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Why You Secretly Compare Yourself To Others: The Hidden Force That Controls Your Self-Worth

Are you talented, attractive, or intelligent? 

Whether you responded yes or no, the question remains: What measures did you use to gauge your assessments?

Humans have an innate drive to assess our abilities, beliefs, and emotions, but without objective benchmarks, we evaluate these qualities by comparing ourselves to people around us. 

This idea that we compare ourselves to others to gauge our abilities and worth is called Social Comparison Theory and was developed by psychologist Leon Festinger in 1954.

According to Festinger’s theory, we assess our abilities and attractiveness through comparison, which helps shape our self-worth. 

Festinger theorized that we determine much of our social and personal value based on how our skills, opinions, and emotional reactions stack up against our peers. The comparisons serve as sources of information through which we develop self-assessments. 

Other people’s skills and traits become our metrics. We use peers like human yardsticks, subjectively assessing what they have versus what we have and arriving at a verdict that shapes our sense of self.

This means that our self-concept and sense of worth change depending on the bubble we live inside.

But how does this hurt us?

My deepest insights don't go in the free version—they're distilled from my 27 years in therapy, decades of independent study, and work as a mental health advocate. These frameworks and perspectives are reserved for readers committed to going deeper.

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