Source: Roman 92 Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

In order to determine whether something is good or bad, you need to compare it to something else. Is a dictionary with 10,000 entries in it good or bad? It depends. It is good compared to a dictionary with only 5,000 entries, but not compared to one that has 25,000 entries.

Comparisons also play a big role in your satisfaction with what you have. Sometimes, people compare what they have to what they themselves have had in the past, which leads people to be satisfied (if they are better off now than before) or dissatisfied (if they are worse off).

Often, though, people compare what they have to what other people have. How do these social comparisons affect satisfaction?

An interesting study by Daniel Yudkin, Nira Liberman, Cheryl Wakslak, and Yaacov Trope in a 2020 volume of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes looks at how people make these comparisons.

This paper looks at how distance affects satisfaction. Much research on construal level theory points out that the more distant you are from something in time, space, or socially, the more abstractly you think about it. For this reason, we tend to think about people who live in a far-off country as if they are all fairly similar, but we recognize all the individual variation of people who live in our hometown.

The researchers suggested that when you compare what you have to what someone else has, you may focus either on high-level or low-level features of it. For example, suppose you are asked to do a reading assignment; you might focus on a high-level quality of it, like how interesting it is. You might also focus on specific details about it, like how long it will take to complete. Construal-level theory suggests that being distant might focus you on a general property, like interestingness, while being close up might focus you on the length of time it will take to complete.

In a series of studies, participants were told about a second person who was either similar to them in some key way or dissimilar. This served as manipulation of distance.

For example, in one study, participants in a lab filled out a survey of likes and dislikes. Then, they were shown a survey that was supposed to have been filled out by a person in another room. (In fact, there was not actually another person; this was just a manipulation by the experimenters.) This survey showed either that the other person had similar or dissimilar likes and dislikes. Participants shown a survey with similar likes and dislikes rated themselves as more similar to the other person than those shown a survey with dissimilar likes and dislikes.

Then, these participants were told that they had to do a reading assignment of an article that looked moderately interesting (a high-level feature) and would take about eight minutes to complete (a low-level feature). They were also told about the assignment given to the other participant. The assignment given to the other participant was either better on the high-level feature (it was more interesting, but would take longer to read) or better on the low-level feature (it was less interesting, but would take less time to read). Participants had to rate how satisfied they were with the reading they were given.

When participants thought they were similar to the other person, then they focused on the low-level feature. They were more satisfied when their reading was shorter (though less interesting) than when it was longer (though more interesting).

When participants thought they were dissimilar to the other person, they focused on the high-level feature. They were more satisfied when their reading was more interesting (though longer) than when their reading was less interesting (though shorter). That is, distance completely reversed people’s sense of satisfaction with the readings.

A similar pattern was obtained in several other studies that used different manipulations of the sense of distance between the participant and the other person and also looked at different types of items, like movies given as prizes (where the high-level feature was the overall rating of the movie, and the low-level feature was when the prize would arrive) or restaurant coupons won in a raffle (where the high-level feature was the quality of the restaurant, and the low-level feature was how many dates were available for the coupon to be used). In each case, participants’ ratings of satisfaction were more influenced by the low-level feature when they thought they were similar to the other person and more on the high-level feature when they thought they were dissimilar to that person.

These results are interesting because our satisfaction with what we have is driven both by who we choose to compare ourselves to as well as the distance between that person and ourselves. That means that if you are dissatisfied with an outcome, you might want to compare yourself to someone else and see if that changes how you feel about what you have. You might also want to focus more on comparing yourself in the present to yourself in the past rather than comparing yourself to someone else.