It is the continuous process of determining personal growth and progress, which can be raised or lowered by the behavior of others.
This is because the success of a close other invites comparison on one's own capabilities, thereby directly affecting one's own self-evaluation.
Using a similar example: a sibling scores the winning goal in an important game; but you are also on the same team and through comparison, your self-evaluation is lowered.
When closeness (sibling) and performance (scored the winning goal) are high, self-evaluation is decreased in the comparison process.
If you are aspiring to become a professional soccer player, but your sibling scores the winning goal and you do not, the comparison aspect of SEM will decrease your self-evaluation.
There are different factors in which a person can assume closeness: family, friends, people with similar characteristics, etc.
According to Tesser's (1988) theory, if a sibling did not do well in his/her game, then there is no reason the individual's self-evaluation will be affected.
Tesser (1988) suggests that people may do things to reduce the decrease in self-evaluation from comparison.
One can spend less time with that particular individual, thereby reducing closeness or one can change their important self-definition and take up a new hobby or focus on a different self-defining activity, which reduces relevance (e.g., A siblings success in your favorite sport may lead you to stop playing).
They found that participants engaged in dishonest behaviors to achieve external benefits up to a point.
Half the subjects were told that the study's purpose was measuring important verbal skills and leadership.
The other three can give clues that are easy or difficult based on their own judgment and whether or not they would like to help the other person guess the word.
In 10 out of 13 sessions, when relevance was high (told that this activity measures important verbal and leadership skills) the stranger was helped more than a friend.
Also, in 10 out of 13 sessions, when relevance was low (subjects were told that this activity determined nothing of importance) the friend was helped more than the stranger.
Having previously discovered that the most positive evaluations occurred in participants when have low relevance with high closeness to another individual, Tesser (1989)[3] sought to test whether emotional arousal mediated this relation.
When the task was high in relevancy, the subject rating the other participant much worse than the control condition.
This graph illustrates the basic principles of Tesser's (1988) self-evaluatory maintenance model of behavior.