What measuring gives you

Suppose you sit an exam and get 64 per cent. You can't tell whether that's good until you hear what everyone else got. If most people scored in the forties, you'll be pleased for a week. If most scored in the eighties, you won't mention it.

In 1954 the psychologist Leon Festinger built a theory on that ordinary fact, and the subject has been studied ever since. He proposed that people have a drive to evaluate their own opinions and abilities, because acting on a wrong estimate of yourself can be costly. Where there's an objective test, people use it. Where there isn't, they look at other people.

Most of adult life has no objective test. Nobody marks your career, your home or your parenting, and nobody tells you whether you're doing all right for thirty-eight. So you look sideways at the nearest people, and you read your position off them. You're using the only instrument you've been given, and there's nothing vain in that.

It does real work, too. Comparing tells you whether your pay is fair for the job you do. It shows you what's possible, as when a friend retrains at forty and you realise that people can. It can warn you that you've let something slide. Now and then it gives you comfort.

It's also automatic. In two studies published in 1995, Daniel Gilbert and his colleagues found that people compared themselves with someone even when they knew the comparison could tell them nothing. They then corrected for it afterwards, when they were able to. The researchers concluded that comparing may be spontaneous and unintentional, and that it happens even when people think it's illogical. You don't decide to compare. You compare, and then, if you have the chance, you decide what to make of it.

So I won't ask you to stop. You'd fail, and you'd lose something useful along the way. If a book tells you to stop comparing yourself with others, it's asking you to stop doing something you never decided to do.

The trouble starts with how the instrument gets used day to day.

In 1992 Ladd Wheeler and Kunitate Miyake asked 94 students to record every comparison they made for two weeks. Comparing upwards, with someone better off, lowered how the students felt. Comparing downwards raised it. A bad mood beforehand led to upward comparisons more often than to downward ones. When the students already felt low, they tended to look at people who were doing better.

The largest summary I know of was published in 2018 and pulled together more than sixty years of experiments. When people were offered a choice, they showed a strong preference for looking upwards. And the usual result of any comparison was contrast, which means seeing yourself as further from the other person than you did before. The authors end by asking why people keep choosing to look upwards when the likeliest outcome is to feel deflated.

My answer, and it's an interpretation, is that looking upwards feels like finding out. You think you're collecting information about where you stand, and information seems worth a bit of discomfort. The next five chapters are about how little information you're actually getting.

One distinction will help from here on. Some comparisons are ones you run. You have a question, such as whether your salary is in line with the market. You go and get real figures, you get an answer, and it's over. That kind of comparing is useful and I've no quarrel with it.

The dip is a comparison that runs you. It had no question, unless you count "how is my whole life going against hers". Its evidence was four hours in somebody's kitchen. And it didn't end when you got home. That second kind of comparing is the one this book is about.