Most people judge themselves to be content with their lives. However, they also judge themselves to be more content than the others in their group, which is a logical impossibility. In line with previous speculations, the authors found in two studies that comparative contentment judgments were highly related to judgments of one’s own contentment but entirely unrelated to judgments of comparison of others’ contentment. That is, comparative contentment judgments are predominantly self-focused. Researchers asking the question, “How content are you relative to your peers?” should be aware that the response might well be to the question “How content are you?”
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Alicke, M. D. , Klotz, M. L., Breitenbecher, D. L., Yurak, T. J., & Vredenburg, D. S. (1995). Personal contact, individuation, and the better-than-average effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68, 804-825.
2.
Biernat, M. & Manis, M. (1994). Shifting standards and stereotype-based judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66, 5-20.
3.
Brown, J. D. (1986). Evaluations of self and others: Self-enhancement biases in social judgments. Social Cognition, 4, 353-376.
4.
Buunk, B. P. , & van der Eijnden, R. J. J. M. (1997). Perceived prevalence, perceived superiority, and relationship satisfaction: Most relationships are good, but ours is the best. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 23, 219-228.
5.
Campbell, J. D. (1986). Similarity and uniqueness: The effects of attribute type, relevance, and individual differences in self-esteem and depression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 281-293.
6.
Codol, J.-P. (1975). On the so-called “superior conformity of the self” behavior: Twenty experimental investigations. European Journal of Social Psychology, 5, 457-501.
7.
Cohen, J. , & Cohen, P. (1983). Applied multiple regression/correlation analysis for the behavioral sciences. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
8.
Cronbach, L. J. (1955). Processes affecting scores on “understanding the others” and “assumed similarity.”Psychological Bulletin, 52, 177-193.
9.
Diener, E. (1984). Subjective well-being. Psychological Bulletin, 95, 542-575.
10.
Diener, E. , & Diener, C. (1996). Most people are happy. Psychological Science, 7, 181-185.
11.
Diener, E. , & Fujita, F. (1997). Social comparison and subjective well-being. In B. P. Buunk & F. X. Gibbons (Eds.), Health, coping, and well-being: Perspectives from social comparison theory. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
12.
Dunning, D. , Meyerowitz, J. A., & Holzberg, A. D. (1989). Ambiguity and self-evaluation: The role of idiosyncratic trait definitions in self-serving assessments of ability. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57, 1082-1090.
13.
Emmons, R. A. , & Diener, E. (1985). Factors predicting satisfaction judgments: A comparative examination. Social Indicators Research, 16, 157-167.
14.
Epstein, S. , & Feist, G. J. (1988). Relation between self and other acceptance and its moderation by identification. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 309-315.
15.
Fordyce, M. W. (1988). A review of research on the happiness measures. Social Indicators Research, 20, 355-382.
16.
Fox, C. R. , & Kahneman, D. (1992). Correlations, causes and heuristics in surveys of life satisfaction. Social Indicators Research, 27, 221-234.
17.
Gilbert, D. T. , Giesler, B. R., & Morris, K. A. (1995). When comparisons arise. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 227-236.
18.
Heady, B. , & Wearing, A. (1988). The sense of relative superiority—Central to well-being. Social Indicators Research, 20, 497-516.
19.
Higgins, E. T. , & Lurie, L. (1983). Context, categorization, and recall: The “change-of-standard” effect. Cognitive Psychology, 15, 525-547.
20.
Hoorens, V. (1993). Self-enhancement and superiority biases in social comparison. European Review of Social Psychology, 4, 113-139
21.
Keillor, G. (1985). Lake Wobegon days. New York: Viking.
22.
Klar, Y. (1998a). Idiosyncratic reasoning, unrealistic optimism and pessimism: Self-review can modulate the comparative bias about personal risks. Unpublished manuscript, Tel-Aviv University, Israel.
23.
Klar, Y. (1998b). Lake Wobegon proves true: Pseudocomparative judgments and the all-the-members-of-my-group-are-above-the-group-average effect. Submitted for publication, Tel-Aviv University, Israel.
24.
Klar, Y. , & Giladi, E. E. (1997). No one in my group can be below the group’s average: A robust positivity bias in favor of anonymous peers. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73, 885-901.
25.
Klar, Y. , Medding, A., & Sarel, D. (1996). Nonunique invulnerability: Singular versus distributional probabilities and unrealistic optimism in comparative risk judgments. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 67, 229-245.
26.
Klein, W. M. (1997). Objective standards are not enough: Affective, self-evaluative, and behavioral responses to social comparison information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72, 763-774.
27.
Klein, W. M. , & Kunda, Z. (1993). Maintaining self-serving social comparisons: Biased reconstruction of one’s past behaviors. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 19, 732-739.
28.
Lykken, D. , & Tellegen, A. (1996). Happiness is a stochastic phenomenon. Psychological Science, 7, 186-189.
29.
Miller, D. T. , & McFarland, C. (1987). Pluralistic ignorance: When similarity is interpreted as dissimilarity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53, 298-305.
30.
Nisbett, R. E. , Borgida, E., Crandall, R., & Reed, H. (1976). Popular induction: Information is not necessarily informative. In J. S. Carrol & J. W. Payne (Eds.), Cognitive and social behavior (pp. 11-133). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
31.
Perloff, L. S. , & Fetzer, B. K. (1986). Self-other judgments and perceived invulnerability to victimization. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 502-510.
32.
Rothman, A. J. , Klein, B. W., & Weinstein, N. D. (1996). Absolute and relative biases in estimation of personal risks. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 26, 1213-1236.
33.
Weinstein, N. D. (1996). Optimistic biases about risks and future life events. Unpublished bibliography, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ.
34.
Weinstein, N. D. , & Lachendro, E. (1982). Egocentrism as a source of unrealistic optimism. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 8, 195-200.
35.
Wood, J. V. (1996). What is social cognition and how should we study it?Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 22, 520-537.
36.
Wood, J. V. , & Taylor, S. E. (1991). Serving self-relevant goals through social comparison. In J. Suls & T. A. Wills (Eds.), Social comparison: Contemporary theory and research (pp. 23-49). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
37.
Wright, S. J. (1985). Health satisfaction: A detailed test of the multiple discrepancies theory model. Social Indicators Research, 17, 299-313.
