Exchange Orientation

Conceptual Overview

The concept of distributive justice refers to the transfer of benefits and costs in relationships and perceptions of that transfer. Exchange orientation is one approach to thinking about distributive justice and, as stated earlier, reflects a tendency to prefer and seek equal allocation of costs and benefits among parties in relationships. More specifically, when Murstein first wrote about exchange orientation, he described a person high in such an orientation as being concerned with making sure that there was a balance among the parties involved in a relationship in costs and benefits. That is, every cost incurred by one person in the relationship should be met with a similar cost for the other party and every benefit gained by one person in the relationship should be reciprocated by the other with a similar benefit.

A natural implication of such an orientation is that a person would be upset whenever an imbalance was present in the relationship, whether he or she believed the self to be overbenefited or under-benefited. He or she would be dissatisfied whenever believing that the self incurred more costs than the other party in a relationship or whenever believing that the self received more benefits than the other. Murstein initially proposed that this orientation would be harmful to marital satisfaction because people generally are more aware of what they do for others than they are of what others do for them. So, all things being equal, people will generally perceive themselves to be underbenefited relative to others with whom they have relationships. If people generally perceive this to be the case, then it makes sense that a high exchange orientation would be associated with less satisfaction in marital relations. In contrast, he proposed that high exchange orientation would actually be beneficial for relatively new friendships. Because new friendships are comparatively much easier to get out of, people who perceive a great deal of inequity in a friendship would simply leave that relationship.

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