Developmental Comparison Stage Theory

1 Developmental-comparison theory and self-assessment

Developmental-Comparison Theory and Self-Assessment

Herman Ong

Upper Iowa University


摘要

很多年來，當談及性格或特質，人們都會用心理分析中的童年性期 (Psychosexual Stage

theory)，又或是用社會心理分析中 (Psychosocial Stage theory) 的發展危機去解釋。不過，

這些理論未必能給予一個全面的視野去了解一個人的特質以至其行為，而本人就正正是

這一類特別例子。透過自我評估 (self-assessment)的方法，我發現自我概念以至特質都

是和 Leon Festinger 於 1954 年所提出的「社會比較理論」(social-comparison)相關。事

實上，社會比較或鬥爭不只單單作用於成年期，而是發生於人生所有的階段，包括「嬰

兒期」、「童年期」及「青少年期」等等。以我經驗相提並論，社會比較加強了自己評

價及自尊，扮演著調度發展階段理論及性格的中介角色。權力(Power)，身份(Identity)，

道德(Morality)及統一性(Uniformity)通通都經由與父母、朋輩以至社會系統之間的社會

比較後所產生。而我的經驗當中，「過多勝利」(Over-winning)或是「永遠失敗」(Ever-losing)

的經驗都會造成獨有的特質如「支配人格」(Dominant)和「自卑人格」(Inferiority)﹐甚

或至在不同的成長階段中衝擊我的性格。以至提及的都會透過剛剛提出的「成長比較理

論」(Developmental comparison stage theory)作評估及研究。


Abstract

For many years, personality or trait usually have explained in terms of sex-experience in

childhood or developmental crisis as suggested by psychosexual and psychosocial stage

theories respectively. However, these stage theories may not represent the whole view of

one’s traits as well as his behavior. My personal experience actually is one of these special

cases. Through the self-assessment, I found my self-concept as well as traits was driven by

the social-comparison and competition which termed by Leon Festinger in 1954. In fact,

social-comparison doesn’t solely affect the adulthood but generally to all stages including

infancy, childhood and adolescence. Compare to my experience, it is sound to propose that

social-comparison enhances the self-evaluation as well as self-esteem; it moderates the

developmental stage theory to personality. Power, identity, morality and uniformity are all

developed by social-comparison with parent, peers as well as system respectively.

Over-winning or ever-losing experience leaded me to possess the traits such as “dominant”

and “inferiority” as well as impact my personality in different stages. All of these would be

assessed and examined by proposed developmental-comparison theory


Developmental-comparison theory and self-assessment

“I am competitive”; “I am considerate”; “I am obstinate”; “I am self-critical”; “I am

inferiority”; “I am firm”; “I like power”; “I am conservative”; “I am decisive”, “I am

unappreciative” and “I feel different from others”.

In order to understand my self-concept and trait, I took an informal test – “Who am I /

W-A-Y” invented by Bugental in 1964. As suggested by the test, those self-descriptive

statements I mentioned above were come first to my mind in a second after start thinking my

“self”. In general, one’s personality or self-concept would be explained in terms of

sex-related childhood experience (Freud, 1917) or crisis during the life experience (Erikson,

1950). However, I found my life is a little bit different in which it is not driven apparently by

sex or social crisis as usual, instead, it is underlain by the experience of “Comparison and

competition”. Because of the “comparison”, I am likely engaged in competition, this

engagement is strong enough to be viewed as aggressive. Because of the “comparison”, I

knew the uniqueness of myself, strength and weakness, and become self-critical and feel

different from others. Because of the “comparison”, I am less influenced by others but myself.

This is why I am firm and obstinate”. Recap to my memory, it seems I have engaged in

different battles and comparisons at all time, such as competed with siblings in a single parent

family; competed with gifted classmates in a band 1 school and competed with aggressive


partners in a big corporate. Accordingly, my temperaments as well as behaviors seem have

shaped little by little through the “comparison” or “competition” throughout the life span.

In fact, this plausible hypothesis leads me to doubt and examine the role and value of

comparison plays in personality formation as well as the general development of people. And

how this comparison works and implicates to the society. However, developmental process or

personality formation of people is complicated which cannot solely explain by one theory

(Santrock, 2009), to say nothing of comparison. Therefore, this study attempts to examine the

importance of comparison and competition in different developmental stage with the

integration of social-comparison theory (Festinger, 1954), evolutionary psychology (Darwin,

1859; Dawkins, 2010), psychosexual stage theory (Freud, 1917), psychosocial stage theory

(Erikson, 1950), cognitive developmental stage theory (Piaget, 1972) and attachment style

(Ainsworth, 1979) through the case study of my self-assessment. In additions, a new theory

“developmental-comparison stage theory” and its correlation with self-esteem will be

proposed and discussed.

Literature review

In this study, the term “comparison” is operated defined as “social-comparison”, a

concept which suggested by social psychologist Leon Festinger in 1954. According to

Festinger (1954), human have the innate drive to compare with similar others in order to

gather information to survive and self-evaluate. He stressed that self-evaluation of opinion


and ability is crucial to affect how person interacts with others. People who engage in

social-comparison more will have more opportunities to self-evaluation, more comprehensive

and accurate information about the self or others and result in stable personality. All of these

will modify people behavior as well as flipping the feedback from others.

However, the innate drive to compete is not exclusive to adulthood. For example,

some researchers found that older children viewed more frequent to others in exam when

compare with younger children (Butler, 1996). And most children out of 169 gifted children

favored competitive learning style rather than cooperative learning style (Clinkenbeard,

1989). These implicated that social-comparison should not be limited in adulthood but also

works in other developmental stages, such as childhood and adolescence as well. And this

hypothesis is also supported by evolutionary perspective in which it suggested that the core

mechanism of natural selection or sex selection is to retain one’s genes through the mean of

“competition” with others and environment (Darwin, 1859). Therefore, human, as one of

living things in the earth cannot get rid of this principle and live without competition. Rather

than that, human expressed the competition and comparison much more complicated than

other organisms. In fact, to animals, competition or comparison is only for the mating and

survive. But to human, despite sex and live, competitions represent the identity, power and

uniformity also. Hereinafter, we will examine how the comparison impact human

development through the battle to power, uniformity and identity.


Discussion

Stage one: Dominant versus enslaved (Battle for power)

The first stage of developmental-comparison occurs mainly from birth to early

childhood. At this stage, the major competitor to the baby is parent and caregiver. According

to Piaget’s cognitive developmental theory (1972), baby in or before preoperational stage is

ego-centrism, they will only concern and strive for their needs, therefore, some scholars said

that baby is the most selfish animal (Ridgway, 2006). The first battle of baby is to learn how

to control the external world in order to get the resource. For the baby, parent or care-giver is

the whole world, ammunition depot and shield. In order to survive, baby must use different

strategies and tricks to drive the attention from parent or caregiver and get what he wants,

such as crying (Zeskind, 2010), suckling (Blass, 1990) and attachment style (Ainsworth,

1979). Through these processes, baby learns what and who they can or cannot control

through the different trials and magnitudes of testing the parent’s bottom line. For example,

baby may use different attachment style such as avoidance, attached or disorganized to tempt

the extent from environment favoring their life (ibid.). However, this battle will lead the baby

to dominant or enslaved style. If the parent over-cares to every attempts of baby, baby will

perceive they are superior and dominate the parent or caregiver. On the other hands, if parent

ignores the baby whatever he did, the baby will perceive they are inferior and enslaved by the

parent or caregiver. Once the strata formed as superior or inferior, the communication or


influence of this battlefield (parent-to-baby) will be ceased throughout the life span (Festinger,

1954); No inter-dependence is expected at this relationship later on, it would only be the case

either son/daughter-controls-father/mother or father/mother-controls-son/daughter. This is

also consistent with the stage one in psychosocial stage theory which suggested by Erik

Erikson in 1950: Trust versus mistrust. Erikson proposed that baby would become unpleasant

to the external world if they failed to experience the love and care from parent.

Interestingly, this may explain the prevalence of coddled kids in Hong Kong. After

90s, children generally birth with better nurturing environment and more resource. Less labor

force is needed and the family belief changed from collectivism to individualism leaded the

young couple favor one kid policy. However, this results in two problems: one is

“hyper-parent” and another is “coddled kid”. In order to avoid any mental or physical

threaten to the only-kid, hyper-parent generally spoils and cossets their kid. Thus coddled kid

experiences no competition with parent, cease the interaction and dominate them gradually.

In contrary, children who experience ignored, abused, disrespected or neglected from their

authoritarian parent may also cease the interaction with their parent. They feel inferior and

never win in front of their parent result in learned helplessness and introverted.

These studies were found to match my personal experience. Recap to my infant

memory, I born in a single parent family. However, I lived in a big family in which 6 to 8

aunties and uncles served as caregivers to upbring me. Therefore, I was not afraid of losing


any attention or resource since all of my caregivers including my mother would fulfill what I

wanted. And I was usually sick and weak in infancy, thus they paid extra attention on my

status and health. Any crying or even poor in appetitive would drive them nervous and

cosseted me immediately. Toys, food, love and power, I was never short of. Thus, according

to the developmental-comparison theory, the battles to my mother and family relatives were

foreclosed and ceased immediately after I perceived I was the dominant one and hold the

absolute power in front of them. There had no necessary to compete with parent through a

hard-paid effort of crying or fussy in order to get the resource or attention. Those experiences

and perceptions resulted in my difficult temperaments as well as a control freak to my parent

and family relatives even now.

Stage two: Growth-focus versus goal-focus (Battle for uniformity)

This stage mainly occurs in childhood to late childhood in which children learn the

perspective-taking (Selman, 1982) with less ego-centrism and start evaluate themselves from

others’ perspective. At this stage, the major competitor to children is relative others and

children have a strong pressure to uniformity because they start to contact with the world

(Festinger, 1954). This pressure to uniformity is originated in history of human, the innate

drive to exchange the social information and blend in the population to protect themselves.

As fragile as children who just detached from parent, this is the only way they can do in order

to survive. There had a research conducted by Bulter in 1989 found that 10 years old children


tended to glance more to other peers’ work in drawing test than in younger children around 4

years old. This suggested the positive correlation between the age and social-referencing in

childhood. And this is also matched to the Piaget’s concrete operational stage (Piaget, 1972),

which suggested that egocentrism is reduced in age 7-12. Thus, this pressure to uniformity

pushes the children to compete and compare with others, such as sibling or mates in order to

find out the social standard to follow in an ambiguous world (Festinger, 1954). It implicates a

cultural difference in which some developed countries have higher expectation to ability, thus

the children in these countries have a higher standard to achieve while some under-developed

countries have lower expectation to ability, and their children have a lower standard to

achieve in order to blend in the population. Those expectations and standards the children

learnt is cultural specific and internalized as suggested by Lev Vygotsky in 1986.

However, the major difference of children to develop in this stage is the mean to

achieve. There have 2 means to achieve the uniformity which is “Growth-focus” and another

is “Goal-focus”. Growth-focused mean is the way children target to the self-growth and

self-improvement, result of losing or winning doesn’t impact but promote their understanding

to the ability gap between them. However, goal-focused mean is the way children target to

the win or lose; they perceived the standard of society is focused on “external factor” as result,

grade or number rather than the “internal factor” as ability as perceived by growth-focus

children. This finding also implicates the morality of children. According to the recent studies


in English university, students who were interested more in grade points are more likely to

cheat than the student who interested in learning (Newstead, Franklyn-Strokes & Armstead,

1996). Although Kohlberg (1958) didn’t explain in detail of the mechanism to jump from one

moral stage to another, I believe the social-comparison helps one to have more exposures in

moral dilemma and conflict, through the cycle of mean to uniformity, reward and punishment

and self-evaluation, people will have more opportunities to take other’s perspectives as well

as considering a bigger pictures of the world. Those are the criterions to step up in the moral

stages. Therefore, social-comparison should be one of the variables in Kohlberg’s moral

development.

By the same token, the over-winning or ever-losing experience in stage 2 will also

cause the cessation. Supposedly, children base on their ability to compare with others in order

to know the standard of others and self. However, some helicopter parents will over-assist

their children through different means which is not derived from the children’s intrinsic

ability, such as money, power or relationship. Despite this over-assistance leads the children

over-estimate their ability, this over-winning experience also ceased the inter-dependent

relationship between the children and sibling or peers with exaggerating the self-esteem.

Because there have no inter-dependent comparison once the superior or inferior strata are

formed between the children and peers. On the other hand, children who living in under-level

in social class or discriminated by peers found no way to success by the limitation of society.


Those would perceived learned helplessness through the ever-losing experience and result in

cut off the inter-dependent relationship with social others too. Those given superior or

inferior feeling will isolate the children from the society (Adler, 1932)

According to the developmental-comparison theory, I found my characteristic of

competitive, self-critical and higher-moral judgment was originated in the stage 2. In

childhood, my family broken due to the financial issue and I had to compete with my older

brother for any resources, such as academic, living or entertainment. However, in traditional

Chinese family, the scarce resource would prioritize to older sibling than to younger one,

besides he performed better in academic achievement. Therefore, I perceived the learned

helplessness as inferiority in front of my older brother up to now. However, limited resource

lead me engaged in more competition with others in school, this resulted in more

opportunities to evaluate self and others. Thus, I am considerate person. Nevertheless, the

ego-centrism developed in stage one was conflict with the inferior feeling in stage 2. In order

to pursue the former superiority back, I was being a “goal-focused” child who might use

whatever the mean to achieve my desire and got the resource, like cheating in exam or

stealing coins. This matched to the inferiority-to-superiority suggested by Alfred Adler in

1932. Fortunately, in 90s, academic achievement still depended solely on children’s

intelligence and effort. Parent usually won’t externally interrupt children academic

performance. Therefore, over-winning or ever-losing didn’t happen in my school life and I


tended to engage in more comparisons or competition with other as well as increasing the

evaluation of self and others. At that moment, my moral judgment gradually established and

self-reflected whether my “goal-focused” strategy was right or wrong.

Stage three: Uniqueness versus conformity (Battle for identity)

At this stage, it occurs mainly in adolescence to adulthood. One hand people suffered

from the pressure to uniformity in stage 2, on the other hand they have to strive uniqueness in

order to fulfill the biological need of sex selection (Dawkins, 2010). People at this stage

would battle with system and population for outstanding themselves. However, in general,

outstanding one’s self in population ever risk and threaten his life, for instance, being

attacked or isolated as well as losing the support from society. Thus people at the stage 3

have to decide their strategy: retain their gene by conforming to the population or outstands

their attractiveness as well as the chance of mating. This finding is perfectly matched to the

concept of “imaginary audience” suggested by Piaget (1972). According to Piaget, teenagers

always perceived they are being noticed and highlighted, and this perception drives them to

differentiate and feel uniqueness from others. Similar explanation derived from Erik

Erikson’s fifth stage of psychosocial stage theory: identity versus identity confusion (Erikson,

1950). Through the social-comparison with others, adolescence finds out who they are, what

the uniqueness they have and what they decide to do. Once people confirm to uniqueness,

they have the clear aspects of their own uniqueness and identity. However, identity confusion


or foreclosure may due to the inadequate social comparison as well as self-evaluation,

over-winning or ever-losing so far. Therefore, they would likely to engage in conforming

behavior to the society rather than being individualistic.

Due to the severe competitions and comparisons in my childhood, I had a strong

feeling to strive for the uniqueness and identity in my adolescence and young adulthood. Part

of my beliefs and traits, such as “I feel different”, “obstinate” and “firm” were emerged at

that moment because I know who I am and what I have to do rather than conforming to

general social expectation. I listen myself more than social others at stage three. More battles

in different occupations or academics I engaged, more distinctions and discrimination I had

for my identity, ability and pathway. This is a method of “self-subtraction” to subtract the

redundant social expectation, wrongly-focused ability and assumption but retain your core

organismic-self at the end (Rogers, 1951; Descartes, 1984).

Continuum of organismic-self, golden-self and social-self

Summarize the above findings and results of developmental-comparison; individual

who experiences the winning of social-comparison in stages would increase the self-esteem

while losing experience reduces the self-esteem. In fact, Figure 1a shows that the

developmental-comparison results in a continuum in which one end is organismic-self while

another opposition is social-self. Higher the self-esteem, closer to the organismic-self; Lower

the self-esteem, closer to the social-self. Although many researchers found that higher


self-esteem leads to success, overrated self-esteem implicates the ego-centrism and failed to

think from other’s point of view (Smith, 2008). Person with excessive self-esteem might do

whatever he wants to do even risk people life, such as Napoleon, Hitler etc. On the other hand,

insufficient self-esteem drives the people conform to society and become ego-dependent.

People with ego-dependent tend to follow and rely on the public without deeply consider

their real need. Besides, from the biological perspective, over-conformity in species may

narrow the diversity as well as reducing the resistance to disaster (Harris, 2006). Therefore,

the healthiest self is lie on middle of continuum called “golden-self” (Aristotle, B.C.). People

with the golden-self never win or lose at all time, thus they won’t form any superior or

inferior strata or ceased the inter-dependent relationship with family or society. They are

likely to engage in social-comparison and result in more opportunities to evaluate self and

others with appropriated self-esteem, neither excessive nor insufficient.

In fact, some researchers found that female’s self-esteem were highly correlated with

social-comparison after they saw an attractive or unattractive female photo (Jones &

Buckingham, 2005). And some scholars found that children in a higher competitive

environment do have a higher self-esteem (Guest, 2007). Accordingly, integrated these

findings in my result of self-assessment, it is sound to say that self-esteem as a moderator

variable between the social-comparison and one’s traits.


Limitation and conclusion

This study was limited by the external validity in which self-assessment lacks of

generalizing power and the result may not apply to others. Besides, competition and

comparison in development are new concept to study. Therefore, those findings are in

hypothetic and lack of supportive statistics. It suggests that following study shall conduct

more case studies in longitudinal basis in order to increase the validity as well as analysis the

secondary data to figure out the correlation between social-comparison and self-esteem

throughout the life span (Robins et al., 2002). All of these suggestions may help to

consummate the theory.

Through the self-assessment, I found social-comparison impact my life span not just

in adulthood, even infancy, childhood and adolescence. My traits actually were formed little

by little through the competition with parent in infancy, siblings and relative others in

childhood as well as the system in adulthood. While I had more engagements in


social-comparison, I had more opportunities to evaluate others and myself. In fact, these

evaluations impact the self-esteem result from the winning or losing. Over-winning

experiences made me feel ego-centrism and superior to my family as well as dominate them

up to now while more exposure to fair competitions strengthened my competitiveness in

childhood. Different magnitude of self-esteem represents a continuum in

developmental-comparison. People with excessive self-esteem are more likely to express

organismic-self and become ego-centrism, while people with lower self-esteem are more

likely to conform the society as ego-dependent. Only the people who neither over-winning

nor ever-losing can achieve the golden-self with appropriated self-esteem. Therefore, beyond

the explanation of personality in terms of sex or social interaction, social-comparison does

play a role in determining self-esteem as well as the traits.

However, in general, when scholars or psychologists study personality or traits, they

always neglect the innate drive of human which is “compete to adapt”. When integrated the

developmental-comparison theory into other developmental stage theories, such as Piaget’s

cognitive developmental theory, Freud’s psychosexual stage theory, Erikson’s psychosocial

stage theory or Vygotsky’s zone of proximal theory, it found that these theories can perfectly

work together. Innate drive to compete or comparison of human seems act as a moderator

between these theories to explain human personality and behavior. Therefore, we hope this


self-assessment study can inspire people to have an innovative perspective on understanding

individual’s traits as well as his behavior.


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Developmental Comparison Stage Theory