The Logic of Relative Frustration: Boudon’s Competition Model and Experimental Evidence

Abstract

An improvement in the availability of opportunities for actors in a social system (e.g. a society or a firm) can coincide with a growing rate of frustrated individuals. For instance, uprisings have repeatedly been preceded by forms of political liberalization that have provided greater opportunities (the so-called Tocqueville paradox). In organizations, satisfaction with regard to promotion opportunities can be negatively associated with objective chances of promotion. Raymond Boudon has proposed a game-theoretic competition model, which specifies the micro-mechanisms that produce these puzzling phenomena at the aggregate level and clarifies the conditions under which they emerge. We conducted three laboratory experiments to test the model's predictions, making our study the first empirical test of Boudon's model. The results are mixed: when opportunities increased, the rate of the relatively frustrated losers in the group remained constant, or increased only slightly. However, when applying another aggregation rule, which accounts for all social comparison processes and does not merely focus on the losers, an increase in relative frustration under improved conditions was observed. Our results imply that under specific conditions, there is a trade-off between opportunities and social mobility, on the one hand, and social inequality and relative frustration, on the other.

Human competition is not lower if competing is socially wasteful instead of socially beneficial

“…We divided a total of 204 participants into two conditions: 60 in the unallocated condition and 144 in the allocated condition. Previous research suggests that for the unallocated condition sufficient power is obtained with about 60 participants 13 . We did not have comparable information for the allocated condition and therefore recruited more participants for this condition.…”

When upward social mobility leads to frustration: Boudon’s game-theoretic model of relative deprivation and experimental evidence

“…Their equilibrium analyses suggest that the paradox remains ubiquitous even when incorporating these more complex aspects of social life. Finally, Berger and Diekmann (2015) further clarified the model's game-theoretic analysis of dominant strategies and mixed strategy Nash equilibria, and conducted a first empirical test of these predictions in a laboratory experiment, which provided mixed support for the predictions.…”

“…It does not incorporate that non-investors without a reward have a lower net payoff than the investors with a reward, and therefore also feel relative deprivation, albeit less strongly than the investors without reward. 1 To take both type types of relative deprivation into account, versions of the Gini coefficient have been suggested as operationalisation (Yitzhaki, 1979;Berger & Diekmann, 2015), of which one is:…”

Die Anderen als sozialer Kontext. Zur Bedeutung strategischer Interaktion

“…Die Grundzüge des Modells seien kurz skizziert (vgl. auch Berger und Diekmann 2014;Raub 1984). In einer sozialen Gruppe des Umfangs N stehen 0 ≤ k ≤ N Positionen für Beförderungen zur Verfügung.…”

“…Nur wissen die Akteure natürlich nicht, wie viele Mitbewerber jeweils investieren werden. Es gibt dann mehrere Gleichgewichte in "reinen" Strategien, die ohne Koordination nicht erreichbar sind, sowie ein Gleichgewicht in "gemischten" Strategien (Berger und Diekmann 2014;Raub 1984).…”