You finish a project, hit a milestone, or completed a grueling run. For about 3 seconds, you feel a sense of genuine accomplishment. You pick your phone up to check a newsfeed, see someone younger, faster, or just objectively more polished doing what you just did at triple scales; the feeling is gone.

The achievement is the same. The quality of the work did not suddenly deteriorate. What has changed is the reference point.

Most people think that social comparison is an insecurity problem. That the root is a faulty internal reference to your privilege, success, etc. That it can be fixed by practicing gratitude and positive self-talk.

The reality that neuroscience and behavioral biology have uncovered is far more bleak: that relative social rank is encoded and used by the body as a survival metric, and that our neurochemical motivation apparatus regulates based on this metric.

The Contrast Effect

In behavioral neuroscience, dopamine is rarely about the attainment of some inalienable good. Instead, it is a neurotransmitter that encodes prediction error. An unexpected reward. The difference between what you predicted and what actually happened. When something better than expected comes our way, dopamine is released; reinforcing our behaviors by telling us, on a neurochemical level, that this was a worthy investment of time and energy.

The danger with this is that our nervous system encodes “better” almost exclusively in contrast.

When primates and humans evaluate an outcome, the brain is not primarily concerned with whether this outcome fulfills some lowest theoretical threshold of acceptability. We evaluate outcomes on a sliding relative scale. When fMRI scans are taken of social rewards, the contrast between outcomes of relative superiority within a given social group is far more interesting to the brain than the absolute value win. Earning $50 feels rewarding until you discover the person sitting next to you was handed $100 for the same task.

The absolute value win is the same. The neurochemical response is drastically reduced.

When you constantly expose your perceptual system to hyper-polished, top-decile outcomes, your brain recalibrates such that every output you make feels like a negative prediction error. That is, objectively worse than it should be. This will, over time, reduce one’s willingness to put in effort.

This is how self-efficacy breaks down. Albert Bandura defined self-efficacy as an individual’s perception of their ability to execute behaviors necessary to produce specific performance attainments. If the neural machinery responsible for reinforcing performance is consistently signaling to you that an action is not rewarding, your brain will adopt the very reasonable position that there is no reason to continue doing these actions.

The Useful Distinction: Evaluative Comparison vs. Diagnostic Comparison

The problem with comparison is not that people do it. We evolved a complex comparison framework to evaluate ourselves against others. Without social comparison, animals cannot have a sense of danger, or know how to behave within a group dynamic. The distinction is between evaluative versus diagnostic comparison.

Evaluative comparison asks “who is winning?” It looks at an outcome, pulls an emotional judgment about status or self-worth from it. This type of judgment always strips agency away from you – someone, somewhere, is always winning by a greater degree.

Diagnostic comparison asks the much more interesting question of “what mechanism produced that result?” Someone else’s outcome is used as technical data about how something can be achieved. The rank and privilege that come with social outcomes are stripped away, leaving pure mechanics.

When evaluative comparison is encoded, dopamine gets shut off; it sees the outcome as a threat and a demotion relative to your current status. This type of comparison kills self-efficacy.

Through diagnostic comparison, self-efficacy beliefs can be built by exposing the mechanics that underpinned a superior outcome.

An Experiment: The 24-Hour Diagnostic Shift

For the next week, be aware of the exact moment when a comparison triggers that familiar, flat feeling in you. When it does, instead of trying to ignore or recontextualize the thought, perform the following mental pivot:

Catch the status judgment. Name the specific thought your mind just told you. Something along the lines of “they’re 3 years ahead of me,” or “my work looks amateurish next to this.”

Strip the identity away. Ask yourself, “if I remove my ego and their status from this observation, there is one thing different about how they did this relative to me. What is it?”

Extract one mechanic of difference. Did they organize their work differently? Did they edit more harshly? Did they simplify where you did not?

Close the tab right then. The moment you’ve either identified a mechanic that you can learn or realized there was none (and it was just a curated piece of work), disengage from the feed. Don’t spend any more time in it.

If there was no mechanic to learn, treat it like metabolic waste and move on.

A Caveat

In social comparison research, much of the work done is lab-based and uses subjective reporting about general life satisfaction, which does not necessarily encode well to long-term reference point adaptation. We can’t open up a dial and say “here is how much your dopamine dropped by looking at these highlight reels.” The human nervous system is incredibly complex and there are countless confounding variables that come into play with sleep, genetics, and baseline environment.

Still, the core message stands: your motivation system cannot function well if its reference point always produces a prediction error.

Protect the reference point, and the capacity to act will take care of itself.

The research

Fliessbach, K., Phillipps, C. B., Trautner, P., Schnabel, M., Elger, C. E., Falk, A., & Weber, B. (2007). Social comparison affects reward-related brain activity in the human ventral striatum. Science, 318(5854), 1305-1308.

Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. W. H. Freeman.

Schultz, W. (2016). Dopamine reward prediction-error signalling: A two-component response. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 17(3), 183-195.