Social Comparison Shapes Risky Decision Making: Mechanisms and Boundary Conditions

Abstract

Risky decision making does not occur in a social vacuum. When evaluating risky options, individuals consider not only their own absolute gains and losses but also the outcomes, performance, and social positions of others. In recent years, research at the intersection of social comparison and risky decision making has moved beyond asking whether social comparison affects risk taking to examining how social reference points are formed, why different comparison outcomes produce divergent or even opposite effects on risk taking, and which psychological mechanisms underlie these effects. Drawing on social comparison theory, prospect theory, relative deprivation theory, and risk-sensitivity theory, this review synthesizes the relevant literature and proposes an integrative framework comprising social reference-point reconstruction, relative-state evaluation, motivational transformation, and risk adjustment. The framework posits that social comparison incorporates others’ outcomes into the individual’s value-representation process, thereby recoding absolute gains and losses as relative social gains or social losses. Individuals then evaluate their position in terms of comparison direction, relative distance, and the changeability of that distance, and adjust risky behavior through mechanisms such as relative deprivation, regret, competition, and status-restoration motives. Characteristics of the comparison target, the magnitude of the gap, attainability, socioeconomic status, and risk domain further constitute important boundary conditions. Future research should move from static, exogenously imposed laboratory comparisons toward dynamic, self-selected, and networked social comparisons, while integrating computational modeling, longitudinal designs, and real-world behavioral data to clarify the dynamic processes through which social comparison shapes risky decision making.