Future work will examine some knottier issues in opinion comparison. One of these has to do with the role of experts in assessing personal preferences. Another issue concerns how the theory handles opinions that involve a mix of belief and value. Social comparisons provide information about relative standing which yield judgments about similarity, dissimilarity, superiority, and inferiority. Such judgments are, of course, not unique to the process of comparing oneself with other people.
Relational judgments can involve comparing consumer goods, politicians, other people, etc.
Until recently, the study of social comparison has been divorced from areas of cognitive and decision-making science and economics which also are concerned with relational judgment. Adapting concepts and methodologies from cognitive psychology, Rene Martin and I have conducted a series of studies to examine what features of social and nonsocial objects people use to make judgments of similarity, dissimilarity, and informational utility. One of our inspirations was an experiment that demonstrated that the same stimulus could be rated both the most similar and the most dissimilar to a target. We believe that this research has implications for social psychology and cognitive psychology because it considers how people perceive similarity and construct categories. Return to home page Health Psychology Adaptation to Cardiac Disease by Male and Female Patients and Their Spouses.