How do people compare themselves with others on social network sites ? 

BOUVET Océane, DRACON Nadège, WOLFF Manon

People often compare themselves with others (e.g., friends, parents, teachers, celebrities, and so on). Comparing with others can influence an individual in several ways. According to the social comparison theory (Festinger, 1954) and its subsequent studies, through comparison with others (i.e., social comparison), people evaluate their opinions and abilities (Festinger, 1954), emotions (Schachter, 1959), and personnality traits (Thornton and Arrowood, 1966) ; people also try to enhance their self-esteem and self-concept by comparing with others (Gibbons and Buunk, 1999).

Furthermore, people can feel positively or negatively about themselves through comparison with others. How a person feel about himself through social comparison can depend of several factors, such as the person’s personal traits and who the person compares himself with (Buunk, Collins, Taylor, Vanyperen and Dakof, 1990 ; Buunk and Gibbons, 2006).

People compare themselves with others when they acquire informations about the others (Mussweiller, Ruter and Epstude, 2006). In this regard, Mussweiler et al. (2006) mentionned, « Whenever they are confronted with information about how others are, what others can and cannot do, or what others have achieved and have failed to achieve, they relate this information to themselves». This implies that social comparison take unavoidably place in our everyday lives. This is due to the fact that people are easily exposed or can effortlessy obtain information about others through various ways ; e.g., by directly interacting whith others and by consuming media.

These days, one of the most commonly used vector for interacting with others and acquiring information about others is internet.

Internet provides diverse sources from which people can pluck information about others such as emails, instant messages, and blogs. As the access to internet broadens, people tend to spend an increasing amount of time being online, hence the increased social engagment towards social comparison behaviors on the Web.

On the Internet, social network sites (e.g., Facebook and Twitter) are some of the places people use to interact and get information about each others. Thus, it is common that people compare themselves with others on social network sites, which also indicates that social network sites are an important place where people can evaluate themselves (e.g., opinions, abilities, and emotions), develop their own identities, and also feel happy/unhappy or satisfied/dissatisfied with themselves from comparison with others. Even though many people are engaged in social comparison behaviors on social network sites, the influence of such behaviors on a individual can be signifiant, there are some gaps in research about social comparison behaviors on social network sites.

Some study specifically examine the social comparison behaviors on Facebook (Lee, 2014), based on the social comparison theory (Festinger, 1954) and its subsequent studies. The purpose was to examine the effects of how often the person compares themselves with others on Facebook and how the person feels from the comparison. It have shown amongst other things that an individual’s self-uncertainty is  an important factor explaining the person’s social comparison frequency which means that a person who is less self confident, engage more frequently into comparisons with others on Facebook. Furthermore it also highlights that a person’s expectations with other responses to a posting is positively correlated to the person social comparison frequency on Facebook.