General Exploitation Theory

Exploitation is a feature of human social life, yet its study remains fragmented across psychological, economic, philosophical, and social-scientific traditions. We propose General Exploitation Theory (GET), an integrative framework that separates the conceptual question of what exploitation is from the causal question of what makes exploitative action more or less likely. GET defines exploitation as a relational process in which an actor seeks or obtains self-benefit by using a feature of another party's relational position to secure a position-dependent advantage. Such an advantage is an incremental benefit or more favorable terms that would be reduced or unavailable in a comparable interaction in which the underlying contribution, resource, or value remained the same but the enabling positional feature was absent or neutralized. The causal architecture distinguishes objective exploitability from exploitation-relevant appraisal and proposes four appraisal dimensions: expected actor benefit, anticipated self-cost, perceived appropriability, and target-welfare weighting. Relational and social-contextual conditions create or modify objective exploitability and, together with individual characteristics, calibrate exploitation-relevant appraisal without constituting exploitation themselves. Exploitative action is distinguished from successful exploitative outcomes, while behavioral responses and their outcomes can modify subsequent appraisals, relational conditions, and institutional environments through recursive feedback. GET treats interpersonal, organizational, and digital exploitation as context-specific instantiations of an architecture rather than as phenomena requiring separate explanatory models. The framework generates falsifiable predictions concerning appraisal mediation, functional equivalence, contextual recalibration, divergent responses to exploitability, and recursive feedback. GET thereby provides a psychologically explicit framework for explaining how exploitable relational conditions can become exploitative action.