ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Personality and Social Psychology
This article is part of the Research TopicSocial Psychological Perspectives on Threat: Understanding Climate, Economic, and Health ThreatsView all 16 articles
Wealth Comparison Across Social Distances: Implications for Well-Being
Provisionally accepted
- 1The University of Nottingham Ningbo (China), Ningbo, China
- 2Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, China
- 3China Agricultural University, Beijing, China
- 4Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China
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Social comparison, particularly in terms of wealth, significantly is negatively affect well-being in an era of rising inequality and digital connectivity. While prior research emphasizes comparisons with offline proximate peers or a single online channel, this study examines how social distance (categorized as family, friends, and internet) differs the impact of wealth comparisons on well-being. Using a scenario-based questionnaire, we assess differential effects across social distances and test the mediating role of stress and heterogeneous effects of help-seeking behaviors. Results reveal friends as the highest-risk comparison tier. Stress mediates these impacts, while help-seeking behaviors show divergent pathways. Life satisfaction and income buffer sensitivity to disparities. This study advances social comparison theory by integrating offline-online dynamics into different social distances and provides practical insights for interventions to mitigate comparison-driven loss of well-being.
Keywords: wealth comparison, Well-being, Social distances, stress, help-seeking behavior
Received: 07 Jul 2025; Accepted: 06 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Wu, Tang, Huang, Liu and Liang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Yingying Wu, biyyw95@nottingham.edu.cn
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