Social Comparison Theory

     Matt explores the findings of Leon Festinger who was trying to figure out how people like to arrange themselves into groups, peer groups, social groups, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so he started really trying to get an understanding of what that means.

     It's hard to measure yourself against other people in your peer group because peer groups are now infinitely huge and you make certain assumptions about who is and isn't in your peer group. People used to watch the Kardashians. How in the world can we relate to these people even though we live vastly different lives? What are the consequences of comparing ourselves to others?

     George Bush buys socks from Walmart and that look at how he's one of us makes him relatable. It was such an opportunistic, and it depends on which side of the political spectrum you live on, and how you react to that. But that was publicity. It was great publicity. Exactly. But that makes him relatable. And so what we're seeing in this day and age of the influencer, et cetera, et cetera, these people want to be relatable to the maximum number of people possible. And so they can afford and can curate the experience of seeing them, of, quote-unquote being with them in a very relatable way. And so you start to, we can't help it. It's kind of like we're wired to compare ourselves to these people and you can't compare yourselves to them. But we do, but we can't help it. And so this is why sometimes we get excited when we view one of these like pop celebrities as being bad. But that makes us quote-unquote "feel better about ourselves" because we can't help but compare ourselves to others in our peer groups. And also, and this is a really messed up part, is, once we've decided who's in our peer group, we will literally go out of our way to keep them in our peer group to keep them down.

The Social Comparison Theory

[00:00:00] FAWN: Welcome back everybody. Hello. Hello. How are you?

[00:00:04] MATT: Hello everyone.

[00:00:05] FAWN: What are you up to? Hello Martin. Hello, Wendy. Hello, everyone. Everybody, everybody. Everybody around the world. Hello, France. Hello around the world. Matt, you've been looking into something. I have

[00:00:23] MATT: Right. It's the darnest thing. You go shooting down a rabbit hole, somebody puts three words together and all of a sudden,

[00:00:28] FAWN: bam. How did it happen? How did you come across this thing?

[00:00:31] FAWN:<