Saliency of social comparison dimensions

The present article discusses a theory of the saliency of social comparison dimensions and presents the results of an experiment about the effects of two different experimental situations on the saliency of exterior, task-related and socio-emotional dimensions. Saliency was operationalized with a variation of the multidimensional scaling paradigm proposed by Jones and Young (1972). The results show that by manipulating the situation, different dimensions can be made salient. As predicted, at a pretest exterior dimensions were most salient. At a posttest, task-related dimensions had become more salient after a task-oriented group-dynamic exercise than after a socio-emotional group-dynamic exercise. The theory and experiment date from before 1980. A connection is made with modern social comparison theory