A New Study Suggests Feeling Disadvantaged Can Make Relationships More Transactional

Feeling disadvantaged in society does more than damage self-esteem. New research suggests that when people see themselves as left behind, they increasingly treat others as tools for personal gain rather than as full human beings.

The study, titled “Personal Relative Deprivation Leads to the Objectification of Social Targets: Exchange Orientation as a Mechanism,” was conducted by Xuegang Zheng, Jie Leng, and Ping Hu at Renmin University of China and published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology. It examines how perceived unfairness reshapes everyday relationships, finding that a mindset focused on costs and benefits is a key psychological bridge between feeling deprived and objectifying others.

How social comparison feeds resentment

Humans constantly compare themselves with others to judge success and status. When these comparisons are upward, toward people with more money, better jobs, or higher prestige, they can inspire ambition but also trigger a sense of injustice.

Psychologists call this state personal relative deprivation. It is a subjective feeling that one is unfairly worse off than comparable others, often accompanied by anger, frustration, and resentment toward the social system and toward peers.

Past research has linked relative deprivation to aggression, greed, and reduced willingness to help others. The new study goes further, showing how these feelings can erode the very foundations of trusting, communal relationships.

From community to calculation

The research team, led by Xuegang Zheng at Renmin University of China, proposed that deprivation pushes people toward an exchange orientation in close relationships. In this mindset, every interaction is weighed like a transaction.

Exchange-oriented relationships emphasise keeping track of benefits, obligations, and returns, similar to a ledger. This stands in contrast to communal relationships, where people help each other out of mutual care, without closely monitoring who owes whom.

According to the authors, once people start to frame relationships in transactional terms, it becomes easier to see others primarily as instruments for personal advancement, laying the groundwork for objectification.

Three studies, one emerging pattern

To test their ideas, the researchers ran three separate investigations. The first involved 3,482 university freshmen in China who completed standardised surveys about their sense of deprivation and their tendency to treat others as means to an end.

Students who felt more deprived reported higher levels of objectifying others, even after the data were adjusted for age and gender. Although this large survey showed a strong link, it could not prove that deprivation directly caused objectification.

A second study, using an online survey of 250 adults, dug deeper into the underlying mechanism. Participants answered questions on deprivation, objectification, and how much they monitored costs and benefits in friendships.

The team also measured dark personality traits such as narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, plus each person’s desire for power. This allowed them to check whether the findings were simply driven by manipulative or domineering personalities.

The analyses showed that an exchange-oriented mindset acted as a psychological bridge. Feeling deprived was linked to adopting a transactional approach to relationships, which in turn predicted greater objectification of others, even when darker traits and power motives were statistically controlled.

Testing causality in an imagined world

To move beyond correlations, the third study used an experiment with 194 adults. Participants were asked to imagine living on a newly discovered planet where the ability to fly determined access to resources, education, and good jobs.

One group imagined themselves as worse off than the planet’s most successful residents, inducing high relative deprivation. Another group compared themselves to the least successful residents, producing a sense of low deprivation.

After writing about their imagined status, participants rated the traits they would value in new friends on this world. The researchers focused on whether the deprived group would prioritise instrumental skills over warmth and shared values.

Those in the high deprivation group showed a much stronger transactional mindset. They placed significantly greater importance on instrumental qualities, such as flying ability, while differences in preferences for interpersonal traits like kindness or similar values were not statistically significant.

By manipulating perceptions of status and then observing changes in relationship preferences, the experiment provided evidence that feeling deprived can directly cause people to evaluate others more in terms of their utility.

Implications and limits of the findings

The findings suggest that when people feel systematically left behind, they may gravitate toward using relationships as survival tools. This has implications for workplaces, schools, and communities marked by stark inequalities or rapid social change.

If deprivation encourages transactional thinking and objectification, it could further weaken social trust and cooperation. Over time, this might deepen divisions and make it harder to build supportive networks that could buffer against deprivation in the first place.

The authors caution, however, that their work has limitations. The reliance on self-reported questionnaires and hypothetical scenarios may not fully capture how people behave in real-life interactions where norms and emotions are more complex.

All three studies were conducted with participants in China, a context with its own cultural norms around fairness, hierarchy, and community. Results might differ in societies with other views on inequality, social welfare, and collective responsibility.

The researchers also note that exchange orientation is likely only one of several pathways linking deprivation to damaged relationships. Emotions such as anger, mistrust, or shame may also play important roles and deserve further investigation.

What future research could uncover

Future studies may explore whether interventions that highlight shared identities and communal values can counteract the shift toward objectification when people feel deprived. Experimental work in workplaces or schools could test these ideas.

Another open question is how stable the transactional mindset is over time. Researchers want to know whether perceptions of deprivation leave a lasting mark on how people approach relationships, even after their circumstances improve.

As economic inequality and social polarisation continue to grow in many countries, understanding how feelings of unfairness spill into everyday social life is becoming increasingly urgent. This work offers an early roadmap of how those feelings can change not just what people want, but how they see one another.

Article prepared by Victoria Caldwell.