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Research on the determinants of executive compensation has a very long tradition in a variety of academic fields. This chapter focuses on the key ideas that emerge from a review of this work, especially in the management literature. Executive pay is generally determined by economic factors, social factors, and political factors, each of which is examined in this chapter. Economic factors include size, performance, human capital, risk, and marginal product. Managerial discretion, discussed in Chapter 2, also plays a big role. Social factors tend to fall into three categories—institutional pressures, social comparison processes, and social capital—each of which suggests alternative predictors of executive compensation. Finally, political factors are very much about power. The chapter concludes with a short section on the compensation of general managers at a business-unit level.

This chapter explores the factors that influence people to initially adopt, and then to pursue, a health-related goal. These include things such as social comparisons, emotions (e.g., fear or inspiration), logical reasoning, pressure from others, and a sense of self-efficacy. The most appropriate uses of upward and downward comparisons are examined, and the importance of one’s sense of competence and self-esteem when setting goals is discussed. The elements of persuasive messages (and messengers) are described, along with suggestions for how healthcare providers might make their own communications with patients more compelling. Recognizing teachable moments is important, as is knowing the unique characteristics of the patient in order to target persuasive messages most effectively. Factors that influence perseverance, such as expectations, optimism, self-efficacy, social support, and perceptions of benefits and costs are also evaluated.

This chapter examines the relationship between group status and feelings of personal entitlement. Considered are two mechanisms that affect feelings of personal entitlement: social comparison processes and system justification. Biases to compare one’s outcomes with the outcomes of similar others and with one’s own past outcomes lead to different reference standards for people from high-status versus low-status groups. The use of different reference standards creates group differences in feelings of personal entitlement. System justifying beliefs justify hierarchical and unequal relationships among groups in society. System justifying beliefs lead to the inference that groups that possess more social goods (high-status groups) must have greater inputs (e.g., intelligence, skill) than groups with fewer social goods (low-status groups). The inference that high-status groups have more inputs than low-status groups may lead to the belief that they deserve greater outcomes and thus increase feelings of personal entitlement among members of high-status groups and decrease entitlement among members of low-status groups. The chapters describe a recent program of research on the role of system justifying beliefs in creating group differences in personal entitlement, and discuss potential strategies for eliminating group differences in personal entitlement as well as directions for future research.

This chapter discusses what social comparison theorists have to say about envious people and their targets, as well as the situational factors that nurture or discourage envy. It explores the conditions under which social comparisons are most likely to engender envy, as well as the consequences of envious feelings for oneself and their source. It considers both interpersonal and intergroup envy, and looks at directions for future research.

This chapter presents a puzzle: why hasn’t American support for social welfare spending increased with growing inequality? After showing how public opinion about inequality and social spending has changed over time, the authors draw together explanations of the trends from across the social sciences: economics, sociology, and political science. The chapter explains that attention to cross-class social comparison is an important but often ignored phenomena connecting inequality and political attitudes and presents a theoretical model of attitude formation centered on the social perception of inequality.

The final chapter situates social comparison as an important power resource and asks whether the politics of social comparison can be altered to break the reinforcing cycle of inequality and political will. The authors theorize that political communication that encourages upward comparison, messages of solidarity, and long-term social contact and integration between people from different classes can disrupt the reinforcing cycle.

Besides concerns about measurement validity, a number of other potential problems are often believed to accompany the use of well-being measures to assist policy makers. One objection is that it is paternalistic for policy makers to be concerned with the well-being of individuals, and another concern is that people adapt to circumstances so that the objective conditions of a society are not reflected in people’s subjective evaluations of life. The underlying issue here is whether people’s well-being is so subject to comparisons—with other people, with one’s past, and with personal aspirations—that using the surveys to inform policy becomes unwise. Evidence is reviewed that certain conditions have enduring effects on well-being, and that subjective well-being is not completely relative. Thus, many of the concerns about using well-being for policy are exaggerated or unfounded.

Dominant theory predicts that support for economic redistribution will increase as income disparities widen and more people fall farther from the top. Yet public opinion in the United States has remained quite stable, even as the gap between the rich and the middle class continues to grow. Existing explanations for this puzzle focus on knowledge and ideology: Americans either don’t know or don’t care about increasing economic inequality. This chapter reframes this puzzle, focusing instead on perceptions of relative status. Drawing on a nationally representative experiment and survey questions about inequality, education spending, food stamps, unemployment insurance, and social security, the authors demonstrate that when Americans make social comparisons between themselves and someone who is socioeconomically advantaged, they become more supportive of social welfare spending. Downward social comparison, on the other hand, interacts with race, gender and class to produce a more mixed picture, with some Americans becoming more supportive of redistribution and others becoming less so. These findings are consistent with political economy studies that show greater support for redistribution when upper-tail inequality is greater than lower-tail inequality. The authors conclude that Americans respond to inequality with support for redistribution when conditions facilitate social contrast with the wealthy elite.

This chapter provides an overview of the interplay between social comparison and competition before, during, and after the competition. Competition is defined broadly to include an act or process of competition, explicit or implicit, linked to basic social comparison processes. Before the competition, the authors consider the lessons of the social comparison literature on motives, individual differences, cultural and social norms, and competition entry decisions. The authors then review relevant findings on the role of individual factors (personal and relational) as well as situational factors that affect motivation and competitive behavior during the competition. Finally, the chapter examines the social comparison literature on downward comparison, upward comparison, and competition re-entry decisions after the competition.

This chapter explains the prevalence of social comparison in political rhetoric and everyday life and summarizes how upward comparisons with the rich and downward comparisons with the poor affect perceptions of status, political attitudes, and emotions. The chapter also explains how social context, psychology, and racial and gender divides combine to structure the nature of cross-class comparisons in American society. The chapter explores political rhetoric and theory about social comparison from a variety of contemporary political actors such as Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders, and great thinkers such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Virginia Wolfe, and Aristotle. The authors argue that interrogating cross-class comparisons can provide important insights into Americans’ responses to growing economic inequality.

Many Americans misperceive their place in the income distribution. This chapter presents experimental findings demonstrating that individuals can use social comparisons to make sense of the socioeconomic hierarchy and their place within it. The authors show that social comparison with people who are economically different makes people more accurate about their own socioeconomic status, even when no factual information about the income distribution is provided. When the wealthy think about the poor, they are more aware of their advantage; when the poor and the middle class think about the wealthy, they become more aware of their disadvantage and their perception of status falls.

What kinds of social comparisons are encouraged by an increasingly unequal America? This chapter explores how class segregation and media portrayals of wealth combine to push the American imagination away from contrast-focused upward social comparison with the wealthy elite. As inequality has grown over the last half century, so has economic residential segregation, insulating the majority of Americans from the sort of social experiences that make inequality feel real and meaningful. Exploring media portrayals of the elite, including celebrity culture and reality television, they show that increasingly, Americans’ opportunities for interaction with the rich are not social per se, but parasocial, conducted via imagined relationships and comparisons with celebrities through social and traditional media. Rather than offering opportunities for upward social contrast, these parasocial experiences are deliberately crafted to do the opposite: portraying the rich as morally or intellectually inferior, drawing attention to similarities between the elite and everyday Americans, or making distances seem small to spark economic aspiration and exploit the appeal of the American Dream. Finally, the authors demonstrate how race and class segregation distort white Americans’ perceptions of status, and how media use race and gender strategically to draw attention away from contrast-based thinking about the wealthy.

Even when people do make social comparisons with the wealthy elite and increase their support for programs that redistribute wealth, the potential for political action faces an additional hurdle. In this chapter, the authors show how upward comparison causes Americans to pull back from democratic life. Results from a nationally representative sample demonstrate that Americans’ political efficacy is depressed when they make upward comparisons and become more socially aware of their disadvantaged socioeconomic status. The authors also find suggestive evidence that members of marginalized groups are most likely to react to upward social comparison with feelings of lost political power and voice. Thus, the very experience that increases support for redistribution appears to decrease the likelihood that those who stand to benefit will enter the political fray and make those demands heard.

People evaluate themselves against a variety of standards. In addition to measuring themselves against relevant others (social comparisons), individuals often appraise their current selves by looking to their former and future selves (temporal comparisons). This chapter first considers temporal comparison in relation to social comparison and then describes processes of temporal self-appraisal in more detail. The authors first consider the relative frequency and impact of temporal comparison relative to social comparison and describe how comparison preference and impact depends on method, context, and self-appraisal goals. Both comparison types are meaningful, and people show considerable fluidity in their use of these self-appraisal standards. Next, the authors describe temporal self-appraisal theory, which unpacks the nuanced mechanisms underlying active selection and construction of temporal comparisons, drawing parallels to similar social comparative processes.

This chapter presents the methodological challenges of studying social comparative thinking and relative status. With observational data, it is nearly impossible to untangle the social comparisons people make from their own status and social context, or parse the importance of relative status from the resources, advantages, and social roles that determine it. The authors explain how they resolve these challenges with a mixed methods research design: large-scale experiments are combined with qualitative research and survey data to investigate how Americans think about the rich, the poor, and their own status, and how they form attitudes about redistribution.

Social psychologists have found in a variety of contexts that people use downward social comparison to protect their fragile selves and boost their egos when threatened. This chapter presents results from an experimental study that shows that economic anxiety induces a similar reaction. Given the choice, people prefer not to think about the economic other at all, but when they are induced to experience economic anxiety, many turn to downward comparison with the poor to protect their sense of self in insecure times. Drawing on survey data, the authors first document the increase in financial instability and anxiety among Americans in recent decades. They then demonstrate experimentally how economic insecurity leads Americans to turn their attention away from the wealthy and toward the poor and disadvantaged, activating racial and gender stereotypes, inflating perceptions of status, and reducing their support for redistribution.

Social comparison processes exert a ubiquitous influence on people’s thoughts, decisions, and behaviors related to their health. Moreover, many comparative perceptions (e.g., perceived personal risk, estimation of social norms) are miscalibrated with reality. The way in which people compare themselves with others on a wide variety of dimensions can have important implications for their long-term health, and health communications may be more influential to the extent that they heed people’s interest in social comparisons and acknowledge the role of biases in these comparisons. This chapter reviews the various influences that social comparisons can have on health outcomes, with a particular focus on health cognitions, decision-making, and behavior.

This chapter provides a history of social comparison theory starting in 1944 with the “Level of Aspiration” paper by Kurt Lewin and colleagues. From the work of Stan Schachter on affiliation in the 1950s, the chapter maintains a linear narrative, attempting to tell the story with numerous digressions into what and how particularly important events happened. The authors are uniquely suited to do this, as their professional lives and friendships have overlapped almost completely with the developments of social comparison theory. They then discuss several theories that are often confused as being based on social comparison theory but are not. They yield the razor with gusto! The chapter ends with a discussion of the neighboring fields and applications that are indeed on the reasons this book is being published.