When I was 13-years-old we moved from the eastside of the city to a southern suburb. There, I met kids in the new grade school. The first summer, a friend of mine—who I now see more clearly as an incipient case of antisocial personality disorder—invited me to the city’s swimming pool. While sitting on a bench together waiting to enter the pool, he observed that my thighs were fatter than his with the implication that I was fat. I found this unsettling and disturbing and, oddly, more than one-half-century later, I still do in a way. Not only do we compare out bodies to others regarding their age, beauty, shapeliness, or muscularity, we compare our own body to that which it was in the past. The sad reality of bodily existence is that it is one of continual change–and usually for the worse–accompanied by body anxiety or body image disturbances.
Now, today, decades later, I go the gym and work out on Nautilus machines while casually observing my fellow gym-mates and I notice in watching my own mental processes that I compare and contrast my body shape against theirs in an almost automatic manner. My mind just does it whether I will it or not. This catches my attention even though it is pretty much an unconscious mental behavior called body comparison. There are two types of body comparisons formally known as body-related upward social comparison (BUSC) and body-related downward social comparison.
This behavior is only natural according to Social Comparison Theory by Leon Festinger (1919-1989), the theorist who also gave us Cognitive Dissonance Theory (Festinger, 1954). Festinger’s premise is that humans need to know how they compare to others. Downward comparisons in which you compare yourself to someone in a worse state than your own serves to defend the ego and bolster self-worth. Upward comparisons with others who are perceived as being superior in some way may threaten the ego and decrease self-esteem. The practice of body-related upward social comparisons is associated with negative self-evaluations, the deviation from cultural standards of desirable appearance, self-esteem fluctuation, negative emotionality, increased negative body image, and increased body checking behaviors.
The Study and Its Results
The research study by Pila et al. (2016) assessed the body comparison behaviors and exercise habits of 47 women and 40 men in the age range from 18 to 40. Test subjects were a mix of Caucasian (36 percent), Aboriginal (23 percent), Asian (14 percent), Arabic or West Asian (11 percent), South Asian (3 percent), African Canadian (7 percent) and mixed/other (6 percent). Most were university students and other working full or part-time. The study lasted one week. The hypothesis that persons with higher body-related upward comparisons would exercise more in general with the exception of men who felt they were unattractive (negative self-evaluation). The results were that men increased their exercise activity after seeing someone better than themselves while women exercised less on days with higher upward comparison behaviors.
Closing Thoughts
This study confirms the past findings of the tendency of women when comparing their body size, weight, and shape to others superior to themselves lapse into negative behaviors such as despair, disordered eating and dieting. Men, on the other hand, are spurred into competitive exercising and become vulnerable to short-cuts like disordered eating and performance-enhancing drugs. And there appears to be a link between appearance self-evaluation and body comparisons and exercise behavior. Obviously, more research is necessary, but it certainly appears this is which way the train is going.
As for me, I’ve written a more extensive blog-lecture on social comparison entitled “Do You Think She’s Prettier Than Me?”: The Compulsive Need to Compare Our Bodies to Those of Others for those of you interested in the topic.
Suffice it to say here, and yet once again for the one-thousandth time, vive le difference between men and women. Better looking men fire up the male ego to compete—oftentimes to the point of self-destructive behaviors—while women are more inclined to throw up their hands in frustrated resignation and possibly engage in health-threatening behaviors. Both are expressions of somatic unhappiness which is a side-effect of social comparisons. You compare yourself to others and often discover things you really better off not knowing. Social comparisons are forced on us hundreds of times a day via being in public, the entertainment media, and worst of all, social media and selfies. We’re going to compare ourselves to others. We can’t help it, but ii usually leads us down the slippery slope to bodily unhappiness and that’s not a good thing.
How we compare our bodies to those of others and our emotional response to the process greatly informs us as to how we feel about ourselves, our fears, envies, and insecurities. We need to temper our comparisons with self-compassion, self-acceptance, and a small dose of humor. I’ll be writing more about self-compassion in the future as I discover a bit more every day in my older age just how crucial a virtue it is.
Paul Shane, Ph.D., LMT
Director, Academic Content
References
Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations 7, 117-149.
Pila, E., Barlow, M., Wrosch, C., & Sabiston, C. (2016). Comparing the body to superior others: Associations with daily exercise and body evaluation in men and women. Psychology of Sport and Exercise 27, p. 120-127.