#comparingourselves

— Zenmister, from the post Self-Comparison 

Eighty percent of the women that took the survey were eighteen and the other twenty percent were nineteen. The most popular social media website was Instagram with 91% of the women reporting using it. The majority of the women that used Instagram spent between less than thirty minutes (35%) and one hour (38%). A shocking sixty-seven percent of the women said that social media has impacted their self-esteems negatively at least once in the past week. Fifty-nine percent of women said they compared themselves to another social media user at least once in the past week.

There are specifically two kinds of social comparison: Upward and Downward. Upward social comparison is defined as comparing ourselves to people we think are better than us while downward social comparison compares ourselves to people we believe we are better than. This theory is called the Social Comparison theory and was created by psychologist Leon Festinger.