The influence of social comparison on career decision-making: Vocational identity as a moderator and regret as a mediator ¬リニ

Article history: Received 18 September 2014 Available online 22 October 2014 This study investigated the influence of social comparison on career choice certainty and its potential mechanisms: regret as a mediator and vocational identity as a moderator. Before the formal experiment, 30 pairs of vocational values representing typical conflicts in career decisionmaking for Chinese university students were obtained. The formal experiment adopted a single-factor (social comparison VS no comparison) between-subject design with vocational identity as an independent covariate. Ninety-eight junior and senior undergraduate students and graduate students in a university in China were invited to participate in the computercontrolled experiment, which involved vocational identity assessment, social comparisonmanipulation, and analogue career-choice scenario tests. Path analysis showed that: (a) Social comparison significantly and negatively predicted career choice certainty; (b) Regret partially mediated the effect of social comparison on career choice certainty; and (c) Vocational identity did not moderate the path between social comparison and regret, but significantly moderated the negative effect of regret on career choice certainty. These results indicated that in the collectivistic Chinese culture, individuals' career development trajectoriesmay not be totally independent and are subject to influences by other people's choices, while emotion of regret and vocational identity development all play significant roles in this intricate process. © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.