What’s one up? Questions as a vehicle for social comparisons

Abstract: Research suggests that asking questions is an effective way to increase liking with an interaction partner. However, there might be certain types of questions that could backfire. We propose that one such question type, social comparison questions – defined as questions where the main goal of the question asker is to compare how they measure up to the recipient on some valued dimension (e.g., possessions, achievements), are predominantly negatively perceived. In a pre-registered experiment (N = 382), we show that these types of questions are very common with a large majority (>90%) of participants having experiences of both asking and receiving social comparison questions. In line with predictions, social comparison recipients rated their interaction experience more negatively than social comparison question askers. Furthermore, social comparison question askers were largely unaware of how negatively these questions came across and incorrectly predicted that social comparison recipients had an equally pleasant conversation.

Keywords: Question-asking; Social comparison; Conversation; Social interaction