Strangers as friends or Friends as strangers?

There is a famous dialogue from the movie 3 Idiots; it’s a Bollywood movie (I highly recommend it!): “When your friend fails you feel bad, but when that friend is the first on an exam, you feel worse.” While the audience might have discarded the dialogue as a joke during the movie, psychological studies show that this statement might actually be true.

Studies show and even as we observe our daily life happenings, that social comparison- the act of comparing oneself socially and against perceived social norms, suggests that a person may suffer as a result of someone else performing better than him/her. Haven’t we all (except those highly moral souls who claim that they gain happiness even in their sufferings) had this feeling once in our lifetime of feeling really bad when a competitor out-performed us? And try to be honest (in private atleast), hasn’t that bad feeling aggravated when you saw that your best friend outperformed you or for that matter, even your sibling? You may want to hate me right now for having said the previous line, but there have been studies which do show that closer the relationship, greater the suffering when social comparison is considered. But, social reflection on the other hand suggests that one may benefit as a result of others’ good performance and closer the relationship, greater the benefit. So how does one determine whether social comparison or social reflection occur between friends and strangers?    

Tesser suggests that occurrence of social comparison or reflection is based on the relevance of the task and performance domain of the person in question. If the domain is essential to the person’s identity, social comparison will occur, and if the domain is not central to the person’s identity, social reflection will occur. In their study, Tesser and Smith (1980) told the participants that the task to be performed was either of high relevance to participants (for example relating to their verbal skills and leadership) or low in relevance (not relating to their identity at all). The participants were then told that they had done poorly on the task and were asked to give clues to their friend or stranger who had come with them to the study and who would be performing a similar task. As predicted, participants of the high-relevance group tended to give difficult clues (the clue-sheet had the clues numbered according to the increasing difficulty of the clue) to their friends than to strangers. The participants of the low-relevance group gave easy clues to their friends as compared to strangers.

So does that mean that our friends are not truly our friends? That our best friends, the people whom we say as can risk our lives with would eventually wish to sabotage us when the situation demanded and that too, over a stranger? On simple tasks, maybe. I am pretty sure that when my sister gave a speech which received more recognition than the one I had given the previous year on the same occasion, I felt bad. But when it comes down to her achievements in academics and other important things, I still am the happiest big sister ever!  

So folks, don’t be saddened by the fact that your friends may sometimes give preference to strangers over you, for you might have done that on numerous occasions yourself! But just as a side-note, Best friends do exist (I absolutely love my Best Friends and hope that they don't hate me after reading this.. lol) :D

Happy (be/-ing) friending,

Nupur