Social Comparison and the Vices of Pride: A Kierkegaardian Perspective

Philosophia https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-026-00986-2 RESEARCH Social Comparison and the Vices of Pride: A Kierkegaardian Perspective John Lippitt1,2 Received: 20 October 2025 / Revised: 13 March 2026 / Accepted: 17 March 2026 © The Author(s) 2026 Abstract This article connects Kierkegaard’s warnings about social comparison to “vices of pride” such as self-righteousness, domination, presumption, vanity and hyperautonomy. In Sect. 1, I stress the ways these vices use social comparison and show their connections with self-importance. In Sect. 2, I investigate Kierkegaard’s prima facie startling claim that “pride is cowardliness”, showing why it is more plausible than might initially appear. “Pride is cowardliness” insofar as the vices of pride involve failing to face up to, or pursue, the truth. They distort the truth, serve as obstacles to truth-seeking, and hamper our capacity for knowledge and understanding. In Sect. 3, I show that if we suppose that on some level we know this, then the failure to face up to what on some level we know is itself a form of cowardliness. The vices of pride are amongst the ways through which we self-deceptively hide from ourselves (albeit incompletely) what we are doing. But if some forms of social comparison encourage us to be cowardly and dishonest with ourselves, thus hampering our capacity for knowledge and understanding, then it becomes important to ask: which, and how? In Sect. 4, I explore the prospects for two Kierkegaard-inspired answers: when the motivation for social comparison is “shrewdness’”, and when we use “the crowd” or “the public” as problematic reference networks. In Sect. 5, I briefly explore the implications for classic and contemporary social comparison theory, demonstrating some epistemic vice-risks it commonly overlooks. Keywords Pride · Vices · Self-righteousness · Domination · Presumption · Hyperautonomy · Vanity · Humility · Social comparison · Kierkegaard · Robert C. Roberts John Lippitt 1 Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value, University of Pardubice, Pardubice, Czech Republic 2 Institute for Ethics & Society, The University of Notre Dame Australia, Sydney, Australia 13 Philosophia Since Festinger’s (1954) landmark article, many scholars have detailed the positive uses of social comparison (hereafter SC): inter alia, to define and maintain norms; as a coping mechanism; to manage negative effect; for self-enhancement; to affiliate upwards. But a growing body of evidence has in recent years focused on the dark side of SC. For instance, Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke (2016, 2020) argue that a major problem with “moral grandstanding” (or “virtue-signalling”), common on social media, is that SC comes to take the place in public moral discourse that should be held by reason- and evidence-giving. “Upward” SC has been claimed to adversely affect self-esteem, based on studies of regularity of social media use (Vogel et al., 2014; Marciano et al., 2024). The teenage mental health crisis, exemplified by the rapid increase of suicide, self-harm and depression rates has been attributed to a significant degree, by social psychologists such as Jean Twenge (2018) and Jonathan Haidt (2024), to the “smartphone-based childhood”. 1 Here – at a time when youngsters are subject to rapid social and emotional development – rounded experiences integral to an embodied, play-based childhood are blocked in favour of relatively shallow online communication via social media which encourage chronic, near constant SC, which can often be brutal and which are claimed to be especially damaging to girls (Haidt, 2024, esp. 146 − 50, 153-8). This is one of the concerns behind the movement to ban smartphones in schools. As one reviewer of Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation remarks, “What middle-aged adult doesn’t feel relief to have grown up before smartphones? Adolescence was hard enough without the threat of online humiliation, the possibility of quantifying, through engagement and follower numbers, exactly how much of a loser you are” (McBain, ibid.). Even a meta-analytic study more positive about social media use concludes that passive social media consumption encourages SC and envy, describing SC as the social media “plague”, and reporting that “social media comparison was related to lower well-being with a medium-to-large effect” (Marciano et al., 2024, 12). To scholars of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, the dangers of SC are nothing new. Kierkegaard was clearly deeply troubled by the human tendency continually to evaluate our identity and norms in relation to those around us: “If I were to imagine a human being who was brought up in such a manner and lived out his life in such a manner that he never got any impression of himself but always lived by adaptation and comparison—this would be an example of dishonesty. And this is precisely the state of affairs in modern times.” (Kierkegaard 1967-78 vol. 1, 654/SKS 27, 417).2 1 The figures are alarming: suicide rates up by 167% for teenage girls and 91% for boys, in the decade up to 2020; emergency room visits for self-harm up 188% for girls and 48% for boys. These US figures are echoed elsewhere, including the UK (McBain, 2024). The British millennium cohort study, which followed 19,000 children born in 2000-02, found that, among girls especially, rates of depression rose in tandem with hours spent on social media. Girls who spent five or more hours a day on social media were three times more likely to become depressed than those who didn’t use it at all (Kelly et al., 2018). 2 References to Kierkegaard’s works will be given by an English translation referenced by publication date, followed by the standard Danish edition (Kierkegaard 1997–2013; abbreviated SKS). 13 Philosophia He associates “comparison with others” with ethical-religious laziness and dishonesty (Kierkegaard 1967-78 vol. 2, 2010/SKS 21, 128, NB7: 97).3 Perhaps the most memorable example of Kierkegaard’s criticism of SC is the parable (in his 1847 discourses on the lilies of the field and the bird of the air) of the “worried lily”, who through cultivated envy and growing self-doubt ends up being destroyed by the “naughty little bird” who represents “the restless mentality of comparison” (Kierkegaard, 1993, 169/SKS 8, 268). Here Kierkegaard’s central message is that comparison’s corrosive effects can persuade us of the falsehood that the differences between us are what matters (“that diversity … is the supreme … is eternally false” (Kierkegaard, 1993, 169/SKS 8, 268)). This obscures from us what matters most: the sheer wonder of being alive, and of our common humanity.4 Such passages have led one scholar (Kaftanski, 2023) to argue explicitly that Kierkegaard sees SC as a vice (a claim to which I shall return). In this article, I shall aim to draw upon Kierkegaard to show the connection between SC and what, following Robert C. Roberts, I shall label the “vices of pride” and consider as a multiplic (...truncated)