The Overpowering Effect of Social Comparison Information

If people’s goals and evaluative standards were aligned, then individuals with mastery-based goals should, theoretically, primarily rely on temporal comparison information (i.e., on how they performed relative to before). In contrast, individuals with performance-based goals should rely on social comparison information (i.e., on how they performed relative to others). However, across three studies, we explored a misalignment phenomenon we call...