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  3. Comparing Yourself to Others: It’s Not All Bad "To compare is to despair," the saying goes, and I’ve generally found it to b

Comparing Yourself to Others: It’s Not All Bad "To compare is to despair," the saying goes, and I’ve generally found it to b

admin2012-05-28  30
问题                 Comparing Yourself to Others: It’s Not All Bad
    "To compare is to despair," the saying goes, and I’ve generally found it to be true. If I try hard enough (and sometimes even if I don’t) I can usually find someone who performs better or has more. And I can feel bad about it.
    I objectively know that my own life is pretty good, but this upward comparison, as economists and psychologists call it, can somehow dim my own accomplishments. "Comparison is rife with danger, but it’s understandable why we do it," said Heidi Grant Halvorson, a social psychologist. "We’re human beings and we naturally seek information."
    One way to get information, Ms. Halvorson said, is to turn to experts. Another way is to look at those around us.
    And often what we see in our neighborhood or community is more important, in our minds, than anything else. Economic studies have shown, for example, that once they make a certain amount of money to cover basics, most people care more about relative, rather than absolute, income. That is, most of us feel better if we make, say, $100,000 if the majority of our neighbors make $75,000 than if we earn $150,000 when most of our friends bring in $200,000.
    One such study, "Neighbors as Negatives: Relative Earnings and Well-Being", published in 2005 in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, found that "higher earnings of neighbors were associated with lower levels of self-reported happiness." The paper cites the oft-quoted saying by the economist and philosopher John Stuart Mill: "Men do not desire to be rich, but to be richer than other men."
    Erzo F. P. Luttmer, the author of the study and an associate professor of economics at Dartmouth College, said in a telephone interview that neighbors "influence what you think is a normal lifestyle, and you struggle to keep up."
    We’re often told to avoid comparing, but this is both difficult and not necessarily wise advice in all situations.
    Ms. Halvorson, who is also author of the book Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals, said we needed to think about why we were seeking the information. "Upward comparison can be punishing and make you feel terrible," she said. "But you can also look upward to learn."
    If we feel bad, for example, about how well we just played in a game of tennis, we can check out those who play worse to make ourselves feel better, and avoid watching the semi-pros on the other court. Or, if we believe that we can improve and learn by looking at others — and not just feel inferior about playing worse — then we can watch the better players.
    There are also pros and cons to comparing ourselves with people worse off than ourselves. It’s not good if we’re just trying to gain a sense of superiority or avoiding challenging ourselves to do better. But such downward comparisons can remind us of our own fortune. They can also help us when we think about the things we regret but we cannot change.
    As part of a study co-written by Isabelle Bauer, a clinical psychologist in Toronto, 104 people of various ages were asked to complete a survey about their greatest misgivings — choosing the wrong career path, or failing to make amends to someone who passed away or marrying the wrong person.
    The study found that those who felt that other people had regrets that were "more" or "much more" severe reported an increase in positive emotions when reassessed four months later compared with those who said that other people’s regrets were "less" or "much less" severe.
    "If you can’t change what you did, then downward social comparison helps us gain perspective," Ms. Bauer said. "And those people are able to move on and re-engage in other goals. If you compare upward about things you can’t change, then you seem to just feel stuck." But those who compared themselves downward and had the opportunity to do something about their regrets didn’t feel any more positive over time, she said.
    Comparisons can also serve as a reality check, particularly when speaking about money.
    My colleague Ron Lieber, for example, wrote about NetworthIQ, a site that allows people to anonymously post their own net worth. Would we be happier and healthier, he asked readers, if we knew the net worth of our friends, colleagues and neighbors?
    The overwhelming response was no. As one commenter put it: "I am sickened by the idea of calculating one’s ’net worth’ in terms of money. It’s good to have savings and it’s good to have a nest in which one can nestle when one exceeds productive years. However, to express your worth in terms of the ’how much?’ question is one more step toward dehumanization. I’d rather figure out my net worth in terms of how much I am worth to the world in which I live."
    Not everyone feels that way, of course, and plenty of people have posted their profiles on NetworthIQ.com.
    ING Retirement, a United States-based division of the Dutch financial services group, a few years ago introduced INGCompareME.com, which allows you to anonymously type in your profile — your age, income, gender and marital status.
    Then you answer some personal finance questions, like the amount of money you’ve put aside for retirement, your mortgage payments, what you think you’ll need to save to retire comfortably and so on. You are then instantly compared with your peers.
    I answered some of the questions and seemed pretty average. I guess I was pleased our retirement savings were slightly higher than those of the other 1,071 people who answered the question with a similar profile, but I also wasn’t sure if I should be. Might it just mean that all of us are saving too little? Was I getting a false sense of security?
    Not at all, said Denis-Martin Monty, vice president of emerging product development at ING Retirement. Rather, it is a useful tool to get us to think about things we often don’t want to — like how much (or little) we’ve put away for retirement.
    The site was initially tested among 28,000 employees of ING’s larger clients. When asked at the end of the survey, 64 percent of those who measured themselves chose to take some sort of positive action, like enroll in a retirement plan or increase their savings rate.
    Mr. Monty also pointed out that studies show that most of us think we’re above average, what he called the Lake Wobegon effect.
    "We tend to overestimate where we stand in comparison to other people," he said. So people aren’t necessarily looking at how much more they’re actually saving than other people, he said, but how much more they thought they were saving.
    The site recently hit the million-user mark, Mr. Monty said.
    David Laibson, a professor of economics at Harvard University, who has looked at the impact of providing peer information on retirement savings decisions (it can be helpful, but not always) agreed that such comparisons can serve a purpose.
    "Comparisons to large groups of peers are often useful," he said. "It’s never the final word on what I should do, but it does give me food for thought."
    I doubt most of us are ever going to stop comparing ourselves with others. The most important point to keep in mind, however, is as Ms. Halvorson said: "There’s a lot of imperfect comparison going on. We never see the whole picture."
According to Ron Lieber’s article, many people thought that knowing the net worth of others
选项 A、helped check their spending
B、had influenced their lifestyle
C、was the source of their misery
D、would not make them happier
答案D
解析 第15段提到，我的同事Ron Lieber报道过NetworthIQ……他向读者提出这样的问题：如果知道了朋友、同事和邻居们的实际资产，我们会活得更加健康快乐吗?第16段首句给出了回答；绝大多数人给出的答案是“不会”。也就是说，根据Ron Lieber的报道，很多人认为知道别人(即朋友、同事和邻居们)的实际资产并不能使他们更快乐，故答案为[D]。[C]是针对I am sickened by the idea of calculating one’s net worth’设的干扰项。
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