Do you compete with yourself?

Did you know that People want their friends to notice them? When people refuse to accept their offers to help, it dismays them.

There has been study associated with Self Competence which suggests that

“Self-Competence Increases the Willingness to Pay for Social Influence”.

To test this hypothesis, they asked whether, and under what conditions, people are willing to forgo monetary reward purely for the sake of influencing others’ decisions.

• In 4 experiments, participants competed with a rival for influence over a client. They examined participants’ willingness to pay for influence on a trial-by-trial basis.
• Most participants sacrificed some of their real-life financial reward to increase their chance of being selected over their rival within the experiment.
• Participants did not pay to gloss over inaccurate advice; instead they paid to promote their competence after having given good advice that was ignored by the client.
• Theoretical works in social psychology have proposed that social rewards such as status and prestige have intrinsic value.

Neuroscientific evidence has supported this idea, claiming that people would use their material and social resources to enhance their abilities and position themselves as leaders.

People do not simply want to be a part of a group; they expend a massive quantity of time and cognitive effort striving to increase their social status and influence, comparing themselves to others and monitoring the behaviour of others.

Hopefully, this gives you some insights around Self-competence. What do you think, hackers?

You can learn more in-depth about it by accessing the original article from the Psych Newsletter.