Relationship social comparisons in dating and marital relationships: Adding relationship social comparison interpretations

ABSTRACT

How an individual interprets a relationship social comparison may have important implications for the self and one’s relationship. We asked whether these interpretations significantly mediated the relation between the manipulated social comparison direction and relationship satisfaction, relationship commitment, satisfaction with life, and happiness for both dating (Studies 1 and 2) and married (Study 2) individuals. Participants were randomly assigned to make an upward or downward comparison to a friend’s romantic relationship and completed measures of their interpretations, relationship quality, satisfaction with life, and happiness. For both dating and married individuals, there were indirect effects of manipulated social comparison direction through the interpretations for all dependent variables. Although there were some differences in mediation for married and dating individuals, the effect sizes were not significantly different.

KEYWORDS:

• Cognitions
• relationship quality
• relationship type
• social comparisons

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The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/73e54/

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible https://osf.io/73e54/