Social Comparisons And Attacks In Social Networks

With the widespread use of smartphones and mobile networks,it has become a fashion to share our daily life through social networks such as Weibo,Wechat and Facebook.People can even broadcast their daily meals and travel experience live on the Internet.It can be said that social networks have become a part of people's lives.Through social networks,people construct a self-image on the network.At the same time,people can also browse dynamic photos and videos posted by others in the social platform to understand the lives of others.While browsing other people's information,individuals will unconsciously compare their own situation with others.This process is social comparison.Research shows that there is a positive bias in information on social networks,and people's self-image on social networks is mainly positive.Therefore,users in the social networks receive information about more beautiful appearance,more perfect body,happier life than themselves,and so on.Previous studies on social comparison focused on the influence of social comparison on individual variables such as self-evaluation and emotion,and found that social comparison in social networks,especially upward social comparison,had negative effects on self-evaluation,emotion and self-esteem.However,few studies focused on the impact of social comparison in social networks on interpersonal variables.Based on the compensatory competence model,this study examines whether upward social comparison can threaten individuals'self-efficacy and thus lead to increased aggression.Experiments 1 simulated the situation of Wechat and explored the influence of social comparison on state self-efficacy and aggression.The experiment was designed by a two-level single variable experiment.After browsing the posts including upward social comparative information or no social comparative information,the subjects' state self-efficacy and aggressiveness were measured.The results showed that the subjects who browsed the upward social comparative information reduced their state self-efficacy and increased aggression.The first experiment shows that social comparison can threaten individual's state self-efficacy and increase their aggression,moreover,the state self-efficacy was the mediator between upward social comparison and aggression,which proved the hypothesis of the compensatory competence model.In experiment 2,by manipulating the similarity between the social comparison objects and the subjects,we further investigated the influence of the similarity of the comparison objects on the comparison results of upward social comparison in the social networks.The results showed that the subjects with higher similarity had higher state self-efficacy and lower aggression than those with lower similarity.These results showed that the consequences of social comparison in social networks are affected by the similarity of comparators,and the negative effects of comparators with lower similarity on state self-efficacy and aggression are stronger than that of comparators with higher similarity.The experiment 3 simulated the upward social comparison situation in the Wechat,and investigated whether the improvement of the state self-efficacy could alleviate the increase of aggression after the upward social comparison.After browsing the posts containing upward social comparison information,the participants in the experimental group continued to browse the post which aim to improve their positive expectations of future,while the participants in the control group continued to browse a neutral picture.The results showed that the state self-efficacy of the participants in the experimental group was higher than that of the control group,and the aggressiveness was lower than that of the control group.Experiments 3 showed that after upward social comparison,the aggressiveness of subjects whose state self-efficacy was not threatened was significantly lower than that of subjects whose state self-efficacy was threatened.In conclusion,three experiments have been conducted to validate the hypothesis of the compensatory competence model,which shows that the upward social comparison in social networks can reduce users' state self-efficacy and increase users'aggressiveness.Moreover,the impact of upward social comparison on aggressiveness is achieved through the state self-efficacy.If the upward social comparison improves the individual's self-efficacy,the individual's aggressiveness will be reduced.In addition,the effect of upward social comparison on state self-efficacy and aggressiveness is affected by the similarity of comparators,and the threat and activation of aggressive cognition of dissimilar upward comparators are stronger.This study is helpful for us to further understand the impact of social networks on people and the mechanism of aggression.It also provides inspiration for us to prevent and intervene in the occurrence of aggression.