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Updated: Jun 23, 2025

The Joint Effect of Social Comparison and Social Distance on Evaluation of Intertemporal Choice Outcomes in Event-related Potential Studies
Published on: August 25, 2023
The link between social comparison orientation and domain-specific risk-taking: exploring the mediating role of two
Yuqian Wang1, Andrew J Elliot2, Edmund Derrington3
1Reward, Competition and Social Neuroscience Lab, Department of Psychology, School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China.
Introduction:
Our recent research has demonstrated that social comparison orientation of ability (SCO-ability) is an antecedent of trait competitiveness (TC), and TC mediates the relation between SCO-ability and domain-specific risk-taking. TC is a multi-dimensional trait, therefore we sought to expand on prior research by examining whether SCO-ability predicted two distinct dimensions of TC: hypercompetitive orientation (HCO) and self-development competitive orientation (SDCO).
Methods:
We investigated how these different dimensions of TC mediated the relation between SCO-ability and both overall and domain-specific risk-taking in two correlational studies of 622 college students (313 males, mean age = 22.10, SD = 2.35) and 717 adult workers (368 males, mean age = 27.92, SD = 5.11).
Results:
We found that SCO-ability positively predicted HCO. Together, SCO-ability and HCO predicted overall risk-taking and risk-taking in the recreational and ethical domains in both samples. HCO mediated the relation between SCO-ability and both overall risk-taking and risk-taking in the recreational and ethical domains. Additionally, SCO-ability positively predicted SDCO. SCO-ability and SDCO mainly predicted risk-taking in the recreational domain in both studies. SDCO mediated the relation between SCO-ability and risk-taking only in the recreational domain.
Discussion:
Collectively, the findings above advance our understanding of the relation between competition and risk-taking by using differentiated measures of TC (HCO and SDCO). Our findings suggest that HCO is more strongly related to risk-taking than SDCO, thereby refining the possible role of SCO-ability and TC in predicting overall risk-taking and domain-specific risk-taking.
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