Our Brains Weren’t Built for This Much Comparison

The answer has less to do with social media and more to do with an ancient human tendency: social comparison. Social comparison is the psychological process by which people assess themselves, including their own abilities, opinions, and achievements, in relation to those of others. Likes can both reward us and rank us. They show us that people are validating our posts and also quantify that validation. 

We know how much approval we receive relative to what we might have expected, what we got the last time we posted, and what others receive. Feedback is scored. Likes are just one example. Follower counts, views, and shares are other metrics that make social information measurable. When social approval is numerically valued, comparison becomes harder to avoid.  

From an evolutionary perspective, social comparison may have served an adaptive purpose. Humans evolved in social groups. Knowing where you stood relative to others might have helped you identify what behaviors were approved, whether you belonged, and how to navigate hierarchy. But moving beyond prehistoric time to the last century, comparison still had constraints. Your 25-year high school reunion? It happened once in your lifetime, maybe in a city far away from you, with only your fellow classmates in attendance. Now, the high school reunion lives in the device in our hands, capable of giving anyone quantitative signals from a vast reference group at any moment on our personalized scoreboards of social approval. If the subjective question is whether we belong, what can feel like an objective answer is the 100 likes our post gets from 2,500 followers. The scale, frequency, quantification, and accessibility of social comparison have all changed.