When Social Comparison is Demotivating for Goal Achievement

People often compare themselves with superior others when striving for a goal. Research has shown that upward social comparison motivates people to improve oneself in order to close the gap between themselves and the superior others (Van de Ven et al. 2011). Similarly, goal literature has demonstrated that comparison to superior others signals a lack of goal progress and hence increases motivation to engage in goal-congruent action (Fishbach et al. 2006). In this stream of research, upward comparison is usually described as any situation in which one is outperformed by others. This research, however, posits that holding the relative distance between the self and others constant, people are less motivated when they perceive that the superior others have already achieved the goal. Objectively though, the others’ goal attainment should have no negative consequences for their own goal attainment. We propose that a decrease in motivation when observing others’ goal attainment (compared to when superior others are simply performing better), is caused by feelings of being beaten. Consistent with this explanation, we predict that people are less likely to become demotivated if they focus more on their own progress. In addition, this feeling of being beaten and hence the subsequent demotivation should also decrease if the other person achieving the goal is someone close (i.e., close friends). We also examine how observing others’ goal attainment influences performance in a subsequent task. We predict that it may ironically motivate people to perform better, as the subsequent task provides a new opportunity to outperform the superior others. However, such effect should only happen when the subsequent task is related to the focal task, because performing better than the others in an unrelated task does not help to reduce the gap between themselves and the superior others on the considered dimension.