Keeping Up with the Neighbors: How Social Comparison Shapes Behavior
Introduction
Why do we care how we measure up to others? Whether it’s how many steps we’ve walked, how much energy we’ve used, or how often we recycle, knowing what others do can push us to do better—or worse.
This instinct to compare ourselves isn’t new. Psychologists call it social comparison: the drive to evaluate our abilities or behavior by contrasting them with those of others. Nudges, a subtle behaviour change intervention, commonly leverage the power of social comparison to influence choice architecture. From friendly Fitbit competitions to hotel signs pointing out that most guests reuse their towels, we often calibrate our behavior by comparing what everyone else is doing. Many randomized control trials across domains have been conducted since the late 2000s to evaluate the effectiveness of social comparison as a nudging tool.
A new meta-analysis, conducted by Thole H. Hoppen and colleagues from the University of Münster, comprehensively bridges decades of research to ask a simple but powerful question: how well does social comparison actually work as a tool for changing behavior?
The results highlight social comparison as an effective nudging tool but also reveal how delicate, and design-dependent, our competitive instincts really are.
About the Author
Samantha Lau
Samantha graduated from the University of Toronto, majoring in psychology and criminology. During her undergraduate degree, she studied how mindfulness meditation impacted human memory which sparked her interest in cognition. Samantha is curious about the way behavioural science impacts design, particularly in the UX field. As she works to make behavioural science more accessible with The Decision Lab, she is preparing to start her Master of Behavioural and Decision Sciences degree at the University of Pennsylvania. In her free time, you can catch her at a concert or in a dance studio.
