Chapter Two from

3                                                                                                                         Festinger (1954) A Theory of Social Comparison Processes                     

 

Hochbaum (18) reports an experiment concerning the effect of knowledge of others’ opinions on 

one’s own opinion which corroborates Corollary II B. Half of the subjects in this experiment were 

persuaded by the experimenter that they were extremely good at being able to make correct judgments 

concerning things like the issue they were to discuss. The other half of the subjects were made to feel 

that they were extremely poor in making such judgments. They were then asked to write their opinions 

down and were handed back a slip of paper presumably reporting to them the opinions of each other 

person in the group. In this way the subjects were made to feel that most of the others in the group 

disagreed with them. Those subjects who were given an objective basis for feeling that their opinion was 

likely to be correct did not change their opinions very often in spite of the disagreement with others in 

the group. Those who had an objective basis for feeling their judgments were likely to be poor changed 

their opinion very frequently upon discovering that others disagreed with them. 

Hypothesis III: The tendency to compare oneself with some other specific person decreases as the difference between 

his opinion or ability and one s own increases. 

 

A person does not tend to evaluate his opinions or his abilities by comparison with, others who 

are too divergent from himself. If some other person’s ability is too far from his own, either above or 

below, it is not possible to evaluate his own ability accurately by comparison with this other person. 

There is then a tendency not to make the comparison. Thus, a college student, for example, does not 

compare himself to inmates of an institution for the feeble minded to evaluate his own intelligence. Nor 

does a person who is just beginning to learn the game of chess compare himself to the recognized 

masters of the game. 

 

The situation is identical with respect to the evaluation of opinions. One does not evaluate the 

correctness or incorrectness of an opinion by comparison with others whose opinions are extremely 

divergent from one’s own. Thus, a person who believes that Negroes are the intellectual equals of whites 

does not evaluate his opinion by comparison with the opinion of a person who belongs to some very 

anti-Negro group. In other words, there is a self-imposed restriction in the range of opinion or ability 

with which a person compares himself: 

Corollary III A: Given a range of possible persons for comparison, someone close to one’s own ability or opinion will 

be chosen for comparison. 

 

There is some evidence relevant to this corollary from an experiment by Whittemore (24). The 

purpose of the study was to examine the relation between performance and competition. Subjects were 

seated around a table and given tasks to work on. There was ample opportunity to observe how the 

others were progressing. After the experimental session, in introspective reports, the subjects stated that 

they had almost always spontaneously selected someone whose performance was close to their own to 

compete against. 

Corollary III B: If the only comparison available is a very divergent one, the person will not be able to make a 

subjectively precise evaluation of his opinion or ability. 

 

There is evidence supporting this corollary with respect to abilities but no relevant evidence in 

connection with opinions has been found. 

 

Hoppe (20) in his experiment on level of aspiration reports that when subjects made a score very 

far above or very far below their level of aspiration they did not experience success or failure 

respectively. In other words, this extremely divergent score presented no grounds for self evaluation. 

Dreyer (5) performed an experiment in which high school children were made to score either: very far 

above the reported average for boys like themselves; at the reported average; or very far below the 

reported average. After a series of trials they were asked, “How well do you feel you did on the test?” 

There were five possible categories of response. The top two were good or very good; the bottom two 

were poor or very poor. In the middle was a noncommittal response of fair. Both those who scored very 

far below and those who scored very far above the reported group average gave the response “fair” 

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A Theory of Social Comparison Processes 

   

              4

 

significantly more often than did those who scored at the reported group average. Also, on the average, 

the persons who had scored at the reported average felt they had done better than did those scoring far 

above the group. Again the data support the hypothesis. 

 

We may then conclude that there is selectivity in comparison on abilities and opinions and that 

one major factor governing the selectivity is simply the discrepancy between the person’s own opinion 

or ability and that of another person. Phenomenologically, the appearance of this process is different for 

opinions and for abilities but conceptually it is exactly the same process. In dealing with opinions one 

feels that those with whom one does not compare oneself are different kinds of people or members of 

different groups or people with different backgrounds. Frequently this allegation of difference, to 

support the non-comparability, is made together with some derogation. In the case of abilities, the 

phenomenal process is that of designation of status inferior or superior to those persons who are 

noncomparable to oneself. We will elaborate on this later. 

Derivation A (from I, II, III): Subjective evaluations of opinions or of abilities are stable when comparison is available 

with others who are judged to be close to one’s opinions or abilities. 

Derivation B (from I, II, III): The availability of comparison with others whose opinions or abilities are somewhat 

different from one’s own will produce tendencies to change one’s evaluation of the opinion or ability in question. 

 

There are also data to show the effect which knowledge of group opinions or group abilities have 

on the person’s evaluations which were initially formed privately. If the evaluation of an opinion or an 

ability formed in the absence of the possibility of comparison with others is indeed unstable, as we have 

presumed, then we would expect that, given an opportunity to make a comparison with others, the 

opportunity would be taken and the comparison would have a considerable impact on the self 

evaluation. This is found to be true for both abilities and opinions. “Level of aspiration” experiments 

have been performed where, after a series of trials in which the person is unable to compare his 

performance with others, there occurs a series of trials in which the person has available to him the 

knowledge of how others like himself performed on each trial (1, 4, 6, 17). When the “others like 

himself” have scores different from his own, his stated “level of aspiration” (his statement of what he 

considers is good performance) almost always moves close to the level of the performance of others. It 

is also found that under these conditions the level of aspiration changes less with fluctuations in 

performance, in other words, is more stable. When the reported performance of others is about equal to 

his own score, the stability of his evaluation of his ability is increased and, thus, his level of aspiration 

shows very little variability. Dreyer, in an experiment specifically designed to test part of this theory (5). 

showed clearly that the variance of the level of aspiration was smaller when the subject scored close to 

the group than when he scored far above or far below them. In short, comparison with the performance 

of others specifies what his ability should be and gives stability to the evaluation. 

 Festinger, 

Gerard, et al. (10) find a similar situation with respect to opinions. When a person is 

asked to form an opinion privately and then has made available to him the consensus of opinion in the 

group of which he is a member, those who discover that most others in the group disagree with them 

become relatively less confident that their opinion is correct and a goodly proportion change their 

opinion. Those who discover that most others in the group agree with them become highly confident in 

their opinion and it is extremely rare to find one of them changing his opinion. Again, comparison with 

others has tended to define what is a correct opinion and has given stability to the evaluation. This result 

is also obtained by Hochbaum (18). 

 

We may then conclude that Derivations A and B tend to be supported by the available data. 

Derivation C (from I, III B): A person will be less attracted to situations where others are very divergent from him 

than to situations where others are close to him for both abilities and opinions. 

 

This follows from a consideration of Hypothesis I and Corollary III B. If there is a drive toward 

evaluation of abilities and opinions, and if this evaluation is possible only with others who are close 

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