Social Comparison Orientation Associated with Psychological Well Being: The Mediated Role of Self-efficacy

Abstract

The paper focused on how social comparison orientation people apply influence their psychological well-being and how self-efficacy plays an important role in buffering some negative influence from upward social comparison compared with someone better in one domain. In Festingers social comparison theory, the social comparison orientation instructed how people process the information they compared for, and related emotion was induced differently. In this paper, 2000 college students in Boston were proposed to participate in two experiments that discuss how different social comparison orientations affect their perception of life satisfaction. For the hypothetical result, we proposed that a high level of engagement in social comparison and ability-based social comparison was associated with less life satisfaction than the participants who had a low level of social comparison and opinion-based social comparison. In terms of coping strategy, we assumed that a high level of self-efficacy, which is the belief in capability to achieve a certain goal, will buffer the negative impact from upward comparison and improve the life satisfaction of those participants who like to engage with social comparison and ability-based comparison orientation.