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A mindset of competition versus cooperation moderates the impact of social comparison on self-evaluation.

ABSTRACT: Do people feel better or worse about themselves when working with someone who is better than they are? We present the first replication of the work of Stapel and Koomen (2005), who showed that being in a competitive vs. cooperative mindset moderates the effects of social comparison on self-evaluation. In Experiment 1, we present a close replication of Stapel and Koomen (2005, Study 2). Participants in competition/cooperation had to self-evaluate after receiving information about the personal characteristics of an upward/downward comparison target. In Experiment 2, we went further by providing feedback about both the comparison target and the self. Our results and a small-scale meta-analysis combining our experiments and Stapel and Koomen's (2005) confirm that a competitive/cooperative mindset moderates the impact of social comparison on self-evaluation; nevertheless, the effect size we found across the two experiments is clearly more modest than the one found in Stapel and Koomen's (2005) work.

SUBMITTER: Colpaert L

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4558468 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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A mindset of competition versus cooperation moderates the impact of social comparison on self-evaluation.

Colpaert Lucie L Muller Dominique D Fayant Marie-Pierre MP Butera Fabrizio F

Frontiers in psychology 20150903

Do people feel better or worse about themselves when working with someone who is better than they are? We present the first replication of the work of Stapel and Koomen (2005), who showed that being in a competitive vs. cooperative mindset moderates the effects of social comparison on self-evaluation. In Experiment 1, we present a close replication of Stapel and Koomen (2005, Study 2). Participants in competition/cooperation had to self-evaluate after receiving information about the personal cha ...[more]

PMID: 26388827

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Project description:Cooperation is a relevant and controversial phenomenon in human societies. Indeed, although it is widely recognized essential for tackling social dilemmas, finding suitable policies for promoting cooperation can be arduous and expensive. More often, it is driven by pre-established schemas based on norms and punishments. To overcome this paradigm, we highlight the interplay between the influence of social interactions on networks and spontaneous self-regulating mechanisms on individuals behavior. We show that the presence of these mechanisms in a prisoner's dilemma game, may oppose the willingness of individuals to defect, thus allowing them to behave cooperatively, while interacting with others and taking conflicting decisions over time. These results are obtained by extending the Evolutionary Game Equations over Networks to account for self-regulating mechanisms. Specifically, we prove that players may partially or fully cooperate whether self-regulating mechanisms are sufficiently stronger than social pressure. The proposed model can explain unconditional cooperation (strong self-regulation) and unconditional defection (weak self-regulation). For intermediate self-regulation values, more complex behaviors are observed, such as mutual defection, recruiting (cooperate if others cooperate), exploitation of cooperators (defect if others cooperate) and altruism (cooperate if others defect). These phenomena result from dynamical transitions among different game structures, according to changes of system parameters and cooperation of neighboring players. Interestingly, we show that the topology of the network of connections among players is crucial when self-regulation, and the associated costs, are reasonably low. In particular, a population organized on a random network with a Scale-Free distribution of connections is more cooperative than on a network with an Erdös-Rényi distribution, and, in turn, with a regular one. These results highlight that social diversity, encoded within heterogeneous networks, is more effective for promoting cooperation.

Dataset Information

A mindset of competition versus cooperation moderates the impact of social comparison on self-evaluation.

Publications

A mindset of competition versus cooperation moderates the impact of social comparison on self-evaluation.

Similar Datasets

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