New study explores social comparison in early childhood
It has been shown (and probably experienced by all of us) that performing worse than our peers on a particular task results in negative self-esteem and poorer subsequent performance on the same task. How people respond when their peers perform better than they do has been studied in a variety of age groups and it turns out that preschoolers have thicker skin than adults do! Previous research has shown that preschoolers (4-5 year old children) maintain positive self-evaluations and high levels of performance even when they see that their peers have out-performed them. This is thought to occur because young children believe that achievement differences between themselves and their peers are adaptable; in other words, they think that if they try harder, they will be able to do as well as their peers in the future.