Social exchange theory. Flashcards
Rewards, costs, profits - Thibault and Kelley (1959).
- Suggest that behaviour in relationships reflects the economic assumptions of exchange. We try to minimise looses and maximise gains (the minimax principle),
- We judge our satisfaction with a relationship in terms of the profit it yields, defined as rewards minus the costs.
- But rewards and costs are subjective, there is a wide range of possible outcomes because what one person considers a significant reward might be viewed as less valuable by someone else.
Rewards, costs and profits in relationships - Pete Blau (1964).
- As people are fundamentally selfish, relationships only continue if both partners feel they are getting more out of the relationship than they are putting in.
- The value of rewards and costs might change over course of a relationship. What’s seen as rewarding or costly in the early stage might become less or even more so over time.
- For a relationship to me maintained, individuals must feel as though they are receiving more than they are putting in.
- Peter Blau (1964) used economic language to explain relationships can be ‘expensive’. Relationships can also incur an opportunity cost, investment in time and energy in your current relationship means using resources you cannot invest elsewhere.
Rewards of relationships:
- Companionship
- Sex
- Love
- Affection
- Status
- Emotional support
- Satisfaction
- Self-esteem boost.
Costs of relationships:
- Missed opportunities
- Time
- Money
- Stress
- Energy
- Compromise
- Arguments
Stages of development.
Profit, similarly with economics, refers to rewards minus costs. Positive outcomes happen when there is net profit and negative outcomes happen when there is net loss.
Stages of development: Thibault and Kelley (1959):
Identify 4 different stages of a relationship based on rewards, costs and exchange.
1) Sampling: partners consider the possible costs and benefits in a new relationship through direct or indirect interactions and compare it to other relationships.
2) Bargaining: partners exchange costs and benefits; they negotiate and identify what is most profitable.
3) Commitment: the relationship is stable and maintained by a predictable exchange of rewards.
4) Institutionalisation: partners are now settled down and established norms in terms of rewards and costs.
- Comparison Level.
There are 2 ways in which we measure profit in a romantic relationship, the first being comparison level and the second being comparison level for alternatives.
1) Comparison level: this is the amount of rewards that you believe you deserve to get. This depends on our experiences of previous relationships which feed into our expectations of the current one.
- It’s also influenced by social norms that determine what is widely considered, within a culture, to be a reasonable level of reward - this is often reflected in the media through films, books etc.
- Over time, we get more relationships and more experience of social norms, so our comparison level changes as we gather more ‘data’ to set it by.
- We consider a relationship worth pursuing if our comparison level is high, this is due to the link with self-esteem. Someone with low self-esteem will have a low comparison level and will therefore be satisfied with gaining just small profit from a relationship.
- Whereas, someone with a higher self-esteem will believe they are worth a lot more and will not ‘settle’.
- Comparison Level of Alternatives.
- This measure of profit includes a wider context of our current relationship.
2. Comparison level of alternatives: do we believe we could gain greater rewards and fewer costs from another relationship or from being on our own? - This would be asking yourself you could ‘do better’. SET predicts that we will stay in our current relationship only for as long as we believe it’s more rewarding than alternatives.
- Researcher Ducker (1994) suggests that if costs of our current relationship outweigh the rewards, then alternatives become more attractive. But when we are satisfied in relationships, we may not even notice that alternatives could be available.
Are relationships really this complex?
- Researchers suggest that romantic relationships involve more than just rewards, costs and comparisons.
- Ronald Sabatelli suggests two examples to help extend our understanding of the social exchange theory:
1. Dependence
2. Barriers.
Ronald Sabatelli: 1. Dependence.
- Refers to how much you depend on your partner to feel satisfied in your relationship.
- You are said to be dependent if you believe that you will get less satisfaction from an alternative relationship than you are from your current one.
- If this is the case and you are dependent on your partner for your happiness but they will not dependent on your for theirs (because they have better alternatives), then there is a power imbalance between you.
Are relationships really this complex? 2. Barriers.
- There are certain factors that make you more dependent on your partner. Levinger (1982) call these ‘barriers’ and there are two types.
- Internal barriers - include things like believing a marriage should be permanent, that children need two parents, feeling guilt at the thought of divorce etc.
- External barriers - include economic factors, legal considerations and wider pressures. Barriers increase the costs of ending a relationship, thereby increasing dependence even in ‘loveless’ relationships where the attraction has faded.
Limitation of social exchange theory: Measuring SET concepts.
P: A limitation of the social exchange theory is that it deals with concepts that are hard to quantify.
E: Rewards and costs have been defined superficially (e.g. money) in order to measure them. But psychological rewards and costs are more difficult to
define, especially when they vary so much from one person to another. It is also unclear what the values of comparisons must be before we become dissatisfied in the relationship.
C: The inability to accurately quantify the key concepts of SET make it very difficult to produce valid research support.
Limitation of social exchange theory: not universal.
P: Another limitation of social exchange theory is that it assumes that all relationships are exchanged based.
E: Clark and Mills (2011) argues that exchange relationships (e.g. work
colleagues) may involve profit but communal relationships (romantic) involve the giving and receiving of rewards without thinking of profit.
C: This suggests that social exchange theory may not provide a suitable explanation for all types of relationships.
Limitation of social exchange theory: direction of effect.
P: Another limitation concerns the direction of effect.
E: It is assumed that dissatisfaction occurs where costs outweigh rewards or
alternatives seem more attractive, but Miller (1997) found that people who
said they were in a committed relationship spent less time looking at images
of attractive people. Less time looking was a good predictor of the relationship continuing at the two month follow up.
C: Therefore, SET may have the wrong direction of cause and effect. Rather than lack of profit leading to dissatisfaction it can be argued that we do not consider the profit until after we become dissatisfied.
