New Research Says Comparing Ourselves to Others is Normal
Competing with a person who is more skilled than you are can leave you feeling a bit low. Meanwhile, working together with that person can boost your self-esteem - new research reveals.
The study, published in the journal Neuron, found that people automatically compare their own performance with that of others. The findings show that when an individual is cooperating with another person, they perceive that person’s performance as a reflection on their own. That is, a better partner makes people feel better about their own abilities, while a worse partner makes them feel incompetent, too.
During competition, the opposite happens: A skilled competitor makes people judge their own performance as worse, and a bumbling opponent makes them feel better.
In the study, the researchers asked 24 participants to play reaction-time games while inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. This machine tracked blood flow and indicated which brain areas were more or less active at a given time.
They were sometimes given the choice to play the games cooperatively with another player and sometimes given the choice to play the games in competition with another player. But they could also choose to skip the competition or cooperation, and get a small number of points for themselves automatically.
After each round, the person was given feedback on both his or her performance and the other player’s performance, and told to rate the other player’s abilities as well as his or her own. In reality, the feedback — as well as the other player — was fake, and researchers could vary whether a person was told if they were doing well or poorly.
But what areas in the brain are responsible for this so-called “self-other mergence” effect? The fMRI data revealed that two brain regions were particularly active during these tasks. The first, the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex, is located deep in the midsection of the brain. More activity in this region correlated with rating oneself better at the reaction-time games.
Lead researcher Marco Wittmann, a doctoral student in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Oxford in England, said “it would be interesting to see, for instance, if for depressed patients, their estimates of how well they’re doing are somehow different”.
Source of this article:
Why Comparing Yourself To Others Is Normal
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