“Comparison is the thief of joy,” said former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. Spoken more than a century ago, Roosevelt’s words highlight a fundamental truth that is just as relevant today.
In the 1950s, the acclaimed social psychologist Leon Festinger devised the social comparison theory to help explain the psychological processes behind why we compare ourselves to others. Festinger proposed that individuals have an innate desire to see how they measure up with their peers on dimensions they deem personally important in order to evaluate how well they are doing.
This tendency hasn’t gone away, and in fact, through social media websites like Facebook we may be engaging in more social comparison than ever before. Such social comparisons can convey important information: are we measuring up in terms of our progress or achievements, or are we falling behind and need to put in the effort to catch up?
Of course, comparing ourselves too much to our peers can leave us feeling bad about ourselves. When looking at social media, we are often inundated with a constant stream of information and photos about family members, friends, and acquaintances. There may be times when this is too much, and we'd be better off not knowing the details that we learn, or imply, from these sites.
For example, a couple of years ago my little sister decided not to go to a big school dance because she didn’t have a date. She told me she was devastated about it. The next day, her friends’ pictures from the dance started to appear on her Facebook news feed. She said it made her feel even worse. Although I didn’t want to pry into why she felt this way, I began to think that this might be a common occurrence. Perhaps, all those smiling, happy photos of her girlfriends blissfully dancing the night away with their respective beaus made her feel that she was not attractive or popular enough to garner a date.
