Editing Leon Festinger (section)

===Social comparison theory===
Festinger's influential [[social comparison theory]] (1954) can be viewed as an extension of his prior theory related to the reliance on social reality for evaluating attitudes and opinions to the realm of abilities. Starting with the premise that humans have an innate drive to accurately evaluate their opinions and abilities, Festinger postulated that people will seek to evaluate their opinions and abilities by comparing them with those of others. Specifically, people will seek out others who are close to one's own opinions and abilities for comparison because accurate comparisons are difficult when others are too divergent from those of oneself. To use Festinger's example, a chess novice does not compare his chess abilities to those of recognized chess masters,<ref>Festinger, 1954, p. 120</ref> nor does a college student compare his intellectual abilities to those of a toddler.

People will, moreover, take action to reduce discrepancies in attitudes, whether by changing others to bring them closer to oneself or by changing one's own attitudes to bring them closer to others. They will likewise take action to reduce discrepancies in abilities, for which there is an upward drive to improve one's abilities. Thus Festinger suggested that the "social influence processes and some kinds of competitive behavior are both manifestations of the same socio-psychological process...[namely,] the drive for self evaluation and the necessity for such evaluation being based on comparison with other persons."<ref>Festinger, 1954, p. 138</ref> Festinger also discussed implications of social comparison theory for society, hypothesizing that the tendency for people to move into groups that hold opinions which agree with their own and abilities that are near their own results in the segmentation of society into groups which are relatively alike.

In his 1954 paper, Festinger again systematically set forth a series of hypotheses, corollaries, and derivations, and he cited existing experimental evidence where available. He stated his main set of hypotheses as follows:

:1. There exists, in the human organism, a drive to evaluate his opinion and abilities.
:2. To the extent that objective, nonsocial means are available, people evaluate their opinions and abilities by comparison respectively with the opinions and abilities of others.
:3. The tendency to compare oneself with some other specific person decreases as the difference between his opinion or ability and one's own increases.
:4. There is a unidirectional drive upward in the case of abilities which is largely absent in opinions.
:5. There are nonsocial restraints which make it difficult or even impossible to change one's ability. These nonsocial restraints are largely absent for opinions.
:6. The cessation of comparison with others is accompanied by hostility or derogation to the extent that continued comparison with those persons implies unpleasant consequences.
:7. Any factors which increase the importance of some particular group as a comparison group for some particular opinion or ability will increase the pressure toward uniformity concerning that ability or opinion within that group.
:8. If persons who are very divergent from one's own opinion or ability are perceived as different from oneself on attributes consistent with the divergence, the tendency to narrow the range of comparability becomes stronger.
:9. When there is a range of opinion or ability in a group, the relative strength of the three manifestations of pressures toward uniformity will be different for those who are close to the mode of the group than those who are distant from the mode. Specifically, those close to the mode of the group will have stronger tendencies to change the positions of others, relatively weaker tendencies to narrow the range of comparison, and much weaker tendencies to change their position compared to those who are distant from the mode of the group.<ref>Festinger, 1954</ref>