COMM 168 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Social Comparison Theory, Breast Cancer, Mammography
Document Summary
Severity of threat (want moderate severity) have to feel like it"s something that will actually happen to them. Susceptibility to threat (want high susceptibility) the more you make susceptibility more apparent, the more attention they will pay to it. Social comparison theory - we tend to compare ourselves to other people in our comparison groups. People who we think are like us on a specific issue or context. The more similar they are, the more weight we give them in assessing what we should do. Comparison groups offer guidance on attitudes and behavior. We look to other people in our comparison group to tell us how to act and how we should feel about certain things. If people are not in our comparison groups, their actions/feelings carry less weight. See something happen and they don"t act. Uncertainty about what"s going on go with the decision that requires us to do the least (because we are risk-aversive)
