Unhealthy Comparisons to Promote Healthy Behavior? Exploring the Impact of Social Comparison Strategies in Personal Informatics.

要旨

Previous work on Social Comparison Theory shows that comparing oneself to others can lead to negative self-perceptions and rumination, reducing self-confidence. Despite these harmful effects, social comparisons are frequently used as engagement strategies in personal informatics systems, such as health and wellness apps. There is limited understanding of how users perceive these comparisons and their impact on wellbeing. To address this, we reviewed the Top 50 Health & Wellness smartphone applications to analyse implemented comparison strategies and the metrics such comparisons are used for. We conducted an online vignette study (n=192) and an interview study (n=12) to further explore the impact of social comparisons on users. Our study shows that comparisons in personal informatics motivate users but simultaneously lead to negative emotions (e.g., inferiority, disappointment), potentially leading to obsessive thoughts and overtraining. Based on our findings, we propose design guidelines for implementing social comparison features that prioritise users’ wellbeing.

著者
Daphne van Zandvoort
Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands
Marloes Vredenborg
Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands
Marit Bentvelzen
Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands
DOI

10.1145/3706598.3713737

論文URL

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713737

動画

会議: CHI 2025

The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2025.acm.org/)

セッション: Fostering Broad Engagement

G418+G419
6 件の発表
2025-05-01 18:00:00
2025-05-01 19:30:00
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