Relative deprivation and procedural justifications

Abstract

Postulated that relative deprivation-based discontent is a function of "referent cognitions" about the outcomes available if a procedure had not been changed. Given a change in procedures, a high-referent condition exists when the old procedure would have yielded outcomes better than the new one, whereas a low-referent condition consists of outcomes from the old procedure that are no better than those from the new procedure. It was hypothesized that although discontent should generally be greater under high-referent than under low-referent conditions, this tendency would be qualified by the extent to which justifications are given for the change in procedures. Specifically, the hypothesized differences in discontent should be evident only when the justifications given are inadequate. This prediction was confirmed in an experiment in which 60 female undergraduates were led to believe that a change in the scoring procedure had made them the losers in a competition for a desirable reward. (14 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved). © 1983 American Psychological Association.