Relative Deprivation

Relative deprivation is the experience of being deprived of something to which one believes oneself to be entitled. It refers to the discontent people feel when they compare their positions to others and realize that they have less of what they believe themselves to be entitled than those around them.

Schaefer defines it as "the conscious experience of a negative discrepancy between legitimate expectations and present actualities. It is a term used in social sciences to describe feelings or measures of economic, political, or social deprivation that are relative rather than absolute.

The concept of relative deprivation has important consequences for both behavior and attitudes, including feelings of stress, political attitudes, and participation in collective action. It is relevant to researchers studying multiple fields in social sciences. It has sometimes been related to the biological concept of relative fitness, where an organism that successfully outproduces its competitors leaves more copies in the gene pool.

Social scientists, particularly political scientists and sociologists, have cited 'relative deprivation' (especially temporal relative deprivation) as a potential cause of social movements and deviance, leading in extreme situations to political violence such as rioting, terrorism, civil wars and other instances of social deviance such as crime. For example, some scholars of social movements explain their rise by citing grievances of people who feel deprived of what they perceive as values to which they are entitled. Similarly, individuals engage in deviant behaviors when their means do not match their goals.