Between 1882 and 1930 there were 4,761 reported cases of lynchings in the United States. Of these, over 70 per cent were lynchings of black people and the majority occurred in southern states, for so long the heart of American slavery. Such a statistic is a sombre reminder of the awful extremes which prejudice can sometimes reach.
Hovland and Sears (1940), who brought these grisly facts to the attention of social science, noticed that there was a considerable annual variation in the killings, which ranged from a high of 155 (in 1892/3) to a low of seven (in 1929). They also observed that there was a remarkable correspondence between this variation and different economic indicators of farming (farming being the principal industry in southern
states): as the economy receded and times got hard, the number of lynchings increased (but compare Hepworth and West, 1988 and Green et al., 1998).
What might account for this apparent co-variation of economic recession with anti-black violence? Hovland and Sears (1940) themselves believed that it was caused by frustration. Drawing upon Dollard and colleagues’ (1939) frustration–aggression theory, they hypothesized that the hardships generated by a depressed economy raised people’s levels of frustration, which in turn generated increased aggression.
Using the psychoanalytic concept of displacement in the same way as Adorno and colleagues (1950) were to do ten years later (see Chapter 2), Hovland and Sears suggested that the aggression would not be directed at the true source of the economic frustration (that is, the capitalist system which produced it), but would be diverted towards more vulnerable and easily accessible targets such as members of ‘deviant’
and minority groups (see Billig, 1976 and Brown, 2000a for more extended treat-ments of this argument).
Other attempts to confirm this so-called ‘scapegoat’ theory of prejudice4 have had mixed success. Miller and Bugelski (1948) conducted an experiment with a group of young American men at a camp. One evening, when the men were eagerly anticipating a night on the town, the experimenters suddenly announced that the evening out was cancelled and the men would be required to undertake some uninteresting tasks instead. As it happened, they had also measured the men’s ethnic attitudes towards Mexicans and Japanese before this frustrating event, and they did it again afterwards.
Analysis of these attitudes revealed that the participants became significantly less favour-able after the frustration; a control group experiencing no frustration showed no such change. This was a nice confirmation of the ‘displacement’ hypothesis, since these two minority groups could have had no conceivable responsibility for the men’s plight.
However, other experiments have yielded more equivocal results. For instance Stagner and Congdon (1955) failed to find increases in prejudice in students after the frustration of failing some academic tests. Cowen and colleagues (1958), using a simi-lar methodology, did find an increase in negative affect towards blacks, but this did not generalize to increases in more general ethnocentrism against other minorities.
Even more problematically for the frustration–aggression theory, Burnstein and McRae (1962) found more favourable evaluations of a black team member following task failure, and this was particularly evident in highly prejudiced subjects, who should have been the most eager to denigrate him.
It was inconsistencies like these, as well as some other conceptual and empirical difficulties (Berkowitz, 1962; Billig, 1976), that led to the decline in popularity and utility of the frustration–aggression theory as an explanation of prejudice. In its place, and very much influenced by some of its central ideas (Gurr, 1970), there emerged a theory which placed much less emphasis on absolute levels of hardship and frustration but stressed instead the importance of relative deprivation. The inspiration for this new approach – relative deprivation theory (RDT), as it is known – came from some serendipitous observations made in the course of a large-scale social psychological study of morale and social attitudes in the American army (Stouffer et al., 1949).
These researchers discovered that dissatisfaction was higher in certain sections of the military (for example in the air force), where prospects for career advancement were good, than in others (for example in the military police), where the chances of
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Prejudice and Intergroup Relations 167 promotion were poor. How so? Certainly not due to absolute levels of frustration, because on that basis the military police (MP) should have been less happy than the air force. The answer, suggested Stouffer and colleagues, may lie in the different levels of relative frustration (or deprivation): the air force personnel, although objectively better off, had a ready and superior standard of comparison to hand – their promoted colleagues – and thus felt more aggrieved about their position; the MPs, with fewer such comparisons available, did not feel their deprivation so acutely. A contemporary example of this same phenomenon can be observed amongst some footballers in the top flight of the English Premier League. Frank Lampard, it is rumoured, was most disgruntled in 2008 to discover that one of his Chelsea team-mates was earning
£30,000 per week more than him. The fact that he was already earning over £100,000 per week himself, four times more than most British people earn in a year, was appar-ently of little consolation to him. As we shall see, this idea, that advantaged people or groups can be as vulnerable to feelings of relative deprivation as their less privileged counterparts, is a crucial insight of RDT.
The idea that deprivation is always relative to some standard forms the centrepiece of all theories of relative deprivation (Crosby, 1976; Davies, 1969; Davis, 1959; Gurr, 1970; Runciman, 1966; Walker and Smith, 2002). Gurr (1970), who has done much to formalize the theory and to test its implications empirically, proposed that relative deprivation arises when people perceive a discrepancy between the standard of living they currently have and the standard of living they believe they should be enjoying. It is this gap between ‘attainments’ and ‘expectations’ that is thought to lie behind social discontent and prejudice.
Before we examine how this concept has been used to explain prejudice, an impor-tant distinction must be clarified. In some versions of relative deprivation theory – particularly those, like Gurr’s (1970), which derive directly from the earlier frustration–aggression theory – the stress is on the individual’s direct experience of relative deprivation: what I enjoy/suffer relative to what I expect. However, there is another kind of deprivation, one which derives from people’s perception of their group’s fortunes relative to what they expect for their group. Runciman (1966) labelled this ‘group (or fraternalistic) deprivation’, to distinguish it from the other form, ‘individual’ (or ‘egoistic’). A nice illustration of this distinction was provided by Caplan (1970), who noted how many black supporters of Black Power in the USA in the 1960s came from middle and upper income brackets rather than from the poorer (and most individually deprived) groups. Their own personal advantage rela-tive to other blacks did not prevent them from perceiving the relarela-tive disadvantage of blacks, as a group, compared to whites. As Walker and Pettigrew (1984) have pointed out, the fact that group-relative deprivation is based so firmly on group outcomes rather than on individual ones makes it much more suitable a construct than individ-ual deprivation for the analysis of an intergroup phenomenon like prejudice. Recalling the previous section, it is also important to note that a sense of group deprivation cannot arise without some prior identification with the ingroup. In order to feel that our group is not doing well (enough), we must first identify with that group suffi-ciently for its fortunes to matter to us.
What gives rise to relative deprivation? At the most general level, as just noted, rela-tive deprivation is caused by a gap between expectations and achievements. Crawford
and Naditch (1970) used a direct measure of this gap in their survey of black resi-dents in Detroit, shortly after some rioting there. Responresi-dents were asked to indicate on a vertical eleven-step ladder where their present life-style was in relation to their
‘ideal life’ (at the top of the ladder). The discrepancy between these two points was taken as a measure of deprivation. As can be seen from Table 6.3, there was a clear relationship between the level of deprivation and their attitudes towards the riots and black militancy. Those high in deprivation (putting themselves on step 4 or below) showed more sympathy with the objectives of black militants than those scoring low (at step 5 or above).
The next question is: what determines people’s aspirations for their ideal life? In RDT, these aspirations are thought to derive from either or both of two kinds of comparisons. One is temporal in nature and concerns one’s recent past. Davies (1969) proposed that people extrapolate from their own (group’s) experience of affluence or poverty and expect the future to be similar. If living standards rise steadily over a period, this will generate an expectation of future increases. From this, Davies derived his famous J-curve hypothesis, which suggests that dissatisfaction will be most likely to come not after a period of prolonged deprivation, but after a period in which people’s living standards rise over a number of years, followed by a sudden downturn.
It is this sharp drop that produces the gap between actual and expected living stand-ards which is necessary for the arousal of deprivation.5 A second source of expecta-tions are comparisons with other groups. When we perceive another group to be doing better or worse than our own, especially when that group is similar or in some way relevant to the ingroup, its fate is likely to generate expectations for how well we think our group should be doing. In turn, we will feel respectively deprived or grati-fied (Runciman, 1966). Again, the ingroup’s absolute standing is not important; it is the relative element that counts.
A recent study of income distribution in Britain graphically illustrates both of these types of deprivation (Jones et al., 2008). This study charted the weekly levels of different income groups in the UK over a period of thirty years. Figure 6.3 shows the results. All groups, including the poorest, enjoyed a rise in income. However, notice how the gap between the richest and the poorest has steadily widened over
Table 6.3 Black militancy and relative deprivation
Relative deprivation a (%)
Attitude item Low High
Do you think that riots help or hurt the Negro cause?
Help Hurt
28 60
54 38 Do you approve or disapprove
of Black Power?
Approve Disapprove
38 36
64 22 Will force or persuasion be
necessary to change White attitudes?
Force Persuasion
40 52
51 35
Note: a Perceived discrepancy between ‘actual’ and ‘ideal’ life.
Source: Crawford and Naditch, 1970, Table 1 (‘don’t knows’ omitted).
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Prejudice and Intergroup Relations 169
the years. Such a situation is a classic breeding ground for increased feelings of group relative deprivation on the part of the poorer group. The changes in income also reveal the potential for temporal deprivation in the wealthier group. Notice how its incomes rose sharply between 1984 and 1990, and then experienced an actual downturn until 1995/6. This is a demonstration of Davies’ (1969) J-curve, and the fact that it did not result in any widespread discontent among Britain’s middle classes is probably due to the revival of their fortunes in the late 1990s (Brewer et al., 2008).
What are the effects of temporal relative deprivation and group relative depriva-tion on prejudice? There has been little research on the former. Hepworth and West (1988) re-analysed the same data used by Hovland and Sears (1940) and found a correlation between one year’s lynchings of black people and the decline in economic prosperity from the previous year. However, Green and colleagues (1998) found that adding just eight more years’ data (1930–8), which included the Great Depression, considerably reduced the correlation between the economic index and anti-black violence. Moreover, when they attempted to correlate the unemployment rate in four New York boroughs with the incidence of hate crimes over a nine-year period (1987–95), they could find very few reliable associations, however long or short the time lags were.
Other attempts to link intergroup events to temporal changes in groups’ living standards have proved similarly controversial. Davies (1969), the originator of the J-curve hypothesis, tried to explain the incidence of black urban rioting in the USA in Figure 6.3 Changes in UK income distribution 1977–2007 (by quintiles). Figures show average weekly household disposable income in quintiles of the UK income distribution (adjusted to 2006/7 prices). Source: Jones et al., 2008, Figure 2
Image not available in this electronic edition
the 1960s by reference to the rise and fall of black living standards in the previous two decades. However, others have disputed his analysis, arguing that neither the time-course of the economic changes nor the variability in black living standards fitted well with it (Crosby, 1979; Davies, 1978, 1979; Miller et al., 1977; Miller and Bolce, 1979). In short, the link between temporal relative deprivation and intergroup preju-dice has proved rather elusive.
Much more attention has been paid to the effects of relative deprivation (RD) stemming from unfavourable social comparisons. A classic study demonstrating the link between relative deprivation and prejudice was undertaken by Vanneman and Pettigrew (1972). They surveyed over 1,000 white voters in four US cities and asked whether these respondents felt they were doing better or worse economically than other white workers like them (individual RD), and also how well whites were doing compared to blacks (group RD). On the basis of these two questions, Vanneman and Pettigrew divided their sample into four groups, according to whether their partici-pants could be described as being ‘gratified’ (doing better than others) or ‘deprived’
in either or both of the individual and group senses (see Table 6.4). On the main measure of prejudice they administered, those who were group or doubly deprived were the ones who showed most anti-black sentiment.
These findings have since been confirmed by several other studies. Tripathi and Srivastava (1981) studied Muslim attitudes towards Hindus in India. Muslims are now a disadvantaged minority in India, although prior to partition (in 1947) they were in fact the ruling group. This change in their status might be expected to lead to strong feelings of deprivation, and indeed another study found that they did show more deprivation than the Hindus (Ghosh et al., 1992). Tripathi and Srivastava (1981) found a clear correlation between group deprivation and ingroup bias against Hindus. Similar correlations between group deprivation and prejudice have been observed in South Africa (Appelgryn and Nieuwoudt, 1988) and in several countries in Europe (Pettigrew and Meertens, 1995). In truth, the correlations that have been found are not always very large, and this may be because the measures of RD employed have often focused solely on the perception of discrepancy rather than on people’s
Table 6.4 Group and individual deprivation and prejudice
Type of deprivation Prejudice measurea
Doubly gratified (doing well personally and as a group)
−20.9
Individually deprived (doing poorly personally but well as a group)
−13.9
Group deprivation (doing well personally but poorly as a group)
+14.3
Doubly deprived (doing poorly personally and as a group)
+29.1
Note: a Typical prejudice items included: ‘would object if family member wanted to bring a negro friend home for dinner’; ‘would mind if negro family with about the same income and education moved next door’; ‘thinks white and black students should go to separate schools’. The higher the score, the greater the prejudice.
Source: Adapted from Table 9 in Vanneman and Pettigrew, 1972
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Prejudice and Intergroup Relations 171 (negative) feelings associated with the discrepancy. If more affectively oriented meas-ures of RD are used, the correlations with prejudice tend to be higher (Smith and Ortiz, 2002; Taylor, 2002; Walker and Pettigrew, 1984).
All these studies used cross-sectional correlational designs, and so the evidence they have produced is subject to all the usual difficulties of causal interpretation in such studies: did the deprivation lead to an increase in prejudice, or did heightened preju-dice lead to feelings of deprivation? Fortunately there is also longitudinal survey and experimental evidence, which points firmly in the direction of deprivation causing prejudice. Duckitt and Mphuthing (2002) measured black South Africans’ percep-tions and feelings of deprivation and their prejudiced attitudes towards Afrikaans people before and after the 1994 transitional election in South Africa. They found that pre-election levels of affective (or emotional) RD were significantly related to post-election levels of prejudice, but not vice versa, which implied that it was the blacks’ feelings of deprivation that were determining their subsequent levels of prejudice.
Experimental research also supports a causal link between group RD and prejudice (Grant and Brown, 1995). We asked groups of women to work on a brainstorming task for which they expected to receive around $10 each, although they were warned that this payment would depend on their evaluation by another group. That evalua-tion, of course, constituted our experimental manipulation of deprivation: half the groups learned that the other group had given them a poor evaluation and recom-mended that they should only receive $4; the remainder were evaluated positively and were told they would receive their expected $10. The participants reacted strongly to this manipulation. Compared to those who received what they expected, the deprived group showed markedly higher levels of ingroup bias against the other group, expressed consistently higher levels of dislike for them and, from careful observation of their videotaped post-feedback interactions, expressed more derogatory remarks about them.
I want now to return to an issue raised by Vanneman and Pettigrew (1972): that of the respective roles played by personal and group deprivation in the genesis of prejudice. We saw from their data that personal deprivation seemed not to be related to increases in prejudice. Other research, too, has found that only group deprivation seems to be systematically related to intergroup attitudes and behaviour, while personal deprivation seems more linked to individual outcomes like personal unhap-piness, stress and depression (Guimond and Dube-Simard, 1983; Koomen and Fränkel, 1992; Walker and Mann, 1987). It would be tempting to conclude that feel-ing more or less personally deprived has few implications for how prejudiced a person is. Tempting, but mistaken. For one thing, personal deprivation has sometimes been found to be associated with prejudice. Ellemers and Bos (1998), in their study of Dutch shopkeepers, found that both personal and group deprivation predicted nega-tive attitudes towards immigrant shopkeepers, independently of each other. While such a finding may not be typical, it is possible that feeling personally deprived is a first step towards a more collective sense of grievance (Tougas and Beaton, 2002).
Presumably in order for this to happen, there needs to be a sufficiently strong sense of group identification to connect the ‘me’ to the ‘us’. If that precondition is satis-fied, this argument suggests that, if personal deprivation has any effects on prejudice, it does so through group deprivation. Pettigrew and colleagues (2008) uncovered
evidence for such a mediation process in several large European surveys of anti-immigrant prejudice. Individual RD was weakly correlated to prejudice, but that correlation disappeared altogether once group RD was controlled for. On the other hand, group RD was more strongly correlated to prejudice, and that association remained even when individual RD was controlled. Such a pattern of correlations is consistent with the idea that the individual RD prejudice link is mediated by group RD, but not vice versa.
Before I conclude this discussion of relative deprivation and prejudice, there is one last issue to consider. In 1973, just one year after Vanneman and Pettigrew published their classic paper on personal and group deprivation and gratification, there appeared another paper, by Grofman and Muller, with the intriguing title ‘The strange case of relative gratification and potential for political violence: The V-curve hypothesis’.
This article reported the results of a survey conducted in a small mid-western US town which had experienced some serious civic disorder just three years before. In addition to being asked some standard questions about their present, past and expected future life conditions (as compared to an ideal situation),6 respondents were also asked about their support for various forms of civil disobedience and violence. Overall, Grofman and Muller found no straightforward relationship between how deprived people felt and their propensity for political violence. However, when they divided their sample into three groups – respondents who perceived a deterioration over time, no change, or an improvement over time – a consistent pattern emerged: those who experienced a negative change were, as expected from considerations of temporal deprivation (for example the J-curve hypothesis), more likely to favour political vio-lence than those who perceived no change. However, those who perceived a positive change – temporal relative gratification – showed a similar endorsement of political violence (see Figure 6.4). Given the shape of the graph depicted in Figure 6.4, Grofman and Muller labelled it ‘the V-curve’.
This rather surprising finding went virtually unnoticed for thirty years, until Guimond and Dambrun (2002) decided to see if it could be replicated experimentally
Potential for political violence
0 1 2 3 4
Negative change (temporal deprivation)
No change Positive change (temporal gratification) Perception of living conditions
Figure 6.4 The V-curve hypothesis: relative gratification and political violence. Adapted from Table 7 in Grofman and Muller, 1973
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Prejudice and Intergroup Relations 173 and applied to prejudice. They led psychology students to believe that the future job prospects for psychologists would either be better (or worse) than those for students in economics and law. Then they measured those students’ level of prejudice against various immigrant groups. Consistently with the V-curve hypothesis, they found more prejudice both in the deprived and in the gratified conditions, as compared to a control group which had been given no information about psychologists’ future conditions. In fact, those in the gratification condition seemed to show slightly more prejudice than even the participants in the deprivation condition. Dambrun and colleagues (2006) followed this up with a survey conducted in South Africa, and again they found that, both for those who felt things were getting worse and for those who felt things were getting better, prejudice tended to increase (see also Guimond et al., 2002).
What might explain this seemingly paradoxical phenomenon? Leach and col-leagues (2002) have reflected on the phenomenology of belonging to an advantaged group, and they speculate that people’s emotional reactions and subsequent behav-ioural responses could depend on several factors. Of most relevance to the relative gratification effect is Leach and colleagues’ suggestion that a perception that the ingroup’s advantaged position is temporary or unstable could prompt members of that group to display enhanced pride in the ingroup and/or disdain for the out-group. These reactions are thought to be psychological defences against an eventual decline in the ingroup’s status position (see my earlier discussion about the social identity implications of belonging to a superior-status group). In this respect, it is noteworthy that most studies documenting the V-curve effect have employed manip-ulations or measures of gratification that imply some temporal instability, albeit ini-tially in the ingroup’s favour (Dambrun et al., 2006; Grofman and Muller, 1973;
Guimond and Dambrun, 2002). The argument of Leach and colleagues (2002) is that these emotions of pride and disdain have the potential to lead to negative atti-tudinal and behavioural responses towards outgroups (see Harth et al., 2008 for a partial test of these hypotheses).
Intriguing though these ideas are, the V-curve effect still lacks a completely convincing explanation. For one thing, it is not clear whether the effects of relative gratification generalize to all outgroups or pertain mostly to those outgroups likely to pose a future threat to the ingroup’s status position. Dambrun and colleagues’ (2006) findings suggest the latter, because the effect of gratification in higher socio-economic status South Africans seemed mainly targeted at European (rather than African) immi-grants, since this group might be regarded as a greater potential economic threat to them. On the other hand, Guimond and Dambrun (2002) found that the relative gratification of psychologists vis-à-vis lawyers and economists produced an increase in prejudice towards North African immigrants, a group hardly likely to be competitors with professional psychologists.
Finally, it is clear that the negative effects of relative gratification on prejudice do not always occur. As we saw earlier, Vanneman and Pettigrew (1972) observed that the least prejudice of all was coming from their relatively gratified sub-group of respondents (see Table 6.4). Note that their gratification was defined in social rather than temporal terms, and so perhaps the crucial element of perceived insta-bility of the intergroup status relations was not present (although compare Guimond et al., 2002).