A Research On Social Comparison, Esteem And Self-efficiency

Social comparison is a main way people used in evaluating themselves in everyday living and working.Same as the Big-fish-little-pool effect posed by Marsh(1984),surrounded by high-level companions would lower one' s self-concept.Musswelier(2003) raised a Selective Accessibility Model to explain the Assimilation and Contrast effects during social comparison,and some other researches pointed out that self-esteem mediated between social comparison and self-evaluation.In study one,according to the Musswelier model,the researcher tried to verify the priming of athlete self-efficacy caused by different social comparison condition under Chinese culture background.Subjects were 58 students from some Sport University,which were divided into 3 groups: the example priming group,the genius priming group and the control group, pre- and post- tests were carried out.The analysis of variance-results showed that significant differences existed among the example priming group,the genius priming group.The Musswelier model was verified.In study two,the mediated effects caused by implicit and explicit self-esteem between social comparison and self-efficacy were tested.IAT was used to test the implicit self-esteem and scales were used to get scores of explicit self-esteem,social comparison level and self-efficacy level.The analysis of hierarchical multiple regression results was:The relationship of social comparison effected self-efficacy was no correlation about self-esteem,which meant that there was no mediation effect of self-esteem.This research had an elementary validation of the Musswelier' Selective Accessibility Model.In future studies,the research methods should be improved and a further discussion on the mediating effect of self esteem on the relationship between social comparison and self-efficacy.