Hi, everyone.
I'm Justin.
On behalf of my co-authors, Moira and Bethany,
I'm representing our work on Country Differences in Social
Comparison on Social Media.
Social comparison occurs when people compare themselves
to others.
And on social media, social comparison is a common concern.
On one hand, it's been linked to negative outcomes,
such as lower self-esteem or depression.
And on the other hand, it's also been
linked to positive outcomes, such as inspiration
While previous studies have found global differences
in social comparison, they've tended to be small scale
and focused on social comparison in offline settings.
Building on this prior work, we wanted
to understand the relationship between social comparison
on social media and country differences more broadly.
As such, we ran a study combining a survey, interviews,
and Facebook activity logs.
We surveyed almost 38,000 people from 18 countries on Facebook,
conducted 39 in-person interviews in three countries,
and combined this with aggregate data
about participants' Facebook activity.
We measured social comparison using a four question
scale, which included questions on how often people observe
others before acting, how often they compared
their accomplishments to others', how often they thought
about how they presented themselves,
and how often they felt worse in comparison to others.
For time, we're going to focus on three results.
Social comparison and country differences,
the relationship between social comparison, country,
and gender, and the relationship between social comparison,
country, and like counts.
So first you might be wondering, why even
focus on country differences?
Turns out that country is a far more important predictor
of social comparison than most other variables.
The model included participant's age, gender, Facebook friend
count, and how much time they spent on Facebook
only accounted for about 4% of the variance
in social comparison.
However, the model of only country
explained almost twice as much variance
as all the other variables, about 8%.
The model that combined all of the above
explained 11% of the variance in social comparison,
which is pretty good for a model like this.
Correspondingly, we do find that social comparison varies
substantially by country.
It ties in Vietnam and India.
The US is more or less in the middle,
and it's lowest in Mexico and Germany.
While there are overall country level differences
in how often people experience social comparison,
other factors affect this relationship, and one of them
is gender.
Using bayesian hierarchical modeling--
and more details on this are in the paper--
we find that the relationship between gender
and social comparison frequency differs by country.
The chart on the right shows how the strength
of this relationship varies by country.
For instance, in the UK and US, women
tend to feel more in comparison.
And this is generally consistent with prior work
studying gender differences in social comparison.
However, in [?] countries such as India,
men instead tend to feel more comparison.
Why might this be the case?
In India, men we interviewed talked
about the pressure they were under to provide
for their families.
These anecdotal findings also align with general trends.
If we found the percentage of women in the labor force
against differences we found in this slide,
the two do show a positive correlation.
In other words, social comparison
is more frequent among women in countries
where women make up more of the labor force.
Next we'll look at how like counts relate
to social comparison in different countries.
In most countries, seeing a larger proportion of posts
with 20 or more likes or reactions was generally
associated more frequent social comparison.
Still, this relationship is stronger in some countries
and weaker in others.
Our interviews shine some light on why this a relation may
be a little bit stronger in India and the US versus Mexico.
In interviews, people in India and the US
both talked about how likes elicited negative feelings.
In Mexico, people said they were less affected.
All together, what do these findings tell us?
One overarching finding is that experiences
of social comparison vary by country.
So design interventions that work in some countries
may not work in others.
For instance, gender differences and their causes
vary by country.
So public awareness campaigns may
want to target different messages to men and women
in each country.
And while the strength of effect varies,
reducing the visibility of feedback counts
can help many people.
In fact, both Facebook and Instagram
have been conducting tests that highlight counts on posts.
And to conclude, while everyone experiences social comparison
to some degree, this work demonstrate
the significant ways in which the frequency, causes,
and outcomes of social comparison
vary around the world.
For this work, we find that country is among the strongest
predictors of how often people experience social comparison
on social media, so design interventions should
take country differences into account.
If you'd like to learn more, our paper has more details.
And in it, we also try to answer several other questions.
Thank you for listening.