The results of Study 4 support the prediction regarding the appropriateness of self-enhancing social comparison. Participants considered partner-enhancing comparisons as less socially inappropriate and such comparisons elicited less negative evaluations of the discussant than self-enhancing comparisons. In a similar vein, partner-deprecating was seen as more socially inappropriate than self-deprecating, and evaluating the partner in a denigrating fashion thus seems to elicit more disapproving reactions than self-deprecation.

Indeed, the results of this study indicate that partner-deprecation and self-enhancement are negatively sanctioned because the person communicating such evaluations installs an antipathy in the observer. Also, additional analyses were performed to examine the alternative explanation that the effects on social appropriateness were due to antipathetic feelings for the discussant rather than to the experimental manipulations, and vice versa. However, no evidence for this was found. Finally, enhancing evaluations appeared to be attributed to a greater degree of self-enhancement motives than deprecating evaluations, and more so when the discussant evaluated the self instead of the intimate partner.

It should be noted, however, that one possible limitation of the results of Study 4 is that the computerized questionnaire as used by the Telepanel Foundation imposed certain restrictions on the length of the verbatim scenario and the limited number of items that assessed social desirability, which may not be sufficiently reliable to capture the hypothesized effects. Therefore, a second study was conducted to further corroborate and extend the findings of Study 4 and to meet the aforementioned limitations.