Performative Baselines: Social Media, Status Signalling, and the Miscalibration of Relationship Expectations

Social media provides unprecedented access to relationship comparison information, exposing users to curated exemplars of partner behaviour. Drawing on expectation calibration theory (Temte 2026b), we argue that this creates systematically upward-biased expectation baselines: a performative floor constructed from status-signalling content rather than representative behavioural distributions. We introduce the epistemic immunity hypothesis, that calibration from observed content occurs even when viewers consciously know the content is curated, exaggerated, or artificial. If supported, this challenges the adequacy of media literacy interventions and content labelling as protective measures, with significant implications in an era of AI-generated synthetic content. We propose three studies testing whether explicit knowledge that content is artificial prevents calibration, examining dose-response relationships between exposure and baselines, and testing a recalibration intervention using downward comparison content. We critique current platform architecture, which optimises engagement without regard to downstream calibration effects, and propose a decoupled reward architecture that separates poster satisfaction from viewer feed curation. Finally, we address the ethical complexity of the awareness-contentment tension: dissatisfaction from raised expectations is information, not pathology, and intervention should target the behaviour distribution (supply-side) rather than expectations (demand-side).