Relative Deprivation Predicts Collective Action Tendency: The Moderating Role Of Society Anxiety

In today’s China，economy develops quickly with huge social change. On onehand， the flourishing prospects are delighted， on the other hand， with thatdevelopment comes outstanding social problems and negative social emotions，whichworries people a lot. For example，different people from different group feel strongerand stronger relative deprivation and society anxiety，and collective behaviors burstfrequently. All these attract attention of psychological researchers. Actually，properrelative deprivation and society anxiety can result in positive effect，excite someone towork hard. Collective behaviors arming at legitimate claims can improve social rules.But excessive relative deprivation，society anxiety and collective behaviors，mayresult in negative effect. Such as，too much feel of relative deprivation and societyanxiety can cause functional diseases，induce collective behavior，cause personalinjury and terrible destruction，even have a strong impact on the harmony andsteadiness of our society.So the following research of collective behavior tendency and its mentalmechanism has strong application significance. Former researches find that strongrelative deprivation is a very important factor of the occurrence of collective behavior.And negative emotions，like society anxiety and angry，plays a very important role. Soin this study，we revised relative deprivation questionnaire，developed society anxietyquestionnaire and collective behavior tendency questionnaire，with passengers fromthe waiting hall of a train station as our objects. We found that relative deprivationcould positively predict collective behavior tendency and society anxiety played as amoderating role between the relationship of relative deprivation and collectivebehavior tendency.So far，most researches about collective behavior and relative deprivationdeveloped different questionnaire to meet the specific need， and there is no experimental research and measures of society anxiety in psychology study. So basedon the concepts and huge Chinese and English documents and materials，scales ofcollective behavior，relative deprivation and society anxiety were developed. Afterevaluated by psychologists，the three predict scales were answered by110passengersfrom Ji’nan Train Station. After the analysis of reliability and validity，severalimproper items were deleted，eventually reliability and validity of the questionnairemet the need of psychometrics. Their reliabilities are separately0.857，0.893and0.923，the GFIs are0.95，0.91and0.86.This study formally selected221passengers from Ji’nan Train Station to answerrelative deprivation questionnaire， society anxiety questionnaire and collectivebehavior tendency questionnaire. In this study，statistic methods such as Hierarchicalregression analysis were used to examine the relationship between relativedeprivation，society anxiety and collective behavior tendency.The main conclusions of this study are as follows:1. There was no significant gender difference on speech level of collectivebehavior tendency. There were significant gender differences on action level ofcollective behavior tendency，and result showed that males’ score is significantlyhigher than females’.2. There was no significant gender difference in relative deprivation.3. There was no significant gender difference on metal level of society anxiety.There were significant gender differences on action level of society anxiety，and resultshowed that males’ score is significantly higher than females’.4. Relative deprivation could positively predict collective behavior tendency.5. Society anxiety played as a moderating role between the relationship ofrelative deprivation and collective behavior tendency. Specifically， moderationfunctioned on the higher level of society anxiety，failed on the lower level of societyanxiety.