The impact of forced social comparison on adolescents' self-esteem and appearance satisfaction

Abstract

The impact of forced social comparison on adolescents' self-esteem and appearance satisfaction research, conducted on a sample of 133 high school seniors, consisted of two phases. In phase one, participants were given the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Inventory, Appearance Satisfaction Scale and Appearance Relevance Scale, and in phase two, one month later, they were exposed to photographs of attractive and unattractive individuals. Two groups of boys and girls each assessed attractive or unattractive individuals of their own gender, while two control groups (of both genders) were not exposed to any photographs. Immediately after assessing the photographs, the participants were again given the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Inventory and Appearance Satisfaction Scale. We found that forced social comparison had an impact on self-esteem and a marginally significant effect on appearance satisfaction in the group of participants (of both genders) assessing the photographs of unattractive individuals, while no effects were found in the either the control group or the group assessing the photographs of attractive individuals. We also examined the impact of self-esteem, appearance satisfaction and appearance relevance as moderating variables on the effect size of social comparison and showed that higher pretest self-esteem and appearance relevance and lower appearance satisfaction predict higher posttest self-esteem scores, regardless of the participants' group membership. The group of participants exposed to photographs of unattractive people, however, showed the opposite pattern - those participants who had initially lower self-esteem have increased it more as a result of the experimental exposure.