Social comparison theory is the idea that people judge themselves based on others for their own validity. The article “A Diary Study of Self-Compassion, Upward Social Comparisons, and Body Image-Related Outcomes”, the movie Mean Girls and my own personal experiences support the theory about how people compare themselves socially.
The article demonstrates that social comparison has happened between young Australian university women aged 18-30 years. The experiment had the women do online surveys three times a day at 11am, 3pm, and 7pm, which answered questions such as, “have you compared your weight or shape to that of another individual?” (Chatzisarantis, Dodos, Ntoumanis, Thøgersen-Ntoumani, 2017, p. 247). The method that this experiment used …show more content…
Personally, I have experienced comparing myself to my friends often as a result of my culture context growing up as the youngest sister and looking up to my older sister and virtually aspiring to be just like her. The environment context we were in was in a store called Forever 21. I was with my best friends from high school named Natalie and Brielle so we all have close relationships with one another. The situational context was that we were shopping for an outfit for a New Year's party for 2017. We all went our separate ways in the store and finally came back together at the dressing room where we showed each other what we picked out to try on. We all ended up choosing the same black and velvet dress. Although we borrow each other’s clothes often, we all have different body types and heights and this factor affected how this one specific black velvet dress looked on each of us. I personally loved how the dress fit me when I tried it on and went out of the dressing room to look at how the dress looks on my friends. In that moment I compared the way I look to how my friends look and instantly hated the dress on me. Psychologically, because I compared how I looked in the dress to how my friends looked made me be unsatisfied with my own body and with how the dress looked on me. In the end, I did not buy the …show more content…
It is almost psychologically installed in most people’s brains to observe how others do, look, or act and compare it to yourself. In the end of Mean Girls, Cady Heron becomes hated by almost everyone in her high school because she compared herself to her new friends and aspired to be just like them. My personal experience supports the experiment conducted in the article because if I were alone and shopping for a dress I would have bought that black velvet dress. However because I was with people who I found to be more attractive and more fit than me, I did not buy it. Socially comparing one’s self to others is perfectly understandable as long as it does not affect or alter who you are as a person. Instead, this theory should make you want to grow as an
The article demonstrates that social comparison has happened between young Australian university women aged 18-30 years. The experiment had the women do online surveys three times a day at 11am, 3pm, and 7pm, which answered questions such as, “have you compared your weight or shape to that of another individual?” (Chatzisarantis, Dodos, Ntoumanis, Thøgersen-Ntoumani, 2017, p. 247). The method that this experiment used …show more content…
Personally, I have experienced comparing myself to my friends often as a result of my culture context growing up as the youngest sister and looking up to my older sister and virtually aspiring to be just like her. The environment context we were in was in a store called Forever 21. I was with my best friends from high school named Natalie and Brielle so we all have close relationships with one another. The situational context was that we were shopping for an outfit for a New Year's party for 2017. We all went our separate ways in the store and finally came back together at the dressing room where we showed each other what we picked out to try on. We all ended up choosing the same black and velvet dress. Although we borrow each other’s clothes often, we all have different body types and heights and this factor affected how this one specific black velvet dress looked on each of us. I personally loved how the dress fit me when I tried it on and went out of the dressing room to look at how the dress looks on my friends. In that moment I compared the way I look to how my friends look and instantly hated the dress on me. Psychologically, because I compared how I looked in the dress to how my friends looked made me be unsatisfied with my own body and with how the dress looked on me. In the end, I did not buy the …show more content…
It is almost psychologically installed in most people’s brains to observe how others do, look, or act and compare it to yourself. In the end of Mean Girls, Cady Heron becomes hated by almost everyone in her high school because she compared herself to her new friends and aspired to be just like them. My personal experience supports the experiment conducted in the article because if I were alone and shopping for a dress I would have bought that black velvet dress. However because I was with people who I found to be more attractive and more fit than me, I did not buy it. Socially comparing one’s self to others is perfectly understandable as long as it does not affect or alter who you are as a person. Instead, this theory should make you want to grow as an