Why Does Another Person’s Progress Sometimes Inspire Us and Sometimes Discourage Us?

Seeing someone whose ability or achievement exceeds our own is an upward social comparison. It is not inherently helpful or harmful, because the same information reveals two things at once: a possible route forward and the distance between us and the goal.

Suppose a colleague earns a demanding professional qualification. If their circumstances seem comparable to yours and you can see how they prepared, the gap may look bridgeable. The comparison can then provide direction and motivation. If the achievement is closely tied to your self-worth, while the resources or route seem unavailable, attention is more likely to settle on ‘I am behind’, producing discouragement or avoidance. Researchers distinguish responses that draw us towards the better performance from contrast responses that emphasise the gap. Goals, perceived attainability, self-threat and context all shape the outcome.

Social comparison is not the same as envy. Comparison is an evaluative process; admiration, hope, shame, envy or action may follow. Social media concentrates selected outcomes while often concealing effort, resources and failure, making it harder to judge whether a path can genuinely be repeated.

So ‘stop comparing yourself’ is incomplete advice. Better questions are: am I comparing outcomes or a process I can learn from, and does this domain actually matter to me? The evidence includes experiments, surveys and social-media studies, but many associations do not establish causation on their own. Culture, individual differences and platform environments can also change the response.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/001872675400700202
https://www.ovid.com/journals/jpspy/fulltext/10.1037/pspa0000204~a-motivational-framework-of-social-comparison
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15213269.2023.2180647