The specific phenomenon that has been the principal stimulant of research on relative deprivation is the frequent discontinuity between objective and subjective well-being. Individuals' objective conditions (wealth, health, etc.) are, at best, imperfect predictors of their subjective satisfaction with their lives or situations. The insight provided by the construct of relative deprivation is that people evaluate their outcomes in relation to standards; when their outcomes fall below the standards, they feel “deprived.” Thus, feelings of deprivation are relative; that is, they imply a comparison with a standard.

Most sociologists and psychologists who have studied relative deprivation have focused on one particular type of comparison standard, namely, the outcomes of other people. That is, social comparisons have constituted the central mechanism hypothesized to underlie the occurrence of relative deprivation (see Olson, Herman, & Zanna, 1986). For example, in the most influential model of personal relative deprivation, Crosby (1976) proposed that one necessary precondition of relative deprivation is the perception that another person possesses a desired object.

Of course, other people's outcomes provide only one of many possible standards with which one's own outcomes could potentially be compared. For example, individuals could compare their current outcomes with their own outcomes in the past. Such temporal comparisons might yield dissatisfaction if past outcomes exceed current ones. Indeed, Gurr (1970) used the term decremental deprivation to refer to this situation, where decreasing outcomes over time yield anger.