Abstract
Social and temporal comparisons inform self-evaluation. In educational and work settings, social comparison information seems to affect performance self-assessments more strongly than temporal comparison information. We investigated whether this “higher assigned priority of social comparison information” (HAPSCI) also occurs in people with symptoms of depression, a condition associated with aberrant feedback processing. In a false feedback experiment, we studied the effects of social and temporal comparison information on self-assessments in a sample of N=159 individuals with dysphoria. Participants received concurrent social and temporal comparison feedback on their cognitive performance in a visuospatial 2-back task, which was either favorable (improvement over time or outperforming other participants) or unfavorable (deterioration or being outperformed). Only temporal comparison feedback affected performance self-assessments, while only unfavorable social comparison feedback impacted objective performance. Our results suggest that HAPSCI may not generalize across populations. Individuals with depressive symptoms might be more receptive to temporal than social comparison feedback. We discuss how appraisal of the motivational significance of comparison outcomes, sample characteristics, and experimental procedures may shape effects on self-evaluation.