Social Comparison Essay Examples

In this society, we revolve around social comparison. According to Festinger (1954), social comparison is we use others as a comparison to satisfy our basic human desire. By comparing with other people, we can evaluate our own abilities, feelings opinion, to figure out our weaknesses and strengths so that we can have an accurate view of ourselves. For instance, we always compare our appearance, wealth, intelligence, and success with other people. It is inevitable to stop the evaluation of self against the social environment as it provides information to the individual's current problem or situation (Emmons & McCullough, 2003; Buunk, Ybema, Gibbons & Ipenburg, 2001). In Festinger's theory, Social Comparison is also a two-way phenomenon where we compare with people who are better than us (Upward comparison) or who are worse than us (downward comparison), depending on a person's motivation (Garcia & Halldosson,2017).

This concept has made me realized that I often engage in upward comparison. I always compare myself to the people who are better than me because I want to achieve something or do something as well as them. but as far as i know, this affected my self-evaluation in many ways. The
Because of this, I always feel insecure about myself, whatever I do, I feel like I am not good enough, I remember that last semester, I had a hard time coping with college works because I always feel that my hard work and effort will not be paid off. There was this one time when all of us received our marks for our mid-term exam, most of my friends got higher marks than me. I feel so bad about myself as I had put a lot of effort in it but still did not get what I want. Therefore, I get discourages a lot when I was dealing with