The frequency of temporal-self and social comparisons in people's personal appraisals.

Abstract

Although past literature emphasizes the importance of social comparisons, in this study it was predicted that participants would often mention temporal comparisons in their self-descriptions. The first 3 studies revealed that participants report as many or more temporal-past comparisons than social comparisons. It was predicted that people would particularly favor temporal-past comparisons when they are interested in enhancing themselves. Temporal-past comparisons are gratifying, because they tend to indicate improvement over time. Social comparisons may be preferred when people are motivated to evaluate themselves accurately. These predictions were supported when self-evaluation and self-enhancement goals were explicitly manipulated (Study 4) or primed (Study 5).

“Still the same and better off than others?”: social and temporal comparisons in old age

“…Temporal comparisons seem to have received less attention in research although their importance for subjective well-being in old age lies at hand (see Staudinger 2001;Wilson and Ross 2000). The comparison with a past self may yield a high probability of resulting in an unfavourable judgement indicating the decrease or loss of the dimension under consideration.…”

Looking back and looking ahead: Adult age differences in consistency of diachronous ratings of subjective well-being.

“…This notion of psychological time has been studied also by social psychologists in investigations concerning, for instance, self-evaluative (e.g., Schwarz & Strack, 1999;Taylor, Neter, & Wayment, 1995) and comparison processes (e.g., Albert, 1977;Suls & Mullen, 1982;Wilson & Ross, 2001), or possible selves (e.g., Markus & Nurius, 1986). This research suggests that we construct our selves with regard to the past, and the present, as well as the future (e.g., Hooker, 1992), and that we use diachronous referents as often as social referents in our comparison processes (e.g., Wilson & Ross, 2000).…”

The Achievement Pride Scales (APS)

“…Achievement goal theorists define goals as "cognitive representations of a future object that the organism is committed to approach or avoid" (Elliot & Fryer, 2008, p. 244) and as the reason for a competence-relevant activity (Maehr, 1989;Nicholls, 1984). According to Schöne and colleagues (2004), along with Wilson and Ross (2000), individuals pursuing mastery-approach goals (i.e., goals to develop competence and master tasks) prefer using individual-temporal frames of reference to evaluate their performance, whereas individuals pursuing performance-approach goals (i.e., goals to demonstrate ability and outperform others) evaluate their performance with respect to social frames of reference 1 .…”