Comparações sociais e preocupações posicionais : um estudo exploratório com estudantes universitários brasileiros

Abstract

Several studies highlight the role of social comparisons on human behavior and decision making, with an increasing contribution of evolutionary perspectives to this debate. The "positional" character of an item designates how its value depends on comparisons with what is possessed by others in a given context. Items whose value depends heavily on these comparisons are called "positional goods" and those that depend less, are called "non-positional goods." This study aimed to conduct an exploratory research among Brazilian university students about the importance of positional concerns in multiple-choice scenarios involving various items (goods, attributes or losses) and the relationship between the observed choices and socioeconomic variables that characterize the participants. The study was divided into two steps. The first designed to evaluate the understanding of the instrument in a sample of university students at Espirito Santo. In Step 2 we attempted to reach participants from the five regions of the country and use a modified instrument from the results found in Step 1. The instrument was a questionnaire whose items presented the participants a choice between two "worlds": in one of them the participant possess higher value of the item than others in that context (the positional choice); in the other world, the value possessed by all participants would be greater than the positional alternative, but the participant would possess lower values than the others in that context. In both steps of the study, there was a higher preference for the positional choice in items related to self and own child´s intelligence, self and own child´s attractiveness and income, results approaching those obtained in western countries. We also observed differences between men and women, between income groups and between working and non working participants not found in the literature. The results confirm the importance of the context of the participants to determine the positional value of the various items, highlight the importance of evolutionary perspectives to this field of study and suggest new possibilities for research in the Brazilian context.