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

Abstract

An improvement in the opportunity structure of a social system (e.g., a society or a firm) can coincide with a growing share of frustrated individuals. For instance, uprisings were repeatedly preceded by political liberalizations or a rise in overall prosperity (the so-called Tocqueville paradox). In organisations, satisfaction with promotion opportunity can be negatively associated with objective promotion chances. Raymond Boudon suggests a game-theoretic competition model specifying the micro-mechanisms that produce these puzzling phenomena on the aggregate level and clarifying the conditions under which they emerge. We conducted a series of laboratory experiments to test model predictions, making our study the first empirical test of Boudon’s model. Results are mixed: When opportunities increased, the share of the relatively frustrated losers in the group remained constant or increased only slightly. However, when applying another aggregation rule that accounts for all social comparison processes and does not merely focus on the losers as suggested by Boudon, 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.