Relative Deprivation and Transactional Behaviour: CX Implications

What happened

A newly published psychology study has found that individuals who perceive themselves as worse off than those around them — a state researchers call relative deprivation — are significantly more likely to adopt an instrumental view of their relationships, treating other people primarily as means to personal ends rather than as ends in themselves.

The research, reported by PsyPost, examined how this sense of comparative disadvantage shapes interpersonal orientation. When participants were primed to feel relatively deprived, they showed a measurable shift toward transactional thinking: evaluating relationships by what could be extracted from them rather than by intrinsic social or emotional value.

Why it matters

For anyone designing customer journeys or managing service teams, this finding carries a pointed implication. Customers who feel economically or socially disadvantaged — whether through pricing structures that feel unfair, loyalty programmes that appear to reward others more generously, or service tiers that make inequality visible — may arrive at interactions already primed toward transactional, low-trust behaviour. They are not being difficult; they are responding rationally to a perceived status gap. That behavioural state makes them harder to delight, quicker to defect and less receptive to relationship-building gestures.

The behavioral economics angle is equally significant for employee experience. Frontline staff who feel relatively deprived compared to colleagues — through opaque pay structures, unequal recognition or visible status hierarchies — may themselves shift toward instrumental workplace behaviour, eroding the discretionary effort that genuine service quality depends upon. Relative deprivation is not merely a customer-side risk; it is a culture risk.

The Renascence take

Most operators will read this study as a warning about economically stressed customer segments and move on. The more uncomfortable insight is that service design itself can manufacture relative deprivation — and frequently does.

Every time a brand makes its tiered benefits visible to those who do not qualify, displays a "premium" queue alongside a standard one, or sends a loyalty offer that a long-standing customer can see but cannot access, it is actively inducing the psychological state this research describes. The question is not whether your customers feel relatively deprived in the world at large — it is whether your own experience architecture is the thing triggering that feeling at the moment of service. Customer-obsessed operators should audit their journey for deprivation cues: the moments where comparison is made salient and status is made legible in ways that diminish rather than motivate. Reducing those cues is not just ethically sound; according to this research, it is commercially rational.