Social Comparison and Coping with Major Medical Problems

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Abstract
Social comparison theory (Festinger, 1954) has long guided efforts to understand how people use social information to accurately evaluate their skills and abilities when objective indicators are lacking (Suls, 1977). More recently, it has stimulated research on how people distort, or even construct, information about others to enhance the self (Taylor & Lobel, in press; Wills, 1987). Cognitive biases in making self-other comparisons have been elucidated in a wide ranging series of studies on the role of adaptive illusions in mental health (See Taylor & Brown, 1988 for a review) and in coping with adversity (e.g., Burgess & Holstrom, 1979; Schulz & Decker, 1985; Taylor, 1983; Thompson, 1985). This research shows that under ordinary circumstances, people tend to evaluate their personal attributes more favorably than objective evidence would warrant, and that under threatening circumstances they are apt to compare themselves to less fortunate others, both real and imagined. This proclivity of nonvictims to make unrealistically positive self-other comparisons and of victims to make downward social comparisons (Wills, 1981) supplies the theme of this chapter on the role of comparison processes in coping with serious medical problems.

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