Academic Social Comparison and Social Mindfulness: The Roles of Self-Evaluation Threat and Regulatory Focus

How does academic social comparison affect social mindfulness? Traditional perspectives largely attribute such changes to self-defensive unwillingness. Across three experiments involving academic-performance comparisons among university students in China, we examined social mindfulness using the Social Mindfulness (SoMi) paradigm and applied the Hierarchical Drift Diffusion Model (HDDM) to choices and response times in Experiments 1 and 2. Classical SoMi scores were lower following upward comparison than following downward or no comparison. Preference-adjusted scores showed the same directional pattern, although their post hoc pairwise differences did not remain significant after Holm correction. Experiment 2 further showed a significant indirect effect of upward comparison on social mindfulness through self-evaluation threat. HDDM analyses showed a drift-rate shift toward selecting the unique item following upward comparison. This model-based result indicates altered evidence accumulation between response options. Experiment 3 showed that promotion focus attenuated the differences in self-evaluation threat and social mindfulness. This behavioral finding is consistent with the possibility that motivational orientation shapes how upward comparison is interpreted. Together, these findings link upward academic comparison to reduced social mindfulness and changes in modelled decision processes, while suggesting that promotion focus may attenuate its behavioural consequences.