When the “We” Impacts How “I” Feel About Myself

Abstract

Dramatic social change leads to profound societal transformations in many countries around the world. The two recent revolutions in March 2005 and April 2010, and the ethnic conflict in June 2010 in Kyrgyzstan are vivid examples. The present research aims to understand people’s reactions to dramatic social change in terms of personal well-being. To further understand how people react psychologically to dramatic social change, the theoretical framework of our research is based on a dominant theory in social psychology: Collective relative deprivation theory. In the past, researchers have argued that collective relative deprivation is logically associated with collective outcomes, and thus is not likely to impact personal well-being (e.g., Walker & Mann, 1987 ). Others, however, have argued that feelings of collective relative deprivation do impact personal well-being (e.g., Zagefka & Brown, 2005 ). We postulate that these inconsistent results arise because past research has failed to consider multiple points of comparison over time to assess collective relative deprivation. Specifically, we theorize that multiple points of collective relative deprivation need to be taken into account, and in so doing, collective relative deprivation will, indeed, be related to personal well-being. We also explore the entire trajectory of collective relative deprivation (which represents how an individual perceives the evolution of his/her group’s history across time) to predict personal well-being. In the present study, we tested these theoretical propositions in the context of dramatic social change in Kyrgyzstan. Regressions, group-based trajectory modeling, and MANOVA confirm our hypotheses.