SOCIAL COMPARISON IN CLIMBING
Photo of Eva Hammelmüller by Luigi Dellarole
Whether in climbing or in our day-to-day life, we all compare ourselves to others from time to time. Often we forget that this is a very natural and fundamentally human behaviour: we want to get better, stronger, faster, work smarter, learn more… And in order to know where we are at, we look around ourselves.
Am I stronger than her? Do I earn more money than him? Why is this climber able to send the route? How did he manage to get all this work done in one day? Why am I so much slower than everybody around me?
Whenever you talk to people about comparison, a common question is: how do I stop comparing myself? This implies that there are commonly felt negative consequences of comparing oneself.
Today we want to look at social comparison, its effect on us and our climbing, and approaches to stop comparison behaviours from a psychological viewpoint.
What is social comparison?
The theory of social comparison was first proposed by the American psychologist Leon Festinger in 1954. Even though this theory was established many years ago, it still is very popular in this field of psychological research. It says that we all have an innate drive to accurately appraise and "judge" ourselves within our social environment. In order to do so, we are looking for comparative standards aka we compare ourselves to others. Therefore this behaviour is not something we choose to do and most likely we are usually unaware of it. It is a natural, innate human behaviour that provides valuable information and shapes our self-perception, affective reactions, motivation and behaviour. At the same time, it is also influenced by cognitive, affective, and motivational factors.
If we look closely, we can find this process in all aspects of our lives. Depending on our age, our gender, our culture, our social media usage,… we all engage in it to a different degree.
Why do we compare ourselves?
One driving force behind us constantly comparing ourselves is motivation: our inherent desire to improve, to accurately evaluate and to maintain a positive image of ourselves. However, objective measures are not always available and, therefore, we need subjective measurements.
Another reason to engage in social comparison might be conversational. Let’s say we are talking to friends from the climbing gym. Your friend says: “Alex is a very athletic climber.” This implies that Alex is more athletic than other climbers. We compare Alex in the social context of climbing and conclude that he is more athletic than the average. This example shows that when we are talking to a specific group (here climbers) we define information in a relative manner.
Another important distinction to understand is that in psychology, we differentiate between upward and downward social comparisons. Both influence us in different ways but neither form of comparison is fundamentally bad nor better than the other.
Upward comparison means that we compare ourselves with other people who are "superior" to us, e.g. because they have a better skill-set, more knowledge, more experience, better results in a competition or have climbed harder stuff.
Downward comparison describes how we compare ourselves to people who are "inferior" to us, e.g. who are less skilled, less knowledgeable, climb weaker or have less experience than us.
These comparing behaviours can influence us in various ways:
When we are comparing ourselves to another climber who is less experienced compared to us, we might feel very good e.g. about our route reading ability compared to theirs. It might make us feel accomplished, successful and confident.
Usually people don’t experience negative side-effects from downward comparisons. Generally speaking, downward comparisons help us to maintain a positive image of ourselves. But we don’t get inspired or gain any valuable information out of it.
However, if we compare ourselves to a climber who has more experience and is superior in terms of their strength, coordination, technique and flexibility – we might not feel as accomplished, successful and confident.
There are two possible consequences of how we react to such a situation: we either judge our performance negatively compared to theirs, feel bad about ourselves and our self-worth takes a toll.
Or we are able to see this other climber as an inspiration and motivation to train harder and strive for improvement. We might analyse the difference in their strength, flexibility, coordinative,... abilities to ours – and get motivated to work on that. We could even ask them for help and information.
Social Comparison in Climbing
Sports and competition in sports generally foster social comparison. And athletes in particular have this innate drive to improve our performance: they want to get stronger, climb better, run faster,… In climbing, we can not always evaluate our performance by objective metric means – meaning real numbers. Of course, we can measure and hence directly compare how many dead hangs we can do, how hard we climb or how fast we climb on the speed climbing wall. But there are so many aspects to a good climbing performance that we can not directly measure e.g. technique, mental strength, flow of movement, route reading skills, etc.
Climbing is an individual sport. Even so, we still go lead climbing with a climbing partner or bouldering in a group of people, with our team or our friends. This means, while a friend is climbing we often watch them climb, observe their beta and possibly compare it to how we would approach this climb. We might ask ourselves, how tall or strong am I compared to this other climber? Is this climber known to be good at crimps? Can this other climber send this problem? Can I do the same?
During times of plateauing in climbing abilities, social comparison can further be present. Most of us have probably experienced this plateauing in their performance over the time. The question is, what did you do during those times of plateauing? My guess would be that you compared yourself and your abilities to climbers at the gym or crag, who were climbing harder grades, right? You might have asked yourself, "why are they so much stronger?" or "Why aren't they plateauing like I do?"
Did you gain any valuable information from that comparison? Such comparisons are really typical. But remember, everyone plateaus at some point. Ask yourself, what you exactly need to get out of this plateau. Do you maybe need to work on your mindset or is it really your power endurance? How big is your desire to get better at this and improve this?
In such situations, comparisons may be really helpful. By comparing ourselves to stronger climbers when we're plateauing can be very insightful and teach us what to still focus on (what we potentially haven't even thought of yet), like working on our maximum power, improving our flexibility; maybe we have to work on our fear of falling so we can try harder things...
Climbing grades can also foster social comparison behaviours. Established bouldering problems and climbing routes are usually graded. There are various different scales: French, American etc. and gyms sometimes have a colour code grading system.
Questions like "Can I keep up with the others?", "What if they don't want to go climbing with me anymore if I don't climb this hard?", "Will I embarrass myself if I only climb 7a and all the others in the group climb 8a or harder?" arise – and potentially make us feel bad about ourselves.
At this point, we should keep in mind that the grading system can be highly subjective. A morpho 7c will feel like an 8b for a climber with short arm span. A 7b+ route with a dyno will feel really hard for someone who's strengths are small crimps, lock-offs and slabs – even though they climb 7b+ normally easily. We’ve probably all experienced different routes/problems of the same grade, which felt worlds apart in difficulty.
We should also always remember that grades aren't everything. Ask yourself:
🧗🏻♂️ Why do you climb in the first place?
🧗🏻♂️ What do you enjoy most about it?
🧗🏻 Instead of tell yourself, "I should climb this problem", try telling yourself "I want to climb this problem" or even "I'm so excited to try this problem". Can you tell the difference?
Another issue with social comparison and especially with upwards comparison can be “cherry-picking” people’s strength. Let’s say, you want to be as good at dynos as Janja Garnbret, as flexible as Fanny Gibert, as experienced as Akiyo Noguchi and have the finger strength of Alexander Megos. Well, we often cherry-pick the strengths of other people and build this “perfect combination of their strength” in our head. This particular upward comparing behaviour might originally derive from our desire to be like this other person. We might consider them as a role model and we're inspired by them.
When you notice that your comparison behaviour causes you harm in terms of your confidence or self-worth – it might be time to take a step back.
In our next blog post, we will talk in more depth about how we can better deal with social comparisons.