The Effect Of Self-construal And Self-esteem On The Result Of Social Comparison For The Undergraduates

At the early stage, the researchers mainly investigated under what kind of social condition could social comparison information be searched as the foundation of self-evaluation. Then the focus for the study turned to what elements could affect the results of social comparison. Many studies abroad found that the self-concept (no matter trate or state) had effect on the result of comparison. However, because of the differences on the research procedure or some relative concepts, the results are different. This study mainly explore the effect of two important aspects of the self (self structure and self-esteem) on the result of social comparison, and investigate the effects of the differences of culture and individual on the result of social comparison. Meanwhile, this study also focus on the effect of different style and information of comparison on the result of social comparison.Study 1 adopts the start-up material which stands for western and eastern culture to excite the subjects'independent self-construal and dependent self-construal respectively. It will further investigate the differences and commonness between emotion state and self-evaluation after the explicit and implicit comparison with positive and negative targets under this condition. The result indicate that, (1)Self-construal has significant effect on both emotion and self evaluation of the subjects after social comparison.(2)the target for comparison has no significant effect on the emotion and self evaluation after social comparison; (3) the type of comparison has significant effect on the emotion but no significant effect on self evaluation after social comparison; (4) the interaction between self structure and comparison target are significant on the variables of emotion, the interaction between self- structure and comparison target, self-structure and comparison type, comparison target and comparison type,self-construal, comparison target and comparison type are not significant ,no matter on the variables of emotion or self evaluation after self evaluation.Study 2 investigates the effect of the level of self- esteem has on the comparison result between different comparison information and comparison types among the subjects with eastern culture which are the individuals who are excited by dependent self-construal. The results indicate that, (1) the main effect of the level of self-esteem is significant, the subjects with high level of self-esteem have more positive emotion and lower self-evaluation than that of the ones with low level of self–esteem after social comparison. (2) the comparison types has significant effect on self-evaluation after social comparison, the self-evaluation after explicit comparison is lower than that after implicit comparison. Comparison types have no significant effect on the emotion after social comparison. (3) comparison target has no significant effect on neither emotion nor self evaluation after social comparison. This is consonant with the western research result which is that there's no correlation between the result of social comparison and the positive or negative of the comparisonness. However, there's a significant interaction between self-esteem and comparison target after subjects'emotion after comparison become the dependent variable. (4) there's a significant interaction between self-esteem, comparison types and comparison target after subjects'self-evaluation become the dependent variable.