Study reveals a psychological link between feeling disadvantaged and using people

Feeling left behind in the social hierarchy does more than just damage a person’s self-esteem. When people feel disadvantaged compared to their peers, they are more likely to view interpersonal relationships as mere transactions and treat others as tools for personal gain. These findings, published recently in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, map out how feelings of relative disadvantage can reshape how people navigate their social worlds.

Social comparisons are a natural part of human behavior. People constantly look to their peers to evaluate their own success, adjust their personal goals, and understand their place in society. Upward comparisons happen when a person looks at someone who has more wealth, a better job, or higher social standing. While this can sometimes motivate self-improvement, it often leaves people feeling intensely disadvantaged.

Psychologists call this experience personal relative deprivation. It is the subjective feeling that one is being treated unfairly compared to others, breeding frustration, anger, and resentment. Prior research shows that this sense of deprivation negatively impacts mental health and alters social behavior. It is linked to increased aggression, elevated greed, and a decreased willingness to engage in helpful behaviors.

Xuegang Zheng, Jie Leng, and Ping Hu, researchers at Renmin University of China, wanted to understand the psychological mechanisms that explain why feeling disadvantaged damages social bonds. They hypothesized that people who feel deprived start to view their peers as objects to be used rather than human beings with their own inner lives. In psychology, objectification occurs when a person’s autonomy, agency, and subjective experiences are ignored.

Instead, the person is treated as an instrument or a tool to achieve a specific goal. The researchers suspected that relative deprivation pushes people toward an exchange orientation in their relationships. In an exchange-oriented relationship, people interact based on the strict tracking of costs and benefits, much like a financial transaction. This contrasts with communal relationships, where people support each other based on mutual care without worrying about who owes whom.

To test these ideas, the researchers conducted three distinct investigations. The first was a large study involving 3,482 university freshmen in China. Participants completed standardized surveys measuring their subjective feelings of disadvantage in various aspects of life. They also answered questions assessing how often they treated their social contacts as mere tools for personal use.

The results of the first investigation revealed a reliable association between the two measures. Students who reported higher levels of relative deprivation also reported a greater tendency to objectify others. This relationship remained consistent even when the researchers adjusted the data to account for age and gender differences.

Because the first investigation relied on survey correlations, it could not determine if deprivation directly produced the objectifying behavior, nor did it explain how the psychological process worked. The researchers designed a second study to test whether a transactional mindset acted as the connecting mechanism. They recruited 250 adults to complete a more detailed online survey.

In this second phase, participants answered questions about relative deprivation and objectification, as well as their tendency to track costs and benefits in their friendships. To ensure the results were not just the byproduct of abrasive personalities, the survey included measures for dark personality traits, such as narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. It also measured each person’s general desire for social power.

The researchers found that the transactional mindset served as a psychological bridge. Feeling deprived was strongly linked to adopting an exchange orientation, which in turn predicted the objectification of others. This pathway remained robust even when factoring out the influence of dark personality traits and the desire for social dominance.

To establish a causal link, the researchers conducted a third study with 194 adults. They used an experimental design to actively manipulate feelings of deprivation. Participants read a science-fiction scenario asking them to imagine they lived on a newly discovered planet. On this planet, resources were stored vertically at high altitudes, meaning that the ability to fly was the single most important skill for securing a good life.

The participants were split into two experimental groups. One group compared their imagined status to the planet’s most successful residents, who held the most wealth, received the best education, and possessed the best jobs. This comparison was designed to provoke high relative deprivation. The other group compared themselves to the planet’s least successful residents, inducing a state of low relative deprivation.

After reflecting on their assigned status and writing a short description of their feelings, participants rated how they would approach new friendships on this world. They were asked to evaluate the importance of various traits in a potential friend. The researchers wanted to see if the deprived group would favor instrumental skills over interpersonal warmth.

The experiment showed that participants in the high deprivation group adopted a much stronger transactional mindset. When asked to evaluate what traits were important in a new friend, the highly deprived group placed greater importance on instrumental qualities, such as the person’s flying skills. The differences between the groups regarding interpersonal traits like kindness, shared values, or having an interesting personality were not statistically significant.

By manipulating the environment, the researchers demonstrated that a sense of deprivation directly causes people to view relationships through a cost-benefit lens. This transactional mindset leads individuals to value others primarily for their practical utility. Feeling left behind essentially trains the brain to look for relationships that offer a strategic advantage.

The study authors noted a few caveats regarding their methodology. The reliance on hypothetical scenarios and self-reported questionnaires might not perfectly capture how people treat one another in actual face-to-face interactions. The research also utilized participant samples entirely drawn from China. Different cultural norms surrounding fairness, wealth distribution, and community support might alter how people react to feeling disadvantaged.

Additionally, while the transactional mindset is a proven pathway to objectification, other psychological reactions might also contribute to the breakdown of social relationships when people feel left behind. Future research could explore whether interventions that emphasize community bonds can reverse this objectifying effect. Scientists could also investigate how long these transactional mindsets persist after a person’s social standing improves.

The study, “Personal Relative Deprivation Leads to the Objectification of Social Targets: Exchange Orientation as a Mechanism,” was authored by Xuegang Zheng, Jie Leng, and Ping Hu.