When parents ask, "What grade did you get?" there is a common follow-up question: "So who got the highest grade?" Many educators select and publicly announce "the best student" in a class or school. Adults praise children for outperforming others. Sports tournaments award those who surpass others. The practice of making social comparisons is so common in daily life that the negative effects caused by social comparisons are usually ignored.
One well-known strategy to get rid of social comparisons is to provide children with participation awards, which means children get the same prize despite their performance. Such awards, however, may not abolish social comparisons. High-performing children may feel unfairly treated and look down on the latter group. More generally, those who receive unwarranted (无正当理由的) rewards may come to believe they deserve to receive the recognition.
How, then, can we make children feel proud of themselves and motivate them without the unwanted side effects? A better approach is to use temporal comparisons — encouraging children to compare themselves with their past self rather than with others.
Researchers recently conducted a study, where 583 children were asked to do a reading and writing exercise designed to influence the kind of comparisons they would make: social comparisons or temporal compared. Results showed children who compared themselves with others said they wanted to be superior to such people, while those who compared themselves with their past self said they wanted to improve rather than be superior. Temporal comparisons changed children's goals away from a desire for superiority and toward self-improvement.
What, then, can parents and teachers do with this knowledge? Parents and teachers can praise children's improvement over time to let them know they are making progress. Also, teachers can create learning contexts that track children's own progress over time, such as report cards that display their changes in learning and performance.
Of course, temporal comparisons are not a panacea (万灵药); we should never push children too much to improve themselves. The road toward self-improvement is paved with struggles and setbacks. Rather than making children feel bad for those failures, we should encourage them to learn from their imperfect past self — and thus help youngsters become better than before.
