Abstract
Festinger's (1954a, b) hypothesis that “To the extent that objective, nonsocial means are not available, people evaluate their opinions and abilities by comparison respectively with the opinions and abilities of others. ” was tested directly through a quasi-Crutchfield type conformity experiment.
Ss were required to judge one of two sets of auditory stimuli as greater than the other. These tasks were consisted of easy, difficult, and insoluble ones. Only when Ss pressed “social comparison button” on each trial, “others' responses” were displayed on a panel in Ss' cubicle. Some of Ss were informed the “objective judgement” to their response on each trial, and some were not (No information condition). The half of the former were informed that their responses were correct on two-thirds of trials (Information-correct condition), and the remaining Ss were informed twothirds of their responses were incorrect (Informa-tion-incorrect condition).
In No information condition, where no objective criteria for the correctness of Ss' responses were available, Ss pressed “social comparison button” most, to know others' responses. But in Information-correct condition, where most of Ss' responses were supported by the objective criteria, there were as many social comparison responses as in No information condition. In Informationincorrect condition, Ss pressed button on few trials. Task difficulty had no effect on the occurrence of social comparison responses.
As to these findings, two functoins of social comparison processes, i. e., informational and normative ones, were discussed.
