Is Fitness Technology-Facilitated Social Comparison the Thief of Well-Being? The Mediating Role of Social Comparison on the Relationships Between Passion and Performance Self-Esteem

Passionate exercisers are those who have integrated their cherished activity into their identity, meaning that their activity defines them (e.g., they consider themselves to be a “runner” or “adventure racer”). There are two types of passion, namely harmonious and obsessive, and research shows that those holding an obsessive passion are prone to negative outcomes. Specifically, the obsessively passionate are susceptible to comparative performance indicators and may rely more heavily on their cherished activity to derive self-esteem. Fitness technologies include social features that provide exercisers with information that may be used to compare their performance against others. Such information may be especially attractive to passionate exercisers and have ramifications for their self-esteem when it is interpreted as evidence of success or failure. Drawing on the dualistic model of passion, social comparison theory, and the fitness technology literature, we develop and test a model that examines how passion is associated with performance self-esteem, and how exercisers’ interpretations of fitness technology-facilitated social comparison information mediate these relationships. We find that fitness technology users who have high levels of obsessive passion focus on being outperformed, and this may harm their performance self-esteem. Conversely, those who have high levels of harmonious passion focus on outperforming others, and this may benefit their performance self-esteem. Overall, our results indicate that fitness technology users may want to be thoughtful about the others they compare with via their fitness technologies because evidence of being outperformed may be psychologically harmful to some.

History: Jason Thatcher, Senior Editor; Sezgin Ayabakan, Associate Editor.

Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2021.0083.