselves with others-research in this area has emphasized the antecedents of social comparisons. The primary question has been whether people compare themselves with superior or inferior others. The most common methodology in this research has been to provide participants with absolute performance feedback and ask them to rank their preferences for viewing the scores of superior or inferior performers (Latane, 1966; Wheeler et al., 1969; Wills, 1981). This rank-order paradigm allows participants to select comparisons they feel will be most illuminating or self-enhancing. However, people are not always afforded the luxury of orchestrating their comparisons. Instead, comparisons are frequently foisted on people, such as when siblings are compared by their parents, students by their teachers, and employees by their employers (Wheeler & Miyake, 1992; Wood, 1989). Thus, the antecedent side of the social comparison process-the selection of a comparison target-is often preempted by sources outside the comparer's control. When comparisons are predetermined, the focus of social comparison research shifts from the antecedents to the consequences of comparison process.

The authors conducted this study among U.S. students to determine whether expectations of job success are related to the degree of match between the masculinity or femininity of men's or women's names and the stereotypic masculinity or femininity of planned occupations. Results confirmed the predictions: The greater the match among (a) the gender of names, (b) the participants' ratings of the masculinity or femininity of those names, and (c) the masculinity or femininity of planned occupations, the greater the expected likelihood of job success.

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