What Is Social Comparison Theory?

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Consumer culture teaches us to compare what we have to what others have and what we do to what others do.

When we see someone with more or doing more, we feel diminished, smaller and less valuable.

Social media feeds us comparisons at a rate we’ve never known, and we feel smaller and smaller.

In the distant past, there was far less comparing and far more connecting. It’s time to live this way again.

I’ve been touring colleges with my 17-year-old daughter, across our home state of Colorado and up and down the California coast. Recently, my daughter found a college she loves, nothing grand, a small liberal arts school, and when she pictures herself there, she smiles because it feels like her. But I’ve noticed something. When she imagines sharing her discovery with classmates, she hesitates, worried about what they might think: Your chosen school doesn’t boast a famous name. It’s not even well-known. They’ll say it without words, and her choice will feel like a lesser one, and somehow, she’ll feel less about herself too.

My daughter’s doing what we all do: measuring the worth of her decisions, and even her own worth, through comparison. And she’s dreading what we all dread: that sinking feeling of shame that arrives the moment we sense someone’s seeing us as less than (diminishing or devaluing us).

These feelings of shame are so pervasive in modern culture that I see them every day in almost every client who sits down across from me. And it’s getting worse. Where did it come from, and why is it spreading so fast?

A Stick to Measure Ourselves

To understand where shame comes from. Look no further than the two engines that drive consumer culture: acquiring and achieving. Almost from the crib, advertisers teach us that having more (the right toys, the right snacks, the right clothes) will bring people near and, impressed by what we have, they’ll see and value us. Then school arrives, and in our classrooms we learn that doing more (better grades, higher rankings, bigger awards) earns people’s praise and gets them to view us as worthy (Butler, 2021).

Before long, these become the measuring sticks we use to value ourselves: Our worth is........

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