Drawing on his small-town Methodist boyhood, he knew the words to many of the hymns and was thoroughly familiar with the Old Testament quotations that laced the heated sermon. But the Biblical distortions that flowed from the pulpit upset him. “My God,” he said in a too loud voice to both of us, “has this guy got a racket! He takes selected Biblical passages out of context, twists them around, and draws crazy conclusions from them!” In the small hall, many present must have heard him, and Ernie and I were worried that he had blown our cover. But we should have never underestimated Stouffer. Upon leaving the church at the close of the service, he shook the minister’s hand warmly. He told him that the sermon had recalled his childhood, and pointedly suggested integrationist Biblical passages from the New Testament that he then proceeded to cite verbatim. Even this hardened segregationist melted under Stouffer’s charm to our surprise and relief. Stouffer was an inspiring but unorthodox teacher. Instruction from him was invariably informal and empirical. Intensely engrossed in his work, Stouffer taught by example.
You followed him around from office to computing room and back, absorbing as best you could his excitement,blueberry plant pot expertise and “feel” for survey research and analysis. To this day, I have never lost the sense of excitement and curiosity in analyzing survey data instilledby these memorable occasions. If a member of his graduate seminar on survey analysis would offer an interesting hypothesis, he would often leap from his chair and exclaim, “Let’s test it!” At which point he would lead the entire class to the machine room and start stuffing the survey data cards into the old IBM 101 counter, sorter, and printer——the leading machine for social science in the early 1950s. While he was intensely focused on his work, Stouffer often displayed a robust, even puckish, sense of humor. When Gordon Allport lost money on his blueberry crop at his summer retreat in Maine, Stouffer began to call him, to Allport’s amusement, “the blueberry king!” Stouffer loved his family, his work, baseball, Mickey Spillane mysteries, and Shakespeare. His favorite Shakespearian citation from King Henry IV has Glendower asserting that he could “call spirits from the vasty deep.” But, Hotspur retorts, “Why, so can I, or so can any man; but will they come when you do call for them?” When Stouffer called for them from survey data, the answers always came. Stouffer resisted sociology’s fondness for “grand theory.” Consistent with his emphasis on empirical research, he believed in close-to-the-data reasoning and middle level concepts. For example, he advanced the concept of “intervening opportunities” to account for migration flows . Thus, to understand the massive African American migration up the Mississippi River to Chicago in the early twentieth century, one has to take into account not only the distance to Chicago but the intervening opportunities offered by Memphis, St. Louis, and other communities along the migration route.
The most famous illustration of Stouffer’s talent for middle-range concepts comes from his most celebrated work—the monumental World War II American Soldier studies . Stouffer devised relative deprivation as a post hoc explanation for the well-known anomalies from these studies. Two examples became especially famous. He and his wartime colleagues found that the military police were more satisfied with their slow promotions than the air corpsmen were with their rapid promotions. Similarly, African American soldiers in southern camps were more satisfied than those in northern camps despite the fact that the racist South of the 1940s remained tightly segregated by race. These apparent puzzles assume the wrong referent comparisons. Immediate comparisons, Stouffer reasoned, were the salient referents: the military police compared their promotions with other military police——not air corpsmen whom they rarely encountered. Likewise, black soldiers in the South compared their lot with black civilians in the South——not with black soldiers in the North who were out of view. Satisfaction is relative, he held, to the available comparisons we have. Relative deprivation became a major social science concept, because social judgments are shaped not only by absolute standards but also by standards set by social comparisons . A comparative approach to explain his American Soldier puzzles came readily to Stouffer. Comparable ideas had been advanced by both Karl Marx and Alexis de Tocqueville . Moreover, between the world wars, the theory of general relativity won acceptance in physical science while cultural anthropology firmly established a relativity perspective in social science. Hyman was the first to reflect this emphasis in social psychology with his introduction of reference group theory. Following World War II, comparative ideas abounded in American social science. In economics, for example, another Harvard professor introduced a related concept in the same year that Stouffer introduced RD. Duesenberry fashioned “the ratchet effect” to help explain consumer behavior.
Following closely Stouffer’s usage of the concept, we can define relative deprivation as a judgment that one or one’s ingroup is disadvantaged compared to a relevant referent, and that this judgment invokes feelings of anger, resentment and entitlement. In addition to the fundamental feature that the concept refers to individuals and their reference groups, note that there are three critical components of this definition that are frequently overlooked. Individuals undergoing RD experience in turn three psychological processes: 1) they first make cognitive comparisons, 2) then cognitive appraisals that they or their ingroup are disadvantaged, and finally 3) that these disadvantages are seen as unfair and arouse angry resentment. If any one of these three requirements is not met, RD is not operating . Defined in this manner, relative deprivation is a social psychological concept par excellence. It postulates a subjective state that shapes emotions, cognitions, and behavior. It links the individual with the interpersonal and inter group levels of analysis. It melds easily with other social psychological processes to provide more integrative theory——a prime disciplinary need . Moreover, RD challenges conventional wisdom about the leading importance of absolute deprivation. And it has proven useful in a wide range of areas, —as I shall review.The concept of relative deprivation has now won wide acceptance in criminology , economics , and throughout the social sciences. To be sure, two social scientists have used the concept extensively without referencing any work whatsoever of social psychology . Indeed, it has recently even appeared in a popular book, David and Goliath, by the journalist, Malcolm Gladwell ——although, unfortunately, it was grossly misused in this bestseller. After Stouffer introduced RD, Merton enlarged the idea within a reference group framework. Building on this framework, Davis provided a formal mathematical model of RD. This work led me to point out that RD was but one of a large family of concepts and theories that employed relative comparisons in both sociological and psychological social psychology. From sociology,plastic gardening pots this theoretical family embraces Hyman’s and Merton’s reference group theory, Lenski’s concept of status crystallization, Blau’s concept of fair exchange, and Homans’ concept of distributive justice. From psychology, these social evaluation ideas include Walster, Walster, and Bersheid’s equity theory, Festinger’s social comparison theory, and Thibaut and Kelley’s concept of comparison level. Many theories in social psychology burn hot and then suddenly cool. But RD and related ideas have simmered slowly on a back burner for two-thirds of a century. First, Runciman broadened the RD construct by his invaluable distinction between egoistic and fraternal RD. People can believe that they are personally deprived or that a social group to which they belong and identify is deprived . Feelings of GRD should be associated with group-serving attitudes and behavior such as collective action and outgroup prejudice, whereas IRD should be associated with individual-serving attitudes and behavior such as academic achievement and property crime. This is a crucial point for RD theory and research which I shall call “the fit hypothesis.” During the 1970s, Suls and Miller edited a volume that offered a host of interconnections between these comparative concepts and such other disciplinary concerns as causal attributions. Albert focused on temporal comparisons in an influential article. The following decade witnessed further progress. Mark and Folger introduced their referent cognitions model of RD, and a major work edited by Olson, Herman, and Zanna offered additional connections between social comparison theory and RD.
A volume edited by Walker and Smith continued these advances by linking RD theory with attribution, social identity, selfcategorization, and equity theories as well as procedural justice and counterfactual thinking processes. To be sure, not all work on RD has proven useful. In political science, Gurr wrote a widely cited book, Why Men Rebel. The volume largely ignores social psychological work on the subject, and the fact that RD is a phenomenon of individuals ——not societies. Gurr employed such gross macro-level measures of RD as economic and political indices of whole societies. It is a macro-level study that does not involve the micro-level of Stouffer’s conception of RD. Why Men Rebel uncovered some intriguing findings, but it is not a RD study. As I shall discuss later, criticism of this work in the social movement field mistakenly cast RD as having little value. A classic ecological fallacy occurs when macro-level findings are placed within a RD micro-level framework . That is, micro-level phenomena, such as the RD of individuals, are being erroneously assumed from macrophenomena. This mistake is often seen in loose statements made about individual voters from aggregate voting results. It is a fallacy because macro-units are too broad to determine individual data, and individuals have unique properties that cannot be inferred from macro data. In his famous volume on Suicide, Durkheim fully understood this issue. Although he could not obtain individual data, he strove to obtain data from ever-narrowing reporting districts to reduce the bias. Indeed, the central thrust of RD theory is that individual responses are often different from that which is expected of the macro-category. For instance, given contrasting comparisons, the rich can be dissatisfied and the poor content—just the opposite from that which their macro-income characteristics would indicate. Complicating the issue further, more advantaged members of disadvantaged groups often engage in protest actions rather than the most disadvantaged . Although not the most objectively deprived group members, they are the most likely to make subjective social comparisons with members of advantaged groups in part because they are more likely to have contact with them . As we shall see, the ecological fallacy has seriously hurt the development of RD theory in sociology.In short, RD makes the claim that absolute levels of deprivation of individuals— much less collective levels of deprivation – only partly determine feelings of dissatisfaction and injustice. Imagined alternatives, past experiences, and comparisons with similar others also strongly influence such feelings . Relative deprivation describes these subjective evaluations by individuals. The RD concept offers social scientists an elegant way to explain numerous paradoxes . For example, RD explains why there is often little relationship between objective standards of living and satisfaction with one’s income . Thus, the objectively disadvantaged are often satisfied with receiving low levels of societal resources, while the objectively advantaged are often dissatisfied with high levels of societal resources . RD models suggest that the objectively disadvantaged are frequently comparing themselves to others in the same situation or worse, while the objectively advantaged are frequently comparing themselves to those who enjoy even more advantages than they possess. Thus, the RD concept has inspired a vast international and cross-disciplinary literature. Yet the concept’s initial promise as an explanation for a wide range of social behavior remains unfulfilled. Some investigations strongly support RD models . But other studies do not . In response to these inconsistencies, previous literature reviews have sought to clarify the theoretical antecedents and components of the concept , or to dismiss its value altogether . Two fundamental problems of the RD literature help to explain these persistent discrepancies in results. First, in The American Soldier, Stouffer did not measure RD directly; rather, as noted earlier, he inferred it as a post hoc explanation for a series of surprising results. This failure to initiate a prototype measure has led to literally hundreds of diverse and often conflicting measures that have bedeviled RD research ever since. Indeed, many of the measures throughout the social scientific research literature purporting to tap relative deprivation do not meet the basic features of the concept just outlined.