The studies in the current chapter examined individuals' reactions to others who overtly display self- and partner-enhancing downward comparisons. Participants were told that they would be required to read a brief scenario, which was a fragment that ostensibly was derived from a group discussion. Each scenario depicted someone who publicly evaluated his or her intimate relationship (the gender of the evaluator was not specified). The evaluator's statements were made about either the self (as a relationship partner) or the relationship partner. Moreover, in Studies 4 and 5, the evaluations were made in an enhancing or in a deprecating fashion, whereas in Study 6 the scenarios contained either comparative or noncomparative evaluations about the self or the partner.

In each study, having read the scenario, participants were asked in part to indicate the extent to which they considered the verbal statements as socially desirable, the extent of sympathy felt for the discussant, whether they felt annoyed whilst reading the statements, and the attributions they made for the discussant's statements. Study 5 was carried out to replicate the findings in Study 4. In addition to examining participants' reactions to someone else's self- or partner-evaluations, it was examined as to what extent participants themselves were able to generate evaluations of the self or the partner in either an enhancing or in a deprecating way.

As the former studies did not examine the differential effects of comparative (i.e. with explicit references to social comparison) and noncomparative evaluations (i.e. without references to social comparison), Study 6 was conducted to confirm and extend the results of Studies 4 and 5 under the same carefully designed experimental conditions. In Study 6, the comparative nature of self- and partner-enhancing evaluations was manipulated systematically. Furthermore, in Study 6, the possibly moderating role of individual differences in social comparison orientation was explored by examining the extent to which reactions to someone else engaging in self- and partner-enhancing downward comparison were moderated by social comparison orientation (Gibbons & Buunk, 1999).