The Better You Do, the Worse You Feel: Selective Information Processing Approaches Based on Social Comparisons Moderates the Effect of Absolute Performance on Satisfaction

Consumption settings in which consumers are evaluated in comparison to others are ubiquitous. A prime example of such settings is the postsecondary education industry with, in the USA alone, its 21 million annual consumers. Yet, consumer research has largely ignored such settings. Consequently, the antecedents of satisfaction when customers are evaluated relatively are not well understood. This research addresses this gap by examining satisfaction in consumption settings in which consumers are evaluated relatively. We primarily (but not only) use the postsecondary industry as the testing-ground for our theory. In relative evaluation settings, consumers may have access to three pieces of information: their individual scores (individual absolute evaluation), the scores’ distribution mean (average evaluation), and the actual relative evaluation outcome (ranking).We hypothesize that in these settings, superior (inferior) evaluations can lead to inferior (superior) satisfaction. We theorize that different weights are given to the aforementioned pieces of information as a function of social comparison orientation. We refer to social comparison orientation as SCO. Specifically, we argue that consumers high in SCO pay relatively more attention to the average evaluation, which is a relevant proxy of others’ absolute evaluation. A lower (higher) average evaluation signals that others are doing poorly (well), setting thus a lower (higher) comparison standard. In turn, a lower (higher) comparison standard makes high SCO consumers feel that they are more (less) competent in comparison to others. Conversely, consumers who are low in SCO would focus their attention relatively more closely on their own absolute evaluation. Since a high (low) absolute evaluation is better (worse) than a low (high) one, these individuals feel more (less) competent when their own absolute evaluation is high (low). Jointly, we propose that a simple intervention like moving all the absolute scores up or down without changing rankings (actual outcomes), can significantly affect consumer satisfaction. Since in such interventions the individual and average evaluations would covary, consumers high in SCO would then feel more (less) competent and, therefore, satisfied when their own absolute evaluation is low (high), while the opposite pattern should be observed for consumers low in SCO.