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!!