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Social comparison and the personal-group discrimination discrepancy

2 This chapter is about the correspondence between the psychology and social reality of devalued group membership. Well-being and the subjective satisfaction with life is, at best, modestly related to the objective conditions in which that life takes place. Often, members of minorities or otherwise devalued groups experience similar levels of self-esteem as members of objectively more privileged groups (for a review, see Crocker & Major, 1989). More surprisingly, they report very low levels of personal discrimination even if they are fully aware of the extent to which their group is discriminated (Crosby, 1982). Thus, it would appear that they perceive themselves as less vulnerable to discrimination than the average member of their group. This discontinuity between judgments of discrimination for self and group has been called the personal-group discrimination discrepancy or PGDD (Crosby, 1982; Taylor, Wright & Porter, 1994). It is a very robust effect that is found in a wide variety The purpose of this chapter is to elaborate on prior work examining the role of social comparison processes in personal and group judgments of discrimination. Prior work has argued that the perceptions of both are determined by the choice of comparison standards. In this chapter we also consider the hypothesis that is being tested with respect to the comparison other and we elaborate what goals and motivations are involved in the social comparison. One of the most significant consequences of social comparison activities is that they can alter what people feel they deserve, whether they feel discriminated against, and what the relevant social categories are that should be considered. This chapter highlights some cognitive and motivational factors that lead to preferring certain social comparison targets over others, the conditions leading to testing either similarity or dissimilarity hypotheses when comparing the self or the ingroup to these targets, and the consequences that this has for self-and group-evaluations in the context of discrimination. The first part of this chapter focuses on personal discrimination and examines why and how social comparison processes contribute to people's 3 low sense of personal vulnerability to discrimination. The second part of this chapter concentrates on group discrimination and considers why and how social comparison processes contribute to people's perception of group discrimination and to a sense of relative group deprivation. The argument developed below is threefold. First, we draw on prior research to argue that cognitive and motivational factors lead different comparison standards to …