Relative Gratification and Outgroup Prejudice: Further Tests On A New Dimension of Comparison

Recent studies have shown that the opposite of Relative Deprivation, Relative Gratification (RG), also leads to negative intergroup attitudes. In previous investigations, RG was manipulated in terms of positive economic expectations.

The aim of the present research was to examine whether the effect of RG is limited to an economic dimension or if it reflects a more general process that is observable in different domains of comparison. In the first experiment, we choose to gratify – or not – psychology students on a new dimension with an important social value: their intellectual abilities.

As expected, participants of the RG condition expressed a significantly higher level of prejudice towards low status outgroups than participants of the control group. In the second study, we found support for a model in which ethnic identification and group-based dominance mediated the relationship between intelligence based RG and prejudice toward low status ethnic outgroups.