Theories in Social Psychology by Derek Chadee

Author:Derek Chadee [Chadee, Derek]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119627944
Published: 2022-02-11T14:04:26+00:00

8

Relative Deprivation and Cognate Theories: Making Sense of Irrational Behaviors

Beverly G. Conrique and Faye J. Crosby

“A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirements for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut.”

– Karl Marx, 1847/1935 , p. 33

Introduction

On November 8, 2016, the United States astonished the world and elected to its highest office a man who had never held elected position, who had openly disrespected women, people of color, people with disabilities, and immigrants (Neate, 2015; Trump, 2015), and who had put the interests of a small cadre of wealthy supporters ahead of national interests (Gold & Narayanswamy, 2016). Minute-to-minute reporting of the election that night carried with it undertones of astonishment and disbelief (Arkin & Siemaszko, 2016; Jensen, 2016; Sullivan, 2016). Although many attributed Donald Trump’s win to anti-female bias (Clinton, 2017; Crosby, 2017), subsequent analysis has shown that other factors must also have come into play.

Traditionally, in the United States and elsewhere, people align their votes with their financial and other interests. While the 2016 election did not totally deviate from the traditional pattern (Scott, 2017, 2018), some odd phenomena occurred. During the course of the campaign, a union of immigration and enforcement officers – working-class, blue-collar individuals – unexpectedly announced their official support for Trump (Bacon, Jr., 2017), and exit polls suggested nearly 50% of union households in Ohio voted for Trump (Greenhouse, 2016). In the past, unions backed only Democrats.

American blue-collar support for a blustery billionaire from New York City in 2016 calls to mind how blue-collar workers associated themselves during the mid-20th century with the Tory party in England. That connection, in turn, might make social scientists think of the concept of relative deprivation (RD), a concept that scholars like Runciman (1966) have used to explain how people of modest means might align with conservatives whose policies aim to benefit the well-off, not the poor.

Relative deprivation – as a concept and as a theory – is at the heart of this chapter. The term “relative deprivation” dates back to research conducted by Samuel Stouffer and colleagues during World War II (Stouffer et al., 1949). In their study of the American soldier, Stouffer and colleagues discovered that military police, despite their slower promotions, felt happier with their promotion rates compared to other military personnel, who were promoted more frequently (Stouffer et al., 1949). They also found that Black soldiers from the South were measurably happier with life in the Army than Black soldiers from the North, presumably because of differences in their lives outside the Army before the War. Stouffer et al. (1949) coined the term “relative deprivation” to remind us how people’s subjective sense of themselves, within the context of receiving or lacking equal opportunities or wealth, can vary dramatically from their situation as described by objective measures. Through the lens of relative deprivation, being poor and feeling poor are different phenomena.

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