Skip to main content

Social Comparison Theory: T-test, ANOVA, and a very common way to trichotomize data.

Hey! 

I'm giving a keynote at the February annual teaching pre-conference at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference. It's all about social psychology stats example. Like this one! This one demonstrates social comparison theory without ever saying social comparison theory.
YouGov published data (here is the full data source) that asked participants to rate their own, close-other, and far-others on several factors related to modern life (see below). In doing so, they unknowingly trigger social comparison theory, and in particular, downward social comparison. TL;DR: We know ourselves and how well we are doing compared to other people. And people are motivated to feel good about themselves.  
 
https://today.yougov.com/society/articles/48400-americans-compare-own-outlook-with-country-poll



These findings smack of downward social comparison, right? Instead of having a specific target we are comparing ourself to, like a co-worker or a neighbor, if we are asked to compare ourselves to close others and far others, we tend to see 


I also think this can be a theoretical example of an ANOVA with a factor of judgment type and factors of self, close-other, and far-other. NOTE: I strongly believe in giving multiple, theory, software-free examples to my students. You never know which one will stick!

ANOTHER thing I see with this viz that we never talked about in graduate school (but I see all the time IRL) is the collapsing of levels Likert-type scales. Here is the original scale: 



In the data viz, YouGov collapsed across Excellent and Good. I bet they also cut up this data, collapsing against poor and terrible. It is just funny because, in graduate school, we would read articles about five-item scales versus seven-item scales and, like, sweat that choice, right? However, in multiple professional settings, we just collapse, creating a three-item scale. I get it: We are using this for fast data presentation purposes to quickly share descriptive data, not necessarily for analysis. But still. Dichotomizing (trichotomizing?) data gives me a knee-jerk bad feeling. 

If you want...you can also use this as a paired t-test example using different visualizations of the same data:



If you like this example, and would love to teach statistics using a whole textbook full of such examples, please sign up for the mailing list for my upcoming textbook, Statistics for Everyone!!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ways to use funny meme scales in your stats classes

Have you ever heard of the theory that there are multiple people worldwide thinking about the same novel thing at the same time? It is the multiple discovery hypothesis of invention . Like, multiple great minds around the world were working on calculus at the same time. Well, I think a bunch of super-duper psychology professors were all thinking about scale memes and pedagogy at the same time. Clearly, this is just as impressive as calculus. Who were some of these great minds? 1) Dr.  Molly Metz maintains a curated list of hilarious "How you doing?" scales.  2) Dr. Esther Lindenström posted about using these scales as student check-ins. 3) I was working on a blog post about using such scales to teach the basics of variables.  So, I decided to create a post about three ways to use these scales in your stats classes:  1) Teaching the basics of variables. 2) Nominal vs. ordinal scales.  3) Daily check-in with your students.  1. Teach your students the basics...
Post a Comment
Read more

If your students get the joke, they get statistics.

Gleaned from multiple sources (FB, Pinterest, Twitter, none of these belong to me, etc.). Remember, if your students can explain why a stats funny is funny, they are demonstrating statistical knowledge. I like to ask students to explain the humor in such examples for extra credit points (see below for an example from my FA14 final exam). Using xkcd.com for bonus points/assessing if students understand that correlation =/= causation What are the numerical thresholds for probability?  How does this refer to alpha? What type of error is being described, Type I or Type II? What measure of central tendency is being described? Dilbert: http://search.dilbert.com/comic/Kill%20Anyone Sampling, CLT http://foulmouthedbaker.com/2013/10/03/graphs-belong-on-cakes/ Because control vs. sample, standard deviations, normal curves. Also,"skewed" pun. If you go to the original website , the story behind this cakes has to do w...
1 comment
Read more

Leo DiCaprio Romantic Age Gap Data: UPDATE

Does anyone else teach correlation and regression together at the end of the semester? Here is a treat for you: Updated data on Leonardo DiCaprio, his age, and his romantic partner's age when they started dating. A few years ago, there was a dust-up when a clever Redditor r/TrustLittleBrother realized that DiCaprio had never dated anyone over 25. I blogged about this when it happened. But the old data was from 2022. Inspired by this sleuthing,  I created a wee data set, including up-to-date information on his current relationship with Vittoria Ceretti, so your students can suss out the patterns that exist in this data.
Post a Comment
Read more