Contents
What brings us acquaintance with more successful people? There are two theories that give completely different answers to this question. Details and explanations.
The first of them is that such acquaintances can bring considerable practical benefits and are generally unambiguously useful (they represent the so-called “social capital”), and, in turn, their presence has a positive effect on the psychological state.
However, another thing is also possible – a person can constantly compare himself with more successful and wealthy acquaintances, which, probably, will not have the best effect on his self-esteem and potentially even lead to depression.
Associate Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University (USA), Lijun Song analyzed the data to find out how the socioeconomic status of a person’s friends and acquaintances is related to their tendency to depression and whether this relationship depends on the cultural context. To do this, they used data from a social capital survey conducted in 2004-2005 in the United States and China, in which several thousand people were interviewed. In America, the survey was conducted by telephone, in China – during a personal conversation. The age of the respondents ranged from 21 to 64 years old, all of them either worked at the time of the survey or had work experience in the past, on average, all participants had a fairly high level of education.
Read more:
- Work and personal life: how to find a balance?
In China, as a more “collectivist” society where mutual assistance is valued, it was originally assumed that meeting and connecting with people of high socioeconomic status would generally have a positive impact on mental health. And in the United States, where independence and self-sufficiency are highly valued, such influence will be less pronounced. On the other hand, the Chinese, whose culture is focused on self-improvement, are more likely to compare themselves with people of higher status, and Americans, for whom self-assertion is important, are more likely to compare themselves with those who are below them on the social ladder.
It was found that in China (the study in this country was conducted in cities), acquaintance with high-status people had a negative effect on mental health. This connection was noted in those cases when a large part of the social circle of a person consisted of people with high status, and also when he knew only a few such people, or he had many acquaintances whose status could only be called high in comparison with his own. Leung Song notes that, despite the collectivist values of Chinese culture, constantly comparing yourself to more successful people clearly has a negative impact on the psyche.
Read more:
- Friendship is when you forget about protection
For Americans, having acquaintances of high (or comparatively high) status may also, in some cases, exacerbate depressive states. However, in this country, the factor of social capital also played an important role: in general, a large number of acquaintances with a high socioeconomic status rather contributed to the improvement of the general psychological state of a person, but if a person’s social circle consisted mainly of people with a lower status, he had, on average, more pronounced symptoms of depression.
Подробнее см. L. Song «Does who you know in the positional hierarchy protect or hurt? Social capital, comparative reference group, and depression in two societies». Social Science & Medicine, vol. 136-137, July 2015.