The big-fish-little-pond effect: Generalizability of social comparison processes over two age cohorts from Western, Asian, and Middle Eastern Islamic countries.

Extensive support for the seemingly paradoxical negative effects of school- and class-average achievement on academic self-concept (ASC)—the big-fish-little-pond effect (BFLPE)—is based largely on secondary students in Western countries or on cross-cultural Program for International Student Assessment studies. There is little research testing the generalizability of this frame of reference effect based on social comparison theory to primary...