The Influence Of Social Comparison On High School Students’ Interpersonal Trust

Adolescence is the crucial period for the development of friendship.During this stage,teenagers gradually shifted the focus of their emotion and interpersonal relationship from parents to their peers.As we all know,interpersonal trust plays a very important role in the establishment and maintenance of friendship.Interpersonal trust is the foundation of interpersonal interaction and the prerequisite for maintaining good interpersonal relationships.It is essential for the formation and development of individuals’ mental health,personality and sociality,especially for adolescents.But in today’s rapidly developing information and Internet era,interpersonal trust is facing severe challenges and deeply influenced by social comparison.In addition,social comparison,as a common social psychological phenomenon,is one of the important ways for individuals to conduct self-evaluation,so it plays a unique social function in daily life and the results will affect the individual from all aspects.It should be noted that,young students who are studying in a collective environment and frequently interacting with their peers still need to conduct self-assessment by comparing with others,because their psychological functions are not yet fully mature,making the lack of comprehensive and stable understanding of themselves.Therefore,the social comparison frequency of young people is higher,and they are more susceptible to the impact of social comparison results.In addition,with the development of internet and new media technology,it is becoming more and more convenient for high school students to communicate with peers and obtain peer information,which also makes social comparisons more common.And in the context of China’s exam-oriented education,under the huge pressure of the college entrance examination,high school students are forced to participate in the comparison with their peers,actively or passively.Another phenomenon worthy of our vigilance is that in recent years,there have been some wrong value orientations about peer relationships in the school culture.For example,the popular "inspirational" slogan for the college entrance examination of "improving one point and killing a thousand people" not only directly inspired the social comparison between high school students,but also overemphasized the competitive relationship between students,which is not conducive to the establishment and development of youth friendship.In this regard,previous studies have shown that social comparison may affect the level of interpersonal trust,and that their effects on the cognitive and emotional components of interpersonal trust are also different.Therefore,it is of great research value to study the impact of social comparison on interpersonal trust,cognitive and affective trust for high school student groups.We conducted three studies to examine the relationship between social comparisons and interpersonal trust at the personality trait level and the state level.In the first study,A questionnaire survey was conducted among 1212 senior high school students,and we explored the relationship between social comparison orientation and interpersonal trust.Using comprehensive academic performance as the social comparison content,study 2 explored the impact of the different comparison direction(upward,downward,similar)on senior high school students’ cognitive trust and affective trust.We also analyzed the psychological mechanism in the process of impaired trust.The third study investigated the influence of social comparison on senior high school students’ cognitive and affective trust in the context of cooperative and competitive relationships.Moreover,based on the expected results,we further analyzed the multiple mediating effects of the cognitive and affective trust between two different relationship types and the trust on behavioral dimension in order to enhance the reliability of the results and to expand the scope of popularization of the research results.Through the above studies,the following conclusions are obtained:(1)The social comparison orientation of high school students is slightly higher than the average score,and the interpersonal trust is below the average level.(2)The social comparison orientation and the ability comparison orientation dimension of high school students can predict the interpersonal trust significantly negatively,while the perspective comparison dimension cannot play such a predictive role,that is,a higher level of social comparison orientation,especially the ability comparison orientation,may lead to a lower level of interpersonal trust among high school students.(3)In a comparative situation that does not involve competition and cooperation,there is no benefits of comparisons on cognitive trust nor affective trust,but downward comparisons harm cognitive trust.(4)In the process of downward comparisons harming cognitive trust,we found that downward comparisons can predicted the cognitive trust through the multiple mediating effects of perception of others’ abilities and the psychological distance.(5)When social comparison is performed in the competitive relationship,cognitive trust and emotional trust are both harmed.Specifically,downward comparisons harm cognitive trust,and upward comparisons harm emotional trust.Moreover,in the context of cooperative relationships,social comparisons do not influence the cognitive and affective trust.(6)Competition further lowered the level of the two trust types which had been damaged in the social comparison,whereas cooperation played a protective and promotion role.(7)Cooperation and competition both predicted the individuals’ trust on behavioral dimension through the multiple mediating effects of cognitive and affective trust.In other words,when social comparisons are performed in the cooperative relationships,high school students may have higher level of cognitive and emotional trust,thereby increasing the trust on behavioral dimension.The opposite is true in the competitive relationships.To sum up,not only the social comparison orientation may lead to a lower level of interpersonal trust in high school students,but also the social comparisons may harm the cognitive and emotional trust,especially in the competitive relationships.In view of the fact that social comparison is inevitable,in order to maximize the protection of the trust relationship between high school students and reduce the negative impact of social comparison,we recommend that students should be guided to correctly understand peer competition and to value the significance of social comparison to themselves,so as to actively adjust their own social comparison methods.In addition,educators should not only avoid direct comparisons of students in school education teaching and management,but also actively create a harmonious interpersonal atmosphere and create cooperative relationships among student groups to protect trust relationships for students’ growth.