Motives for social comparison: The construction–validation distinction.

It is suggested that informational social comparison can be motivated by two different concerns: (a) an interest in obtaining from others any information about the entity that they have at their disposal and that the individual lacks or (b) an interest in obtaining information about the validity of one's judgment by determining if that judgment derives from one's personal biases or from the qualities of the entity. A comparison act motivated by the former concern is termed construction and by the latter is termed validation. The results of Experiment 1 suggest that a construction process occurs only when one's perceived level of information is low and others might possess additional information about the object. Two additional experiments examined the impact of agreement and disagreement from sources similar or dissimilar on a relevant attribute. Experiment 2 examined whether the judgments of each of these others are attributed largely to the other's similarity/dissimilarity or to the amount of information about the entity that the other is thought to possess. Experiment 3 examined the implications of the attributional patterns obtained in Experiment 2 for choice of comparison other under motives to construct vs. validate. The two motives were found to lead to differing preferences regarding choice of comparison other.