The relationship of social comparison and wellbeing

Our work focuses on three aspects of the mental process of social comparison (frequency, importance, preferred strategy) and their variability among the czech society. Our goal is to find which socidemographic groups have higher propensity to socially compare than others (we focus on sex, socioeconomic status, education and age). Higher propensity has implications on wellbeing, health and also negative implications on the individual and his environment (envy, scorn, depression etc.). At the same time we search for dimensions in which the differences between groups are salient. We hypothesize the increase of social comparison due to immediate, situational conditions (pandemic) and long-term cultural changes that are taking place in czehc republic. With the help of online questionnare and a representative sample of internet population of 1009 respondents we found out, that the negativne relationship of higher propensity and wellbeing (satisfaction with life, subjective health) does exist in czech society. We find that some comparison dimensions have stronger consequences on wellbeing - for example significant relationship between frequency of comparing selfs health and reported subjective health. Variability between sociodemographic groups has been confirmed. Women compare more often and upward..