Brawling with Others

So as we were going over the three premises of Festinger's Social Comparison Theory, the first things that came to my mind were Super Smash Bros Brawl and Guitar Hero. The social comparison theory states that people constantly evaluate their abilities and opinions by comparing themselves to others (Festinger, 1954). Super Smash Bros Brawl-- Brawl for short--is a video game that features classic and new Nintendo characters duking it out against each other on various stages. I'm going to assume at this point in Guitar Hero's popularity that everyone knows what it is--again with the false-consensus effect.

Being a relatively avid gamer, I constantly have to test my abilities against those that are similar to me. This is the third premise of the theory that we learned in class and displayed in the study done by (Gilbert, Giesler, and Morris, 1995). This is true, because I only ever compare myself to my friends that are really good at playing either game. For the longest time, I was the best in my group at playing Guitar Hero, but then my friend Cameron came along and knocked me off that pedestal of domination. This is fine though because I still judge myself as best among us when playing Brawl.

When playing these games other effects of psychology come into play as well. Every time I play, my self-serving bias comes along for the ride. The self-serving bias just basically means that we attribute our successes to our own abilities, whereas our failures are attributed to external factors (Mezulis, Abramson, Hyde, and Hankin, 2004; Schlenker, Weigold, and Hallam, 1990). I say this because anytime I win its almost always because of my skill at playing that character, although sometimes there is luck involved with my wins. However, the opposite is true about when I lose. Very rarely do I actually blame myself for my loss. More often than not, I will attribute the loss to a bad day or my opponent being better than me with the particular character he had than I am with the character I used. I've even blamed the controller for not responding as well as it should.

In any case, I constantly feel the need to compare myself to similar others to evaluate my abilities as a player of any game we play. This also extends to my life as well, as one would expect. I just figured I'd give you an insight to how competitive I am/we are when playing games.



Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7, 117-140.

Gilbert, D. T., Giesler, R. B., & Morris, K. A. (1995). When comparisons arise. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 227-236.

Mezulis, A. H., Abramson, L. Y., Hyde, J. S., & Hankin, B. L. (2004). Is there a universal positivity bias in attributions? A meta-analytic review of individual, developmental, and cultural differences in the self-serving attributional bias. Psychological Bulletin, 130, 711-747.

Schlenker, B. R., Weigold, M. F., & Hallam, J. R. (1990). Self-serving attributions in social context: Effects of self-esteem and social pressure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58, 855-863.