Relativity in Social Cognition: Basic processes and novel applications of social comparisons. Christian Unkelbach et al. European Review of Social Psychology, Jan 10 2023. https://doi.org/10.1080/10463283.2022.2161043
Abstract: A key challenge for social psychology is to identify unifying principles that account for the complex dynamics of social behaviour. We propose psychological relativity and its core mechanism of comparison as one such unifying principle. To support our proposal, we review recent evidence investigating basic processes underlying and novel applications of social comparisons. Specifically, we clarify determinants of assimilation and contrast, evaluative consequences of comparing similarities vs. differences, attitudinal effects of spatial relativity, and how spatial arrangements determine perceived similarity, one of the antecedents of social comparisons. We then move to behavioural relativity effects on motivation and self-regulation, as well as imitation behaviour. Finally, we address relativity within the more applied areas of morality and political psychology. The reviewed research thereby illustrates how unifying principles of social cognition may be instrumental in answering old questions and discovering new phenomena and explanations.
General discussion
We proposed that social cognition is relative in nature. To substantiate this proposal, we illustrated the relativity’s importance and the importance of comparative thinking in eight sections (cf.
). The first four sections addressed basic processes influencing comparative thinking, while the latter four sections addressed influences of comparative thinking; on behaviours, both regulated and automatic, as well as the more applied aspects of moral and political psychology.
Our first section on the determinants of assimilation and contrast established a method and analysis that allows vigorous tests of comparison theories (Barker & Imhoff, 2021; Barker et al., 2020). The section also explains why Gerber et al. (2018)’s meta-analysis found little evidence for assimilation effects. For most people, Pope Francis is an extreme downward comparison standard on the athleticism dimension, while Serena Williams is an extreme upward standard, leading to contrast effects in judgements of athleticism. However, the “window of assimilation” (cf. Figure 1) might be much more difficult to hit and might vary from person to person. The first section thereby provides a strong methodological and theoretical advancement for research on classic social comparison phenomena.
The second section addressed a central assumption of the SAM (Mussweiler, 2003): People compare stimuli based on their similarities or differences. In combination with properties of the evaluative ecology (i.e., the frequency and diversity of positive and negative information; Unkelbach et al., 2019, 2020; cf. Figure 3), we predicted and found a novel effect, the “common good” phenomenon (Alves et al., 2017a). In a standard ecology, similarities are likely to be good, while differences are likely to be bad. This insight has important implications if one again realises the ubiquity of comparisons and how often people look for differences (see Alves et al., 2018, 2020). The second section thereby also illustrates how comparative thinking may contribute to processes of stereotyping and, ultimately, prejudice.
The third section addressed another evaluative consequence of relativity, building on the relative location of stimuli in space (Gerten & Topolinski, 2020). Relativity is not only ubiquitous in the social but also in the physical domain. The third section showed the evaluative consequences of such relative location due to processing facilitations. While this might appear rather abstract and the effect rather subtle, the implications for real-world applications are straightforward (e.g., how to arrange quantities in texts and pictures). Our third section thereby illustrates novel relativity effects that have been so far overlooked in the literature.
Our fourth section returned to the question of which stimuli are considered as comparison standards and addressed spatial distance as a moderator. The section illustrated this point with an increased probability of jointly categorising two stimuli (Schneider & Mattes, 2022; cf. Figure 8). Thus, because close stimuli appear more similar, they should be more likely to be selected as a comparison standard. We have to concede, though, that the respective experimental evidence is currently lacking. In addition, we did not yet investigate the joint implication of section four’s and section two, namely that close stimuli should also appear more positive compared to more distant stimuli (i.e., if they appear more similar, they should also appear more positive; Alves et al., 2017a).
Our fifth section then moved to a largely unexplored area of relativity and the corresponding comparative thinking, namely motivational effects (Diel and Grelle et al., 2021, Diel, Broeker, et al., 2021). The section shows how key motives postulated in social comparison research (i.e., self-evaluation, self-improvement, and self-enhancement) map onto comparison directions (i.e., lateral, upward, and downward), resulting in corresponding effects for goal pursuit from upward and downward comparisons (i.e., “pushing” or “disengagement” vs. “coasting”, respectively). The theoretical framework and the data provide a step from the cognitive judgement effects (e.g., self-esteem) to actual behavioural effects of relativity and social comparisons.
The sixth section continued the path towards behavioural effects of comparison. However, instead of motivated behaviour, the section addressed automatic imitation, which occurs between interaction partners (Genschow, Cracco, et al., 2021). The straightforward hypothesis, derived from the similarity function between a target and a standard, was that more similar targets should lead to stronger imitation behaviours. We could confirm this prediction initially (Genschow, Cracco, et al., 2021): If participants focus on similarities between themselves and the other person, they show more imitation behaviour. However, when we manipulated searching for similarities and differences not directly (as we did in the previous sections) but more indirectly via group membership (Genschow, Westfal, et al., 2021), the influence was no longer visible (cf. Figure 11). The similarity/difference perspective explains and unifies several documented moderators on imitation behaviour. However, the subtler effects of group membership failed to produce the predicted effects.
The seventh section advanced the relativity principle into the area of moral psychology. We found major differences between moral and social comparisons (cf.
; Fleischmann et al., 2021). Despite these differences, the section highlights the usefulness of an over-arching empirical framework. While theories of emotion and intuition strongly influence moral psychology, the section provides relevant insights from a social-cognitive comparison perspective.
Our last section applied the relativity principle to political psychology, showing that Republicans (in the US) accept pro-environmental messages more when the message is framed as a comparison to the past (“Restoring the planet”) rather than a comparison with a potential future (“Creating a new earth”; Baldwin & Lammers, 2016; Lammers & Baldwin, 2018).
Together, these eight sections lines show the usefulness of an overarching theoretical framework, here, what we termed the relativity principle, to generate new insights into novel areas (e.g., self-regulation, imitation, morality, and political psychology) and to understand existing (i.e., social comparison) phenomena better. Given both the breadth and depth of the reviewed results, we thus believe our review suggests that Festinger (1980, p. 246) was correct in his assumption that universal dynamics can be found in all of social psychology. At the very least, such universals provide a lens through which one can gain new perspectives on classic and contemporary research topics.
Limitations
Despite the overall success of applying the relativity principle and the processes of comparative thinking to different areas, we must concede that our approach is flawed. It amounts to what Karl Popper (1934) called a confirmatory research strategy: We postulated that swans are white and went on to search for white swans (i.e., confirmatory evidence). We agree that science advances best by searching for black swans, that is, by trying to falsify a hypothesis.
However, one may also construe our strategy more positively. First, to stay within the metaphor, we provided some conceptual and theoretical clarifications on how to test if a swan is white (e.g., when does assimilation and contrast occur), antecedents of why the swan is white (e.g., spatial distance), and consequences of the swan being white (e.g., similarities are typically positive). Second, we discovered some unknown swan species (e.g., motivational effects) even in areas where one might assume that there are no swans (i.e., see Section 7 on moral psychology).
Our reviewed data might nevertheless represent only a small percentage of a larger psychological universe where relativity and comparative thinking play no role at all. This problem is not specific to the presented research program. It applies to every empirical investigation that does not rely on a representative sample (Brunswik, 1955) and inductively makes bottom-up inferences from a sample to a population (Becker et al., 2021). In our case, the sample is not participants and a population of people but a sample of research areas. Thus, our review is suggestive but cannot provide conclusive evidence for our claim.
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