Better and richer than me? The joint effect of performance and performance-related social comparison on goal-pursuit motivation

Nowadays, consumers increasingly use mobile apps such as Strava, Fitbit app, Nike Training Club, Duolingo, and WeChat Reading to facilitate goal pursuits in exercising, dieting, studying, working, and learning new skills. These apps not only offer support for users to work toward their goals but also embed features like performance rankings and social profiles to enhance community building and user engagement. These features frequently expose users to social comparisons of their performance in goal-related tasks (e.g., performance ranking) and other performance-related dimensions (e.g., age, gender, financial status). Prior research offers limited insights into how these performance and performance-related comparisons jointly influence consumers' goal-pursuit motivation. To address this gap, across four experiments involving one incentive-compatible study, we find that in the upward performance comparison (the comparison target has superior performance), the comparison target being inferior (vs. superior) on the performance-related dimension enhances consumers' self-threat, which increases consumers' goal-pursuit motivation. In the downward performance comparison (the comparison target has inferior performance), the comparison target being superior (vs. inferior) on the performance-related dimension enhances consumers' self-efficacy, which increases their goal-pursuit motivation.