Rationally adjusting aspirations downward can suppress grievance despite large power gaps

Evidence

The ‘frustration-relative deprivation’ view holds that conflicts burst out when the gap between expectations and actual achievements becomes intolerable, that is, when relative deprivation increases actors’ frustrations beyond certain critical levels. Assuming actors to be rational, the power resources approach indicates that, where differences in power resources between actors are large, the weaker party may find it to be in its best interests, at least in the short term, not to attempt to resist the claims of the stronger actor and is likely, in the long run, to modify its levels of aspiration (Korpi, 1974). In distributive processes involving differently empowered actors, power thus may have important consequences without being associated with manifest conflict. — Walter Korpi, The Iceberg of Power below the Surface, 6

Categorization

• XREF: Directly bears on the reader’s grievance-threshold hypothesis: felt grievance may not scale with actual control deficit because the weak rationally lower aspiration. — connects to: Large power asymmetries suppress visible conflict by lowering the weaker party’s aspirations — Walter Korpi, The Iceberg of Power below the Surface:…, 6; Large power gaps suppress visible resistance and lower aspirations.; Aspiration adaptation, not resistance, is the weaker party’s rational response to large power gaps — Walter Korpi, The Iceberg of Power below the Surface:…, 6
• DEEPTHINKING: The astute empirical implication that frustration is endogenous to power asymmetry — where you cannot win, you stop wanting — undercuts naive grievance models the reader’s whole test depends on.

Broader Connections

• Large power gaps suppress visible resistance and lower aspirations. #corroborates (0.97)
• Aspiration adaptation, not resistance, is the weaker party’s rational response to large power gaps #corroborates (0.96) — Walter Korpi, The Iceberg of Power below the Surface, 6
• Large power asymmetries suppress visible conflict by lowering the weaker party’s aspirations #corroborates (0.95) — Walter Korpi, The Iceberg of Power below the Surface, 6