Home alone yet optimistic: social identity management amidst comparative pessimism

ABSTRACT

In three studies (N = 553) we found that despite reporting that others enjoy a more active social life than they do, participants believed that they possessed more social traits than their peers (Study 1), that their level of social activity exceeds the necessary standards for living a satisfying social life (Study 2), and that their social lives would improve significantly in the future (Study 3). Additionally, people were not comparatively pessimistic about the number of close friends they have (Studies 1 and 3), and their pessimism about their social engagement was associated with lowered perceived importance of the social activities in question (Study 3). Taken together, these findings suggest that people’s outlook on their social lives is not as grim as others have suggested, but rather, self-enhancing beliefs reside comfortably alongside individuals’ acknowledgments of their social deficits.

KEYWORDS:

• Social comparison
• social life
• identity management
• self-enhancement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/JMQZD.

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 at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/JMQZD.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.2022.2077688

Notes

1. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/JMQZD.

2. This study was preregistered on Open Science Framework (https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/JMQZD), and thus, sample size and data collection procedures were predetermined.

3. We did not find a significant effect of order, so we therefore aggregated participant responses across order during analysis.

4. The Mauchly’s tests of sphericity were significant for party and social network,, Ws ≤ .93, p ≤ .001, and therefore, we reported results with Greenhouse-Geisser adjustments.

5. Similar to the previous studies, we did not find a significant order effect.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Corey L. Guenther

Corey L. Guenther is an Associate Professor at Creighton University.

Yiyue Zhang

Yiyue Zhang is a psychology Ph.D. candidate at Ohio University.