Is Comparison the Thief of Joy? Sexual Narcissism and Social Comparisons in the Domain of Sexuality
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Are people who are high in sexual narcissism more sensitive to information comparing their sex lives with the sex lives of others? Does this sensitivity explain narcissists' lower sexual and relationship satisfaction? We conducted three studies to address this question. Participants completed the Sexual Narcissism Scale (Widman & McNulty, 2010), and then either recalled (Study 1), imagined (Study 2), or actually made (Study 3) a sexual comparison. We found that people high in sexual narcissism (compared with those lower in sexual narcissism) were more bothered when comparing themselves with someone with a higher sexual frequency and felt better about a comparison with someone with a lower sexual frequency. In turn, narcissists' greater sensitivity to upward social comparisons predicted lower sexual and relationship satisfaction. These results suggest that those high in sexual narcissism may use downward sexual comparisons to maintain their grandiose self-views and be particularly sensitive to upward sexual comparisons.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".