Investigating the impact of social comparison on attentional control strategy

If you were at the grocery store looking for your favorite type of cereal, how would you choose to search for it? Although we may utilize a strategy to find the box more efficiently, such as only looking for features unique to it, research has shown we are often suboptimal in the search strategies we choose. Crucially, optimality requires effort not everyone is motivated to expend. However, social comparisons, which compare one person to another, can motivate task improvement, though it is unclear if this can translate to strategy use during visual search tasks. As a result, we explored whether upward or downward social comparisons could increase optimal strategy use by modulating motivation to expend effort. In the present study, we employed the Adaptive Choice Visual Search (ACVS), one task designed to measure strategy choices during visual search (ACVS; Irons & Leber, 2016). We randomly assigned online participants to one of three possible conditions: an upward, lateral, or downward comparison condition. At the halfway point of the ACVS, we compared participant reaction times to a bogus peer average that framed participants as slightly slower, about the same, or slightly faster, respectively. Our results showed no significant difference in optimality between conditions. However, it is possible the ACVS, as well as our experienced online participants, were not best suited for these manipulations. Although we found no evidence that social comparisons influence strategy use, future work may explore in-person data collection, as well as other visual search tasks, to investigate if any interactions do exist. No embargoAcademic Major: Public Affair