Feeling Wronged Leads to Entitlement and Selfishness

Home , Entitlement, Selfishness

FEELING WRONGED LEADS TO ENTITLEMENT AND SELFISHNESS

A DISSERTATION

SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY

AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES

OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Emily Maria Zitek

June 2010

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/

This dissertation is online at: http://purl.stanford.edu/yk940fj0071

ii I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Benoit Monin, Primary Adviser

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Carol Dweck

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Elizabeth Mullen

Approved for the Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies. Patricia J. Gumport, Vice Provost Graduate Education

This signature page was generated electronically upon submission of this dissertation in electronic format. An original signed hard copy of the signature page is on file in University Archives.

iii

Abstract

Five studies demonstrate that feeling wronged leads to a sense of entitlement and to selfish behavior. In Study 1, participants who were instructed to recall a time when their lives were unfair were more likely to refuse to help the experimenter with a supplementary task than were participants who recalled a time when they were bored. In

Study 2, the same manipulation increased intentions to engage in a number of selfish behaviors, and this effect was mediated by self-reported entitlement to obtain positive

(and avoid negative) outcomes. In Study 3, participants who lost a computer game for an unfair reason (a glitch in the program) requested a more selfish money allocation for a future task than did participants who lost the game for a fair reason, and this effect was again mediated by entitlement. In Studies 4 and 5, bad luck from a fair, random system led to the same kinds of effects for men. In Study 4, students (especially men) who received bad numbers in a housing lottery expressed less intention to behave charitably.

In Study 5, men who were assigned to bad outcomes by the roll of a die were less willing to help out by signing up for an additional experiment than were men in the control condition, and self-reported entitlement again mediated the effect.

Acknowledgments

This research was conducted in collaboration with Alexander H. Jordan, Benoît

Monin, and, in part, Frederick R. Leach. The first three studies described in this paper, as well as topics covered in the introduction and General Discussion, are also discussed in a published article, protected by APA copyright, in the Journal of Personality and Social

Psychology (Zitek, et al., 2010; http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/psp/index.aspx). I am the first author of this published paper, and I was the lead researcher for the entire set of studies described in this dissertation.

I would like to thank my advisers, Benoît Monin and Lara Tiedens, for working with me during my time at Stanford. I have learned so much about how to be a good social psychologist from them, and I have really appreciated their support and advice. I would also like to thank the other members of my oral examination committee, Shelley

Correll, Carol Dweck, Mark Lepper, and Liz Mullen, for their very helpful feedback on this project. I also extend my thanks to the past and present Monin-Mullen Morality Lab members for their beneficial input. I am grateful to them for giving us the idea to conduct the housing lottery study. I would also like to thank Dale Miller and Krishna Savani for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of papers based on my dissertation research, as well as the members of the social psychology area in general for their insights when I have presented this work. I would also like to express my gratitude to Yesenia Cisneros,

James Hilton, Ned Lederer, Allie Welch, and Chris York for their assistance with the data collection for these studies and Jianfeng Lin for his help programming Study 3. Finally, I would like to thank Ewart Thomas, Mikki Hebl, Ray Yee, and my family, Margaret Diaz,

Terry Zitek, and Tony Zitek, for their general support and encouragement.

Table of Contents

I. Introduction …………………………………………………………. 1

II. Study 1: Recalling Past Events (1) ……………………………...…... 8

a. Method ……………………………………………………. 8 b. Results ……………………………………………………. 10 c. Discussion ………………………………………………… 11

III. Study 2: Recalling Past Events (2) ………………………………….. 12

a. Method ……………………………………………………. 13 b. Results …………………………………………………….. 14 c. Discussion ……………………………………………….... 17

IV. Study 3: The Computer Game ……………………………………… 18

a. Method ……………………………………………………. 19 b. Results ……………………………………………………. 22 c. Discussion ………………………………………………… 24

V. Study 4: The Housing Lottery ……………………………………… 25

a. Method ……………………………………………………. 26 b. Results …………………………………………………….. 28 c. Discussion ………………………………………………… 30

VI. Study 5: The Taste Test …………………………………………..... 32

a. Method ……………………………………………………. 33 b. Results …………………………………………………….. 35 c. Discussion ………………………………………………… 37

VII. General Discussion ……………………………………. …………… 38

VIII. References ………………………………………. ………………….. 49

IX. Footnotes ……………………………………….…………………..... 59

X. Appendix …………………………………………………………….. 60

Feeling Wronged Leads to Entitlement and Selfishness

Does feeling like a victim make one behave more or less selfishly? Imagine that an individual feels wronged by an everyday event: An executive sees a colleague receive a promotion that she feels she deserved instead; an academic finds out that he is once more assigned to a tedious committee, while his colleagues seem miraculously spared; an author is about to send off a manuscript when a computer glitch erases weeks’ worth of work, and she is penalized for missing her deadline; a student is randomly allotted a small, dark dorm room, while her peers seem to be enjoying palatial quarters. As these individuals contemplate their unfortunate lot, how motivated would they be to help others? One could imagine that individuals who have received the short end of the stick would be especially motivated to help others, to redress other wrongs, or to make themselves feel better with the warm glow that comes from doing good. In this paper we make the opposite prediction: We propose instead that feeling wronged gives people a sense of entitlement to obtain positive outcomes—and to avoid negative ones—that frees them from the usual requirements of social life. Whereas individuals typically contend with a strong norm of benevolence that encourages helping and curbs egoism, we propose that wronged individuals, due to their heightened sense of entitlement, feel relieved from this communal obligation, and therefore exhibit more selfish intentions and behavior.

Feeling Wronged and Its Consequences

Individuals feel wronged when they experience outcomes that depart from what they believe they deserve, such as being treated with respect (Miller, 2001), being treated in the same way as similar others (Major, 1994), receiving an output that is proportional to their input (Walster, Walster, & Berscheid, 1978), being offered justifications for

decisions that affect them (Bies & Shapiro, 1987), or even just having a happy childhood

(Lamb, 1996). Different individuals feel deserving of different things (Lerner, 1991;

Major, 1994), so wronging will take various forms; but regardless of its specific source, the experience of being wronged is unpleasant and often elicits negative affect such as anger (Mikula, Scherer, & Athenstaedt, 1998; Shaver, Schwartz, Kirson, & O'Connor,

1987; Walster, Walster, & Berscheid, 1978).

We propose that this perception of being wronged increases individuals’ sense of entitlement to avoid further suffering and to obtain positive outcomes for themselves.1

Wronged individuals feel that they have already done their fair share of suffering—as if there were a maximum amount of victimhood that a person can reasonably be expected to endure—and consequently they feel entitled to spare themselves some of life’s inconveniences, such as being attentive to the needs of others. We predict that this should lead individuals to behave selfishly by, for example, refusing to help, endorsing self- serving intentions, or claiming a bigger piece of the pie when sharing resources with others.

Past Research on the Links between Victimhood, Entitlement, and Selfish Behavior

Victimhood and Entitlement

Clinical psychologists have long suggested a link between unpleasant life experiences and a sense of entitlement. Freud (1916) observed that people who thought they had suffered poor childhoods felt entitled not to endure any more of life’s

“disagreeable necessities” (p. 320). More recently, Bishop and Lane (2000) suggested that people who grew up without a father often show an increased sense of entitlement to special treatment (see also Bishop & Lane, 2002; Shabad, 1993). Some evidence suggests

that this phenomenon is moderated by how the misfortune is construed: In a study of individuals with disabilities, those who least accepted their disability—those who presumably felt most wronged by it—felt most entitled to use alcohol and drugs (Li &

Moore, 2001). This body of work suggests that at a chronic level, individuals who feel that they have suffered in life possess more of a sense of entitlement than do others who perceive their life narrative as more clement.

Entitlement and Selfish Behavior

Does feeling entitled lead people to behave more selfishly? Convergent correlational evidence using various measures of entitlement suggests that this is the case.

In one set of studies, individuals who scored higher on the Psychological Entitlement

Scale took more candy from a bowl that was to be shared with children, said they deserved higher salaries than other workers, acted more greedily in a commons dilemma game, and treated their romantic partners in a more selfish manner (Campbell, Bonacci,

Shelton, Exline, & Bushman, 2004). In another study, higher scores on the

Exploitativeness/Entitlement dimension of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (Raskin

& Hall, 1981) predicted less social responsibility (Watson and Morris, 1991). Finally, in a different study, parents who scored higher on the Entitlement scale of the Basic

Adlerian Scales for Interpersonal Success—Adult Form (a measurement of preference for special treatment; Wheeler, Kern, & Curlette, 1993) were more likely to drop out of a parenting class, even though material learned in it could benefit their children (Snow,

Kern, & Curlette, 2001). These studies suggest that a chronic disposition towards entitlement, as measured by these various scales, is related to selfish behavior.

Victimhood and Selfish Behavior

As we have briefly reviewed, a sense of victimhood may lead to entitlement, and entitlement, in turn, is associated with selfish behavior. Bringing these two findings together, our central claim is that feeling wronged can lead to more selfish behavior through an increase in entitlement. Though, to our knowledge, this hypothesis has never been tested directly, some existing research provides suggestive support. For example, individuals who are especially sensitive to being the victims of unfair treatment (as measured by Schmitt, Neumann, and Montada’s 1995 scale) were more likely to behave selfishly in a dictator game (Fetchenhauer & Huang, 2004) and reported being more likely to commit minor moral transgressions (Gollwitzer, Schmitt, Schalke, Maes, &

Baer, 2005). In another study, women who were victims of sexual abuse reported being less likely to think of and help others as compared to non-victims (McMullin, Wirth, &

White, 2007). In a similar vein, Bishop and Lane (2000) described a clinical case study of a boy who, as a consequence of being abandoned by his father, engaged in “acts of entitlement” (p. 115), such as stealing and trying to get his therapist in trouble for purportedly failing to help him.

Perhaps most suggestive is the experimental work exploring how individuals strive to maintain “equity with the world” (Austin & Walster, 1975; see also Moschetti &

Kues, 1978), or equity in their relationships overall: If they are under-benefited in one relationship (e.g., underpaid), they may try to over-benefit themselves in another (e.g., overpay themselves). In support of this equity-with-the-world hypothesis, Austin and

Walster (1975) found that participants who were underpaid by an individual in a first task were later more likely to underpay a different individual (and overpay themselves) in

another task, compared to participants who were equitably paid in the first task. Although limited to the domain of monetary allocations, equity-with-the-world research suggests that suffering unfairness may indeed lead to selfish behavior in the same domain.

In these studies, after making the ungenerous allocation, participants reported that anger affected their decision, leading Austin and Walster (1975) and Moschetti and Kues

(1978) to propose anger as a mediator. However, empirical support for the role of anger in decreasing prosociality has been scant. In a meta-analysis of 85 studies on negative affect and helping, anger (as well as other negative emotions, such as frustration and sadness) was not related to helpfulness when controlling for other helping-related variables (Carlson & Miller, 1987). Therefore, although people may feel anger and other negative emotions after being wronged, we believe that entitlement, and not anger, is the main cause of subsequent selfish behavior. We will return to this point later.

Our own preliminary research (Zitek, Jordan, Leach, & Monin, 2007) has shown that college students who had been the victims of a common type of campus crime reported being more likely to commit the same crime against other students in the future.

Past and present bike light owners read scenarios asking them to imagine that they did not currently have a bike light. Participants were then asked how likely they would be to steal someone else’s light (rather than buying one) and how morally permissible such an action would be. As predicted, participants whose own light had been stolen in real life reported being more likely to take someone else’s bike light, and they viewed this behavior as more morally acceptable. Like the equity-with-the-world results, these data suggest that feeling wronged can license people to shortchange others in the same domain.

The Present Research: Entitlement as a Dynamic, Domain-General Mindset

We have reviewed research supporting the hypothesis that feeling wronged could lead to selfish behavior as a result of psychological entitlement. Going beyond this past work, we propose that entitlement can be a dynamic mindset, and not just a chronic disposition, and that being wronged in one domain can license selfish behavior in a completely different domain.

Entitlement as Mindset

Although most past research has focused on entitlement as a stable individual difference, we propose that an individual can also vary in the extent to which he or she feels entitled in the course of any given day, depending on what past experiences are salient in the individual’s mind when the opportunity for selfish behavior presents itself.

This approach is consistent with recent social psychological models demonstrating that factors traditionally thought of as structural and heavily determined by long-term factors

(e.g., power) can be productively reconceptualized as mindsets (e.g., Galinsky,

Gruenfeld, & Magee, 2003; see also Bargh, Raymond, Pryor, & Strack, 1995). The model presented here posits that entitlement is a mindset that can be activated whenever one is wronged, or even, in the absence of recent victimhood, by merely reminding individuals of a time when they were wronged.

Entitlement across Domains

In addition to conceiving of entitlement as a mindset, we suggest that its effects should not be limited to a single domain. Whereas earlier empirical work reviewed above

(Austin & Walster, 1975; Moschetti & Kues, 1978; Zitek et al., 2007) focused on how individuals feel licensed to act selfishly (take more money, steal a bike light) after feeling

that they have been the victim of someone else’s selfishness in the same domain, we propose that entitlement is more far-reaching, so that feeling wronged in one domain should lead to increased selfish behavior even in a completely different domain. This departure from the domain specificity of previous research is important because it avoids the alternative interpretation of social modeling that could explain some previous findings (e.g., after having one’s bike light stolen, a person may believe that bike light theft is a more common and thus acceptable behavior).

Overview of Studies

Five studies (three of which are published in Zitek, Jordan, Monin, & Leach,

2010) tested the hypothesis that feeling wronged makes individuals experience a sense of entitlement to avoid further suffering and to obtain positive outcomes, leading them to behave selfishly by, for example, refusing to help, expressing more selfish intentions, or claiming a bigger piece of the pie.2 In Study 1, we tested whether having participants

recall a time when their lives were unfair would decrease the likelihood that they would

help someone in the present. We also examined whether being reminded of this unfair

life event would increase their sense of entitlement. In Study 2, we tested whether having

participants recall a time when their lives were unfair would make them more readily

express self-serving intentions, and whether this relationship between feeling wronged

and selfishness would be mediated by entitlement. In Study 3, instead of having

participants remember an unfair life event, we designed a novel online paradigm in which

participants missed out on a prize either fairly (poor performance) or unfairly (program

malfunction) and then had the opportunity to selfishly claim more of a shared reward.

Again we tested whether this predicted effect would be mediated by entitlement. In

Studies 4 and 5, we examined whether having bad luck in a fair, random system (e.g., a housing lottery) would lead to the same kinds of effects.

Study 1: Recalling Past Events (1)

Study 1 was designed to provide initial evidence that feeling wronged causes people to feel entitled and behave selfishly. First, we wanted to determine whether entitlement is more than just a chronic disposition and examine whether feeling wronged can lead to an entitlement mindset. Second, we wanted to determine whether people who experience injustice in one domain might act selfishly in another domain. To achieve these goals, we asked participants to recall a time when their lives were unfair (vs. a time when they were bored in the control condition), and then we asked them to respond to items measuring their sense of entitlement. Then, at the end of the study, participants were asked whether they wanted to help the experimenter with an additional, optional task, allowing us to look at real selfish behavior in a different domain from that of the wronging. We predicted that participants’ recollections of a time when they were wronged would make them feel entitled, leading them to be less helpful.

Method

Participants. One hundred four Stanford undergraduates (56 women and 48 men) participated in this laboratory study in exchange for partial course credit.

Procedure. Participants were directed to a computer in a laboratory room and began reading the instructions on the screen. In the first part of the study, participants were asked to describe events in their lives. They were told that they would write a brief essay on something that they do frequently, and then they would write a brief essay on something that happened at a particular time. They were told that they could spend 5–10

minutes writing each essay. The first essay asked them to describe their morning routine in detail; this was used to disguise the true purpose of the study. The second essay’s topic varied by condition. In the wronging condition, participants wrote an essay in response to the following prompt: “Please describe in detail a time when your life seemed unfair.

Perhaps you felt wronged or slighted by someone, for example.” In the control condition, the prompt read: “Please describe in detail a time in which you felt bored.” Thus, participants in both conditions were instructed to describe something negative that happened in their lives, but we expected the boredom essays to have nothing to do with experiencing unfairness.

After completing unrelated filler tasks for about five minutes, participants indicated their agreement on a 7-point scale (1 = strong disagreement, 7 = strong agreement) with three entitlement items and nine personality-related filler items (e.g., “I have a good memory”) presented in random order. The entitlement items were: (1) “I deserve more things in my life,” (2) “Things should go my way,” and (3) “I am entitled not to suffer too much.” The first two items were taken from the Psychological

Entitlement Scale (Campbell et al., 2004), and we created the third using language modeled after Freud’s (1916) when he described a phenomenon similar to the one we are studying. The mean of the three entitlement items was used as our measure of entitlement

(α = .66).

The helping request was the last measure administered. Instructions on the computer screen told participants that they had completed the study but that they had the option of helping the experimenter with an extra task described as “pilot testing for another project.” They were told that this was totally voluntary and not part of the

original experiment. On the next screen, participants clicked “yes” or “no” to indicate whether they wanted to help with this extra task. If participants selected “yes”, they went on to answer a brief questionnaire about athletes. If they selected “no”, this questionnaire was skipped. Then, participants were asked to guess the hypothesis of the study and to report whether they were suspicious of anything. Finally, they were debriefed.

Results

Preliminary analyses. An examination of the free-response essays showed that participants in the wronging condition wrote about a wide variety of situations, such as being accused of bad things they did not do, not getting something good they thought they deserved, and getting treated poorly by close others. We removed three wronging- condition participants who did not accurately answer the question (e.g., wrote about a time when other people were wronged) or who wrote about a time when their lives were

“unfair” in a positive sense (e.g., getting something good that they did not deserve). We also removed two control-condition participants who wrote about being wronged in their boredom essays. One other participant was removed because she skipped the essay part of the experiment.

No participant guessed the full hypothesis, but four of the remaining participants expressed suspicion that the request for help with the extra task was what the researchers were actually interested in. We excluded these four participants from all subsequent analyses for clarity of interpretation, but the results reported below were the same regardless of whether we included (N = 98) or excluded (N = 94) these suspicious participants.

Entitlement. As predicted, participants in the wronging condition reported a higher mean entitlement score (M = 4.34, SD = 1.23) than did control participants (M =

3.85, SD = 1.19), t(92) = 1.96, p = .05.

Selfish behavior. Also, as predicted, participants who recalled a time when their lives were unfair were significantly more likely (40%) to refuse to help the experimenter with extra task than were participants who recalled a time when they were bored (19%),

χ2(1, N = 94) = 5.09, p = .02.

Mediation by entitlement. When both condition and entitlement were entered

into a logistic regression model predicting a refusal to volunteer for the extra task, as

hypothesized, entitlement was significant (b = .47, se[b] = .21), Wald χ2 = 4.93, p = .03,

but condition was no longer significant (b = .88, se[b] = .49), Wald χ2 = 3.17, p = .07.

Using the bootstrapping method (with 10,000 iterations) recommended by Preacher and

Hayes (2004), we tested the significance of the indirect effect of condition on the refusal

to help through entitlement. The 95% confidence interval for the indirect effect ranged

from -.0103 to .6284, which just includes zero, so it was not significant at the .05 level.

However, the 90% confidence interval did not include zero (.0201 to .5505), indicating

that entitlement was a marginal mediator in this experiment.

Discussion

After being reminded of a time when life was unfair to them, individuals were

less likely to agree to help an experimenter. Furthermore, we demonstrated that being

reminded of an unfair event led participants to report a heightened sense of entitlement

(i.e., an entitlement mindset). Our first test of the mediation model (that being wronged

leads to selfish behavior due to increased entitlement) yielded a marginal result, providing partial support for the mediating role of entitlement.

These results help to rule out social modeling as the sole explanation for our effect. In contrast to other studies demonstrating that being wronged in one domain leads to selfish behavior in the same domain (e.g., Austin & Walster, 1975; Moschetti & Kues,

1978; Zitek et al., 2007), Study 1 demonstrated that this effect occurs across domains:

Participants recalled being wronged in one way and behaved selfishly in a completely different way. Even though no participants recalled an unfair life event in which another person refused to help them when they asked for assistance, these participants still showed a decreased propensity to help the experimenter when asked to do so.

Study 2: Recalling Past Events (2)

Study 1 demonstrated our basic effect: Individuals made to feel wronged behaved selfishly by not helping the experimenter. Study 1’s results also provided partial support for the hypothesis that entitlement mediates the relationship between feeling wronged and behaving selfishly. In Study 2, to increase statistical power and provide a better test of mediation, we improved our measurement of entitlement by refining the items used, we specified to participants that they should focus on their current state of entitlement, and we averaged several ratings of selfish intentions made on a 7-point scale rather than a relying on a single dichotomous measure of selfish behavior as we did in Study 1. We asked participants how likely they would be to engage in a wide range of behaviors in the future, from failing to recycle to helping with a service project. The set of behaviors was diverse, but they all required a tradeoff between inconveniencing oneself and burdening the community. We used the same manipulation of wronging as in Study 1—asking

participants to remember a time when life was unfair to them. Finally, we included measures of anger, frustration, and general negative affect in Study 2 to test these emotions as alternative potential mediators of our effect.

Method

Participants. One hundred eleven Stanford undergraduates (71 women and 40 men) participated in exchange for partial course credit.

Procedure. Participants were seated at a computer in a laboratory room and were given the essay-writing instructions used in Study 1. After writing their essays about unfair or boring times in their lives, participants indicated how frustrated, wronged, and bored they felt by the event that they just described on a 7-point scale from 1 (not at all) to 7 (very). Participants then reported on a 5-point scale the extent to which, at the present moment, they felt the 10 positive and 10 negative emotions that compose the Positive and

Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS; Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988). Because the

PANAS does not include the words angry and frustrated—emotions of particular interest to us—we added them.

Next, participants rated their agreement with nine personality-related filler items

(also used in Study 1) and four entitlement items on a 7-point scale (1 = strong disagreement, 7 = strong agreement). Going beyond the measurement of entitlement in

Study 1, we only kept the item “I am entitled not to suffer too much” and otherwise substituted three new entitlement items designed to tap more directly into the idea of entitlement to do things that benefit the self (and avoid things that are unpleasant). We changed “I deserve more things in my life” to “I deserve good things in my life” to clarify what that item meant. The final two items we included were: “I deserve an extra

break now and then” and “I should not have to inconvenience myself for others.” We also asked participants to respond to these statements based on how they were feeling at that moment in an attempt to measure state (as opposed to trait) entitlement. We took the mean of the four entitlement items as our measure of entitlement (α = .60).

After this, we measured participants’ selfish intentions (see the appendix).

Participants were asked how likely they would be to engage in 11 selfish (e.g., answering a cell phone in a library) or unselfish (reverse-scored; e.g., volunteering) behaviors on 7- point scales ranging from 1 (definitely will not/would not) to 7 (definitely will/would).

The mean of these items (α = .67) was taken as a measure of selfish behavioral intentions.

Participants also responded to seven filler items (also in the appendix) that did not gauge self-serving tendencies. Finally, participants reported demographic information, were asked to guess our hypothesis, and were debriefed.

In addition to the explicit self-report measures of how likely people would be to engage in various selfish behaviors, we also included a more subtle measure of selfish behavior. Throughout the study, there was a small bin containing 11 pieces of candy on the corner of the participant’s desk labeled candy for research participants. There were two empty wrappers next to the bin, designed to look as if they had been left behind by a previous participant. We surreptitiously recorded the number of pieces of (apparently shared) candy participants ate and also noted any other selfish behaviors (e.g., leaving the trash from the candy they ate on the desk, taking the pen used to sign the consent form).

Results

Preliminary analyses. As expected, participants who wrote an essay about a time when their lives were unfair felt significantly more wronged (M = 5.09, SD = 1.60) than

did participants who wrote about a time when they were bored (M = 2.41, SD = 1.35), t(109) = 9.52, p < .001. As in the previous study, we excluded participants who wrote essays incongruous with their condition. Because in this study we directly asked participants how wronged they felt by the event described, we were able to use participants’ own determinations of whether they were wronged instead of our own. We excluded two participants who did not feel wronged by the experience they described in the unfair essay (i.e., people who gave a rating of 1 labeled not at all to the question asking how wronged they felt by the event they described) and four participants who felt quite wronged by the experience they described in the bored essay (i.e., people who gave a rating of 5 or greater to that question—in other words, anywhere above the midpoint of this 7-point scale), leaving 105 valid participants.

No participant guessed the full hypothesis, and unlike in Study 1 where the help- request dependent variable sometimes raised suspicion, there was nothing for participants to be suspicious about in this study. Therefore, we did not remove any other participants.

Entitlement. As predicted, participants in the wronging condition reported more feelings of entitlement (M = 4.91, SD = .82) than did participants in the control condition

(M = 4.54, SD = 1.01), t(103) = 2.12, p = .04.

Selfish behavioral intentions. Consistent with the decrement in helping (or increase in selfishness) observed in Study 1, participants in Study 2 who wrote about a time when their lives were unfair were significantly more likely to report that they would engage in the selfish behaviors (M = 3.78, SD = .92) than were participants who wrote about a time when they were bored (M = 3.42, SD = .73), t(103) = 2.22, p = .03.

Mediation by entitlement. When both condition and entitlement were entered into a linear regression model predicting selfish behavioral intentions, condition was no longer significant (b = .28, se[b] = .16), t(102) = 1.70, p = .09, whereas entitlement was a significant predictor of selfish intentions (b = .23, se[b] = .09), t(102) = 2.62, p = .01. The

Preacher and Hayes (2004) bootstrapping technique (with 10,000 iterations) produced a

95% confidence interval for the indirect effect that ranged from .0036 to .2175, which does not include zero. Thus, entitlement significantly mediated the relationship between condition and selfish behavioral intentions.

Anger, frustration, and the mean of the negative affect words from the PANAS were not mediators for the effect. Although people who wrote about a time when their lives were unfair did report being more angry after writing the essay (M = 2.05, SD =

1.18) than did people who wrote about a time when they were bored (M = 1.34, SD =

.77), t(103) = 3.64, p < .001, the effect of anger was not significant in a mediation model predicting selfish intentions from condition and anger (b = .04, se[b] = .08), t(102) = .48, p = .63. Similarly, people who wrote about a time when their lives were unfair were more frustrated (M = 2.45, SD = 1.21) than were people who wrote about a time when they were bored (M = 1.94, SD = 1.11), t(103) = 2.25, p = .03, but the effect of frustration was not significant in a mediation model predicting selfish intentions from condition and frustration (b = .09, se[b] = .07), t(102) = 1.25, p = .21. Finally, there was not a significant difference in the mean of the negative affect words on the PANAS between participants in the wronging condition (M = 1.70, SD = .54) and control condition (M =

1.55, SD = .53), t(103) = 1.50, p = .14.

Behavioral results. The number of candies eaten was about the same for people in the wronging condition (M = 1.24, SD = 1.32) and control condition (M = 1.36, SD =

1.37), t(94) = .43, p = .67. However, 11 participants engaged in selfish behaviors other than eating the candies: Five left their trash on the table, five took the experimenter’s pen

(see also Mullen & Nadler, 2008), and one knocked down a small sign on the desk and did not fix it. Nine of the 55 participants in the wronging condition engaged in these selfish behaviors whereas only 2 of the 50 participants in the control condition did. This difference was significant, χ2(1, N = 105) = 4.27, p = .04.

Discussion

Consistent with Study 1, participants who recalled a time when their lives were unfair reported being significantly more likely to engage in selfish behaviors in future situations, and less likely to inconvenience themselves, than did participants who recalled a time when they were bored. Furthermore, a larger proportion of participants in the wronging condition than in the control condition were coded as engaging in actual selfish behaviors (e.g., leaving trash, taking off with the experimenter’s pen). Although we certainly would not want to make too much of this last result given how few participants were coded as engaging in selfish behaviors, we mention it given its suggestive nature.

Study 2 also supports more conclusively than Study 1 our hypothesis that

entitlement mediates the effect. Feeling wronged causes individuals to feel entitled, and

as a result, they behave selfishly. These data also suggest one way in which the

entitlement disposition could develop. If someone feels wronged over and over again, the

constant activation of the entitlement mindset could lead to a more lasting sense of

entitlement, which could explain the relationship between unfair negative life events and

chronic entitlement observed by Freud and other clinical psychologists in their case studies (e.g., Bishop & Lane, 2000; Bishop & Lane, 2002; Freud, 1916; Shabad, 1993).

These data also constitute evidence against a plausible alternative explanation for our effect. Not surprisingly, people who wrote about a time when they were wronged felt more angry after describing the event than did people who wrote about a time when they were bored. This is consistent with other research showing that people get angry after experiencing an unfair event (e.g., Austin & Walster, 1975; Mikula et al., 1998). Austin and Walster (1975) and Moschetti and Kues (1978) proposed that anger mediates the relationship between being a victim of an inequitable money allocation and later allocating money selfishly, but we did not find anger to be the mediator of the relationship between recalling an unfair event and increased selfish behavioral intentions.

Frustration also did not mediate the relationship of interest, as might be predicted from the frustration–aggression hypothesis (Dollard, Doob, Miller, Mowrer, & Sears 1939).

We instead found support for our hypothesis that entitlement is the mediator.

Study 3: The Computer Game

In Studies 1 and 2, participants who recalled an unfair life experience showed higher entitlement and more selfish behavior compared to control participants who recalled a boring experience. Although we believe that this effect was due specifically to participants’ sense of unfairness in the experimental condition, the unfair and boring experiences that participants recalled may have differed in other meaningful ways. To isolate the role of perceived unfairness, in Study 3 the same bad event (losing at an online game) befell all participants, with only the implied fairness of the loss differing between conditions. In the experimental “unfair loss” condition, participants were led to believe

that they lost (and missed out on a monetary prize) because of a glitch in the game that was no fault of their own, whereas in the control “fair loss” condition, participants were led to believe that they lost the game because their performance was below threshold.

The design of Study 3 differed from Studies 1 and 2 in two further critical ways, with the goal of providing additional support for our central hypothesis that being wronged leads to a sense of entitlement, which in turn leads to selfish behavior. First, to increase the generalizability of our findings, participants in Study 3 were actually wronged in the present during the study, rather than asked to look back at a time when life was unfair. Second, to increase the reliability of our measurement of entitlement and better relate our findings to past literature, the full Psychological Entitlement Scale

(Campbell et al., 2004) was used in Study 3.

Method

Participants. One hundred forty-four Internet users from a US-wide subject pool

(86 women and 57 men, 1 unreported, mean age = 33.5) participated in this online study in exchange for a $5 gift card.

Procedure. Participants were told that they were taking part in a study on perceptual speed and personality. They were informed that they would see 10 matrices of random letters. For each matrix, they would have 15 seconds to find and click on a particular letter. If they found the specified letter in all 10 matrices within the allotted time, they would earn an extra $3.3 Participants then saw eight matrices of varying sizes

(from 5×7 to 8×19) with target letters that were easy to find in 15 seconds. Each time

they correctly clicked on a target letter, the matrix disappeared, and they were told that

they correctly found the letter. When they got to the ninth letter matrix, what they saw

varied by condition. In the unfair loss condition, participants were presented with a fairly small matrix (6×10), and they were able to find the specified letter as easily as in previous matrices. However, when they clicked on it, nothing happened, as if there were a bug in the program preventing them from submitting their answer, and participants could only helplessly watch the timer count down to zero. In the fair loss condition, on the other hand, participants were presented with a very large matrix (9×24) that did not actually contain the letter they were asked to find. The matrix was designed to be so large that participants could not thoroughly scan all of the letters within 15 seconds, thus encouraging them to think that they simply were unable to find the letter in that particular matrix. For both groups, the time ran out, and they moved on to the tenth matrix, which was solvable. Participants then were taken to the last screen and were given a report showing which matrices they solved and which matrices they failed to solve. They were told that because they did not solve all 10 matrices, they were not able to earn the extra

$3.

Participants then moved on to the survey part of the study. Participants first filled out, using a 1 (strong disagreement) to 7 (strong agreement) scale, items from the

Psychological Entitlement Scale mixed in with filler items including the fillers from

Studies 1 and 2 as well as the Ten Item Personality Inventory (Gosling, Rentfrow, &

Swann, 2003). We took the mean of the nine Psychological Entitlement Scale items as our measure of entitlement (α = .83). Participants then reported on a 5-point scale the extent to which, at the present moment, they felt the 5 positive and 5 negative emotions that compose the short form of the PANAS (Mackinnon et al., 1999). We again added angry and frustrated.

After this, participants were asked to rate their agreement with the following three statements about the game on a 7-point scale (1 = strong disagreement, 7 = strong agreement): “The letter search game was fun,” “The letter search game was hard,” and

“The letter search game was a fair assessment of my perceptual speed.” Then participants got to our dependent variable, which measured their preference for a selfish money allocation. They were told the following:

We are thinking of running a future study in which two participants compete

against each other on the letter search task. We would divide $6 of reward money

between these two participants. Please help us determine the best way to split the

money. Imagine that you played the game against someone else and you found the

letter faster than your opponent 7 out of 10 times. How should the experimenter

allocate the money?

Participants were given options to allocate money in whole dollar amounts from

“$6 to me, $0 to my opponent” to “$0 to me, $6 to my opponent.” We wanted to see if the entitlement mindset would make participants more likely to act selfishly, given a legitimate rationale to do so. We intentionally did not provide participants with an easy answer. They were told that they were faster than their opponent 70% of the time, so legitimate claims could therefore be made for equal allocations ($3/$3 [50% to the self]) as well as for the two payoffs that came closest to reflecting the participant’s superior performance ($4/$2 [67% to the self] and $5/$1 [83% to the self])—and maybe even for a

“winner-take-all” allocation reflecting the participant’s overall besting of their opponent

($6/$0 [100% to the self]). Given these multiple legitimate claims, we predicted that the entitlement mindset would make participants more likely to opportunistically act on the

more self-serving ones. We predicted that entitled individuals would selfishly take advantage of the situation when they could.

Finally, participants reported demographic information, commented on the letter search game, and went through a funnel debriefing. Participants received the extra $3 at the end of the study if they correctly solved the nine solvable matrices.

Results

Preliminary analyses. One participant was excluded from the analyses because computer problems prevented her from clicking on any of the letters. We excluded four other participants who did not seem to focus exclusively on the study, a necessary precaution with online experiments: three took much longer than everyone else to complete the study (> 3.5 SDs above the mean) and one gave all of the money to his opponent in the hypothetical allocation task (whereas all other participants took at least

$3 for themselves), leaving 139 participants.

No participant guessed the full mediation hypothesis. We excluded six participants who were somewhat suspicious of the letter game (i.e., who thought that we may have intentionally had it break or that the letter may not have been present) and who also thought that their response to losing at the game was what we were interested in.

However, the results reported below are the same whether we remove the suspicious participants or leave them in.

Of the remaining 133 participants, 10 did not find the letter in all nine solvable matrices. We did not exclude these 10 participants because in the fair loss condition, they should have still felt that the game was hard and that they lost fairly, and in the unfair

loss condition, participants’ comments about the game suggested that they reinterpreted their inability to find the letter in the other matrices as being unfair in some way as well.

Perceptions of the game. As predicted, participants in the fair loss condition thought the game was a fairer assessment of their perceptual speed (M = 5.42, SD = 1.19) than did participants in the unfair loss condition (M = 4.36, SD = 1.96), t(131) = 3.78, p <

.001. Furthermore, participants in the fair loss condition thought the game was harder (M

= 3.70, SD = 1.71) than did participants in the unfair loss condition (M = 2.64, SD =

1.74), t(131) = 3.53, p < .001. Finally, participants in the fair loss condition thought the game was about as fun (M = 5.97, SD = 1.19) as participants in the unfair loss condition did (M = 5.85, SD = 1.41), t(130) = .52, p = .60.

Entitlement. As predicted, participants in the unfair loss condition reported significantly higher entitlement (M = 4.22, SD = 0.95) than did participants in the fair loss condition (M = 3.77, SD = 0.89), t(131) = 2.87, p < .01. Note that in contrast to previous studies, Study 3 showed this difference with the full, well-validated

Psychological Entitlement Scale.

Selfish money allocation. Participants in the unfair loss condition said that they should get significantly more money in a future task (M = $3.93, SD = $0.94) than did participants in the fair loss condition (M = $3.64, SD = $0.72), t(131) = 1.99, p < .05.

Thus, as predicted, participants in the unfair loss condition claimed more of the shared money for themselves. Examining the results in another way, two choices ($6 or $5)

involved taking more than they deserved based on equity (that is, $4.20), and the other

two choices involved taking just under ($4) or less ($3) than the amount they deserved. In the fair loss condition, only 8% (5/66) took advantage of the situation and claimed more

money than they deserved based on equity, whereas this number more than doubled to

19% (13/67) in the unfair loss condition, χ2(1, N = 133) = 3.97, p < .05.

Mediation by entitlement. When both condition and entitlement were entered

into a linear regression model predicting money allocated to the self, condition was no

longer significant (b = .21, se[b] = .15), t(130) = 1.41, p = .16, whereas entitlement was a

significant predictor of the money allocation (b = .18, se[b] = .08), t(130) = 2.24, p = .03.

The Preacher and Hayes (2004) bootstrapping technique (with 10,000 iterations)

produced a 95% confidence interval for the indirect effect that ranged from .0037 to

.1784, which does not include zero. Thus, entitlement significantly mediated the

relationship between condition and a selfish money allocation.

As in Study 2, anger, frustration, and the mean of the negative affect words from

the short-form PANAS were not mediators for the effect. Although people in the unfair

loss condition reported being more angry after losing at the game (M = 2.12, SD = 1.29) than did people in the fair loss condition (M = 1.50, SD = .85), t(131) = 3.28, p = .001, the effect of anger was not significant in a mediation model predicting selfish behavior from both condition and anger (b = .10, se[b] = .07), t(130) = 1.50, p = .14. The participants in the unfair loss condition were about equally as frustrated (M = 2.27, SD =

1.39) as the participants in the fair loss condition were (M = 2.00, SD = 1.04), t(131) =

1.26, p = .21; they also did not differ significantly in overall negative affect (M = 1.66,

SD = 0.76 vs. M = 1.48, SD = 0.72), t(131) = 1.39, p = .17.

Discussion

In Study 3, losing at a game for an unfair reason (it appeared broken), compared

to losing at a game for a fair reason (the game was hard), led people to feel higher

entitlement, which led in turn to more selfish money allocations. Thus we found support for the same mediation model demonstrated marginally in Study 1 and significantly in

Study 2 using a different manipulation of wronging (losing a game unfairly rather than reflecting on a past unfair experience), a more reliable measure of entitlement (the full

Psychological Entitlement Scale), and a new dependent variable that was unambiguously self-serving. Moreover, in Study 3, the control and experimental conditions involved the same negative outcome (losing the same amount of money in the same game), ruling out an alternative interpretation according to which the results of Studies 1 and 2 were due to the events recalled in the wronging condition being simply more negative than those in the bored condition.

The results of this experiment further demonstrate that feeling wronged does not lead to selfish behavior solely because of increased negative affect. Paralleling the results of Study 2, people who lost unfairly felt angrier than did people who lost for a fair reason, but anger did not mediate the effect on money allocations. Furthermore, frustration and overall negative affect did not mediate the effect; rather, entitlement was again the mediator.

Study 4: The Housing Lottery

In Study 3, participants in both conditions experienced a bad event, but in the fair loss condition, the bad event might have seemed to be within the participants’ control

(because they failed to find the letter in the hard matrix), whereas in the unfair loss condition, the bad event likely seemed out of their control (because of the computer glitch). This brings up the question of whether any bad event over which people have no control might lead to the same kinds of effects we found in Studies 1-3. Thus, in Study 4,

we examined how participants respond when they receive a different type of bad outcome that they have no control over—bad luck from a fair, random system.

To examine reactions to bad luck, we surveyed students who had taken part in the housing lottery at Stanford University. When we conducted the study, most undergraduates who wanted to live on campus the following year had to enter the lottery and were randomly assigned numbers from 1 to 2000. Some dormitories were much more sought after than others, and students were assigned to housing in the order dictated by their lottery numbers. Thus, getting a poor (i.e., high) number could be considered bad luck. Participants were surveyed soon after receiving their lottery numbers, when the sting or joy of their numbers (and the way these numbers would affect the whole next year of their lives) was still fresh, to determine whether students who received poor numbers in the lottery would report that they were more likely to behave selfishly in the future. We predicted that bad luck in a fair, random system can also feel unfair (even when the fair system is functioning properly) and that bad luck can lead to selfish behavior.

Method

Participants. Two research assistants recruited from around the Stanford campus

98 undergraduates (50 women and 48 men) who had participated in the “Preferred

Housing Draw” to fill out a survey in exchange for $5. All participants were planning to live on campus the following year and had found out their housing lottery number within the last two weeks. A large majority of participants were freshmen (93%).

Questionnaire. Participants began the survey by reporting their housing lottery number. Smaller numbers meant that the participants were more likely to get their

preferred housing. Participants were then asked to rate on 7-point scales how good they thought their number was, the degree to which they felt various emotions when they found out their number, and whether they thought the lottery system was a fair way of assigning housing. They were then asked about their predicted future behaviors in the following year and beyond.

There were four items on this questionnaire measuring the future likelihood of behaving charitably on a scale from 1 (very unlikely) to 7 (very likely). These questions asked about how likely participants would be to attend a service project with their dorm the following year, opt out of some special fees the following year (i.e., refusing to give money to some student groups, reverse coded), donate to charities the following year, and donate to the university after they had graduated. We took the mean of these four items as our measure of charitable behavior. The internal consistency of these four items was very low (α = .22), so we also wanted to create an alternative aggregate score that represented the number of charitable behaviors participants expressed some intention to perform, without assuming that these intentions would covary. To create this aggregate, on each item, if participants were not planning to help (i.e., they gave a likelihood rating of 1-3), they received a 0 for that item, and if participants were more interested in helping (i.e., they gave a rating of 4-7), they received a 1. We then calculated the percentage of dichotomized items on which participants received a 1 as a measure of the overall likelihood of behaving charitably. We took the percentage instead of the total of the four items because seven participants skipped the special fees question. Note that we analyze the data below using both methods (averaging and aggregation), and that the two approaches lead to the same conclusions. There were two other questions on this survey

that also related to future charitable behavior, asking about intentions to volunteer and how much special fees money they planned to get back, but because they were in free- response format, these items had highly skewed distributions and were frequently skipped

(22% and 63% of participants skipped them, respectively), so we did not analyze them.

In addition to examining whether participants with bad lottery numbers would report being unwilling to behave charitably, we wanted to look at other types of selfish behavior, such as (1) whether participants would report breaking rules by putting tacks up on the walls, painting their rooms, moving furniture from the common rooms into their individual rooms, and downloading music illegally, and (2) how considerate of others participants planned to be in the upcoming year, including whether they would claim their favorite space before their roommates arrived (reverse coded), respect the authority of their housing staff, consider their neighbors’ preferences when setting the volume of their music, try to keep their common area clean, and change something that was bothering a roommate. We calculated the mean of each set of items. The reliabilities for the four rule-breaking items (α = .33) and the five considerate-behavior items (α = .42) were again quite low, so we used the same aggregation method of the dichotomized variables described above. Finally, we included questions asking about the food, party, and study habits of our participants as filler items.

Results

One participant did not provide a lottery number. Thus, the analyses are based on the remaining 97 participants.

Reactions to the lottery. There was a significant, strong correlation between their number and how good they thought their number was, r(95) = -.94, p < .001, how happy

they were when they found out their number, r(95) = -.87, p < .001, how sad they were, r(95) = .74, p < .001, how angry they were, r(95) = .71, p < .001, and how annoyed they were, r(95) = .75, p < .001. Importantly, there was also a significant correlation between their lottery number and how fair they thought the dorm lottery system was, r(94) = -.32, p = .002; people with poor lottery numbers thought this was a less fair way of assigning housing. Thus, even though the lottery was designed to be fair due to its randomness, it seems that the lottery is an effective manipulation of wronging, as respondents with bad numbers seem to experience it as an injustice.

Selfish intentions. As hypothesized, there was a significant correlation between housing lottery number and the helping-behavior mean, r(95) = -.24, p = .02; participants who had poor lottery numbers reported intending to engage in fewer charitable behaviors.

There was not a significant correlation between housing lottery number and the mean of the four rule-breaking items, r(95) = -.03, p = .80, or the mean of the five considerate- behavior items, r(95) = -.06, p = .53. When we used the aggregates instead of the means, the results did not change. We again observed the predicted negative correlation between housing lottery number and the charitable-behavior aggregate, r(95) = -.26, p = .01, and there was neither a significant relationship between the housing lottery number and the rule-breaking aggregate, r(95) = -.01, p = .92, nor between the housing lottery number and the considerate-behavior aggregate , r(95) = -.11, p = .31.

When anger and lottery number were both entered into a mediation model, the effect of anger was not significant when predicting the mean charitable behavior (b = -

.08, se[b] = .07), t(94) = -1.22, p = .23, or the charitable-behavior aggregate, (b = -.006, se[b] = .02), t(94) = -.35, p = .73. Thus, as in Studies 2 and 3, anger was not a mediator.

Gender differences. Comparing these effects between genders yields a slightly more complicated story. First, it was primarily men who appeared to feel wronged by a bad lottery number. When we ran a regression model predicting fairness from lottery number, gender, and their interaction, the interaction was significant, t(92) = 1.98, p =

.05, demonstrating a stronger negative relationship between lottery number and fairness for men, r(44) = -.50, p < .001, than for women, r(48) = -.17, p = .22.4 Furthermore, we

found a marginal lottery number by gender interaction when predicting the mean

charitable behavior, t(93) = 1.76, p = .08, or the charitable-behavior aggregate, t(93) =

1.75, p = .08. When people received worse lottery numbers, they had a lower mean

likelihood rating of behaving charitably in the future, but this relationship was stronger

for men, r(45) = -.37, p = .01, than for women, r(48) = -.12, p = .41 (and r(45) = -.38, p =

.01 vs. r(48) = -.16, p = .27, respectively, for the charitable-behavior aggregate). None of

the other effects described in the sections above were moderated by gender.

Discussion

Undergraduates who received poor numbers in their housing lottery were more

likely to think the lottery system was unfair. Therefore, it seems that participants felt

wronged by their bad luck in the fair, random system, even though the system was

functioning properly. This study is consistent with other research showing that people

think systems are more unfair when they get unfavorable outcomes and they do not have

much control over the process in which the outcomes are assigned (e.g., Lind, Lissak, &

Conlon, 1983). As in our previous studies, feeling wronged led to selfishness: When undergraduates received poor numbers in the housing lottery, they were more reluctant to engage in charitable behaviors in the future.

In this study, participants were not wronged by an intentional agent, but by an objectively impartial system. Participants who received poor numbers demonstrated a tendency to act selfishly in an entirely different way than the way they were wronged

(e.g., not doing a service project). These results rule out the generalized version of modeling —that having just witnessed selfish behavior by others, people think that any kind of selfish behavior is the norm—because there is no person or selfish behavior to imitate here.

Participants who received poor numbers did not report a greater intention to break rules or behave inconsiderately. Perhaps our sample stood to benefit more from refusing to help others (e.g., they were able to save money and time) than they did from hurting property or being rude to others, and we believe entitlement leads to hurting others only if it benefits the self. Additionally, people generally consider sins of commission more immoral than sins of omission (Cushman, Young, & Hauser, 2006; Spranca, Minsk, &

Baron, 1991). In our culture, for example, it is generally seen as good to donate money to help others, but not wrong to not donate money (Singer, 1972); doing good deeds is seen as discretionary (Janoff-Bulman, Sheikh, & Hepp, 2009). It might be easier for people to imagine refusing to serve or donate (omission) as opposed to hurting someone else by being inconsiderate (commission), as evidenced by the fact that almost everyone in our study planned on being very considerate in the future (the mean of the considerate- behavior items was 5.2 out of 7).

To limit suspicion in this one-shot opportunity, we did not measure entitlement directly in this study, but based on our previous findings, we interpret these results as showing that people who received worse lottery numbers felt entitled to avoid engaging

in future charitable behaviors. As in previous studies, we did not find any evidence that anger mediates the relationship between lottery number and future charitable behavior.

Although we found an overall negative relationship between lottery number and future charitable behavior in our sample, there was some evidence that this relationship was stronger for men. In fact, it was men who appeared to feel more wronged when they had bad luck in the lottery given that the relationship between lottery number and perceptions of unfairness was stronger for men than for women. Interestingly, we did not find any gender interactions in Studies 1-3. At this point, we are unable to determine whether this gender difference was a fluke or whether there is something about experiencing bad luck that leads men but not women to feel wronged and behave selfishly when they do.

Study 5: The Taste Test

In Study 4, we found that people with worse lottery numbers said that they would be less likely to behave charitably. Thus, bad luck in a fair, random system led to selfish behavior just as more objectively unfair bad events had in previous studies. However, entitlement was not measured in Study 4. A goal of Study 5, then, was to determine whether bad luck in a fair, random system also leads to increased entitlement.

Furthermore, given that we found some evidence of a gender difference in Study 4, we wanted to find out whether that difference could be replicated in Study 5.

To achieve these goals, we used a taste test procedure in which the fair, random system was the roll of a die that would assign people to eat certain foods. We had participants in the bad luck condition eat undesirable foods because of unlucky rolls of a die whereas participants in the control condition had to eat the same undesirable foods

when there was no luck involved (i.e., there was no die). After doing the taste test, participants reported their sense of entitlement to us. We measured selfish behavior by seeing whether participants refused to sign up for an unpleasant study in the future. We predicted that participants who experienced bad luck would report higher entitlement and would refuse to help the experimenter.

Method

Participants. One hundred fifty-four Stanford undergraduates (80 women and 73 men, 1 unreported) participated in exchange for partial course credit or for $5.

Procedure. Participants came to the lab to do a taste test study. In the control condition, participants sat down at a desk with four small cups of vinegar and some crackers on it. Participants were told to dip their crackers in each cup of vinegar and rate how much they liked each one on a 7-point scale (1 = very much dislike, 7 = very much like). In the bad luck condition, the setup was similar except that in addition to the cups of vinegar, there were eight other cups on the table as well. These cups contained small amounts of the following other types of food: popcorn, a Milano cookie, pretzels, some

Sour Patch Kids candies, dried cranberries, dried cherries, some Whoppers candies, and a mini Snickers bar. The experimenter told participants that she would roll a die four times.

Each time she rolled it, if it turned up a low number (1, 2, or 3), participants would have to taste one of the vinegars with crackers, but if she rolled a higher number (4, 5, or 6), participants could choose to taste anything else on the table. She then proceeded to roll the die, and a low number came up. Participants had to taste and rate the vinegar. When they were finished with their ratings, she rolled the die again, and a low number appeared again. In fact, on each of the four rolls, the die showed a 1, 2, or 3. Participants had to

taste all four of the vinegar options and never got to taste anything else on the table. We used a trick die purchased from a novelty shop that only rolled 1, 2, or 3 (but participants did not know this5) to ensure that this sequence of rolls would occur.

Thus, in the bad luck condition, participants saw some desirable types of food that

they were never able to eat. In the control condition, participants tasted the vinegar, just

like participants in the bad luck condition, but they did not think that bad luck had caused

them to do this. We used this control condition, instead of one in which there were

desirable options shown to participants but no die roll, because we thought that if

participants knew about the desirable options, they would probably assume that some kind of experimental random assignment (and thus another fair, random system) caused them to taste the vinegar. Therefore, this other version of the control condition would not be that different from our bad luck condition.

After completing the taste test, participants did a filler handwriting task with the experimenter and then began the computer portion of the experiment. They first rated how happy they were with the taste test on a 7-point scale (1 = very unhappy, 7 = very happy). Next, participants rated their current entitlement according to the procedure used in Study 3. Participants then entered some demographic information. Finally, they were told that we were interested in running a taste test study in the future in which participants would have to try some undesirable foods (e.g., dirt-flavored jelly beans) and that we were worried that not enough people would sign up. We asked them if they would be willing to help us out by signing up for the study. This was a measure of participants’ helpfulness (i.e., unselfishness). Finally, participants went through a funnel debriefing procedure with the experimenter.

Results

Preliminary analyses. The data from nine participants were excluded from the analyses (5 due to suspicion of the die or hypothesis, 3 due to experimental error, 1 did not complete the entire experiment). The analyses are based on the data from the remaining 145 participants. Because of the gender differences found in Study 4, we looked for gender interactions on each of our measures.

Reactions to the taste test. The results of a 2 x 2 ANOVA on the mean rating of the vinegar showed that there was a main effect of condition, F(1, 141) = 4.92, p = .03.

Participants in the control condition said they liked the vinegar more (M = 3.72, SD =

1.06) than did participants in the bad luck condition (M = 3.27, SD = 1.24). There was not a main effect of gender, F(1, 141) = 1.19, p = .28, nor was there a significant condition by gender interaction, F(1, 141) = .16, p = .69. As for participants’ happiness with the taste test, the results of a 2 x 2 ANOVA showed that there was a main effect of condition,

F(1, 141) = 14.16, p < .001. Participants in the control condition were happier with their experience in the taste test (M = 4.36, SD = 1.25) than were participants in the bad luck condition (M = 3.53, SD = 1.41). There was not a main effect of gender, F(1, 141) = .48, p = .49, nor was there a significant condition by gender interaction, F(1, 141) = 1.18, p =

.28. Thus, it appears that participants in the bad luck condition were more displeased about what they had to do than were participants in the control condition, and men and women did not really differ in this respect.

Entitlement. The results of a 2 x 2 ANOVA on entitlement showed that there was no main effect of condition, F(1, 141) = 1.00, p = .32, or gender, F(1, 141) = .55, p = .46, but that there was a significant condition by gender interaction, F(1, 141) = 7.24, p = .01.

Specifically, men in the bad luck condition reported significantly higher entitlement (M =

3.83, SD = 1.15) than did men in the control condition (M = 3.19, SD = 0.90), t(141) =

2.64, p = .01. However, entitlement did not significantly differ between women in the bad luck condition (M = 3.24, SD = 1.03) and women in the control condition (M = 3.53, SD

= 1.10), t(141) = 1.18, p = .24.

Participation in a future experiment. We found a significant condition by gender interaction in a logistic regression model predicting whether participants signed up for the extra experiment (b = 1.61, se[b] = .81), Wald χ2 = 3.93, p < .05. As predicted,

men who had bad luck were significantly more likely to refuse to sign up for the future

experiment (35.3%) than were men in the control condition (12.5%), χ2(1, N = 74) = 5.40,

p = .02. However, there was no significant difference in refusing to sign up for the future

experiment between women in the bad luck (23.1%) and control conditions (28.1%), χ2(1,

N = 71) = 0.24, p = .63.

Mediation by entitlement. We ran a mediational analysis on only men because

women did not appear to be affected by bad luck. When both condition and entitlement

were entered into a logistic regression model predicting a refusal to sign up for the extra

experiment, as hypothesized, entitlement was significant (b = .62, se[b] = .31), Wald χ2 =

4.02, p < .05, but condition was no longer significant (b = 1.00, se[b] = .63), Wald χ2 =

2.48, p = .12. The Preacher and Hayes (2004) bootstrapping technique (with 10,000

iterations) produced a 95% confidence interval for the indirect effect that ranged from

.0072 to 1.265, which does not include zero. Thus, men who had bad luck refused to help

the experimenter due to their heightened sense of entitlement.

Discussion

In this study, men who experienced bad luck, as compared to men who did not, reported higher entitlement and were more likely to refuse to help the experimenter by signing up for a future study. Furthermore, this relationship between having bad luck and refusing to help was mediated by entitlement. Thus, as in previous studies, feeling wronged (in this case as a result of bad luck) led to a heightened sense of entitlement, which led to selfish behavior. However, in this study, this only occurred for men. Recall that the relationship between a poor lottery number and selfish behavior in Study 4 was also stronger for men. It is interesting that we obtained a gender difference in the studies involving fair, random systems but did not have any gender effects in Studies 1-3, in which the manipulations differed substantially from those in Studies 4 and 5. Losing money because of a computer glitch, for example, is more objectively unfair than getting a bad outcome from the roll of a die or a lottery. Perhaps, then, the gender effect in

Studies 4 and 5 was due to a difference in chronic entitlement between the genders that leads men to be more sensitive to bad outcomes than women. If men have a higher chronic sense of entitlement, they may generally feel more entitled to good things. Then, because they feel that they should get good things, perhaps they feel more wronged when they don’t, even if the bad outcomes are objectively fair.6

To determine whether men have a higher chronic sense of entitlement, we looked

back at the Campbell et al. (2004) paper in which they reported the means and standard

deviations for men and women on the Psychological Entitlement Scale in nine different samples. Although the difference between men and women was only significant in two of

the samples, in all nine samples, men reported higher entitlement than the women did.

We conducted a meta-analysis of the studies reported in that paper and found that the average effect size (Cohen’s d) was .18, which was a small but highly significant effect, Z

= 4.37, p < .001. Thus, men do appear to be higher in chronic entitlement than women.

Consistent with the idea that men have higher chronic entitlement than women

(and thus may also feel deserving of good things and expect to get them), many studies have shown that men feel entitled to higher pay for a task or job than women do (e.g.,

Callahan-Levy & Messe, 1979; Jackson, Gardner, & Sullivan, 1992; see Major, 1994, for a review) and that men are more likely to ask for more pay than women are (Small,

Gelfand, Babcock, & Gettman, 2007). Furthermore, in a pilot study that was run during a later housing lottery, we found that controlling for actual lottery number, men were more likely to say (on a 7-point scale from 1 = much worse to 7 = much better) that their assigned housing was worse than what they expected (M = 3.47, SD = 1.26) than were women (M = 4.72, SD = 1.58), F(1, 45) = 4.99, p = .03. Perhaps then, men, because they expect a better result from the lottery, are more likely to feel wronged when they don’t get the good outcome they expect and feel that they deserve, thus explaining the gender difference we found. Women may expect to be treated fairly in general (as in the first three studies), but perhaps due to their lower chronic entitlement, they don’t expect to always have good luck. Women might be unhappy when they do not have good luck, but they do not seem to feel wronged.

General Discussion

In five studies, we found support for our hypothesis that people feel entitled to behave in selfish ways after experiencing or being reminded of experiencing an unfair event. In Study 1, participants who were reminded of a time when their lives were unfair

were less likely to help the experimenter, and this effect was marginally mediated by entitlement. In Study 2, participants who were reminded of a time when their lives were unfair reported being more likely to engage in various selfish behaviors, and their sense of entitlement significantly mediated the effect. Study 2 also showed that feelings of anger, frustration, or other negative affect after recalling the unfair event did not mediate the effect. In Study 3, participants who lost their opportunity to win extra payment in an online game because of an apparent computer glitch subsequently felt more entitled, and as a result, claimed a larger piece of the pie, saying that they would allocate more money to themselves (and less to an opponent) in a future task. Studies 4 and 5 demonstrated that bad luck in a fair, random system leads to the same kinds of effects for men. In Study

4, students who received poor numbers in a housing lottery thought the lottery system was more unfair and said they would be less likely to behave charitably in the future.

This was especially true for men. In Study 5, men who had bad luck based on the roll of a die were less willing to sign up for an additional experiment, and this effect was mediated by entitlement. Thus, although the two genders might feel wronged by different things

(perhaps because men’s higher chronic entitlement makes them more sensitive to bad outcomes), once people feel wronged, they tend to then feel entitled to behave selfishly.

Taken together, these studies support a model in which feeling wronged leads to a sense of entitlement to obtain positive outcomes and avoid negative ones, which in turn produces selfish behavior or intentions. Distinguishing our work from past research, we found that one’s sense of entitlement can change from moment to moment—increasing when one is wronged or remembers being wronged—and that it can yield selfish behavior or intentions even in domains unrelated to the original wronging. Therefore,

entitlement can be thought of as a dynamic mindset, susceptible to situational cues, with effects on behavior that can cross domain boundaries. We also captured the effect using a range of outcomes, such as actually refusing to help an experimenter (Studies 1 and 5), expressing more selfish behavioral intentions (Studies 2 and 4), and claiming a larger piece of the pie (Study 3).

Alternative Explanations

Social modeling. Social modeling could explain past research showing a relationship between being the victim of selfish behavior and acting selfishly in the same domain (e.g., Austin & Walster, 1975; Moschetti & Kues, 1978; Zitek et al., 2007); perhaps people who have been the victims of uneven monetary distributions, for example, simply imitate such unfair behavior when it is their own turn to distribute money, or believe that such behavior is more normative. We found, however, that when people pondered times when life was unfair to them—recalling slights in a wide variety of domains—they were subsequently less likely to help an experimenter with an additional task, even though none of them had recalled a time when they asked for help but did not receive it. One might argue that thinking about a past wrong increases people’s perceptions of domain-general selfishness in the social world, and that it is this more general norm that is imitated in subsequent behavior, but this cannot account for the results of Study 3, in which victims of an impersonal computer bug (involving no selfishness) reported a greater sense of entitlement and claimed more money for themselves in a later hypothetical task, or the results of Study 4, in which people who received a bad number from a fair, random lottery (which was devoid of a human agent) said they would be likely to behave selfishly in the future.

Equity with the world. Some theorists have proposed that people strive to maintain equity across their relationships overall, such that if they are wronged in one relationship, they may compensate by wronging selfishly in another relationship (Austin

& Walster, 1975; Moschetti & Kues, 1978). Again, though, our results in Studies 3 and 4 are inconsistent with this explanation: Participants who suffered at the hands of an impersonal computer bug or a mechanistic, impersonal lottery system could not sensibly be interpreted as restoring equity in their social relationships when they later acted more selfishly. Rather, we believe, as supported by the mediation by entitlement, that these participants felt they had simply suffered enough and were entitled not to make sacrifices to help other people.

Frustration–aggression. The frustration–aggression hypothesis (Dollard et al.,

1939) suggests that when people are frustrated, they will aggress against other individuals, including people who were not the source of the frustration (Holmes, 1972;

Konecni & Doob, 1972; see also Marcus-Newhall, Pedersen, Carlson, & Miller, 2000, for a meta-analysis). One might argue that being wronged frustrates people, and that this consequently leads them to act aggressively in their own self-interest. However, in our

Studies 2 and 3, self-reported frustration and anger did not mediate the relationships between wronging and selfish behavior (whereas self-reported state entitlement did).

Moreover, Berkowitz (1989) interpreted the writings of Dollard and colleagues as referring to hostile aggression (the primary objective of which is to do harm), but our dependent variables did not involve overt, hostile aggression against other people. It seems that our participants, rather than aiming to aggress against others, simply felt that they deserved a break from their normal communal duties.

Social exclusion. Research has shown that social exclusion can lead to decreased prosocial behavior (see Leary, Twenge, & Quinlivan, 2006, for review). For example, participants who were told that they would end up alone in life (based on a bogus personality test they completed) donated less money to a charitable cause and were less willing to help an experimenter (Twenge, Baumeister, DeWall, Ciarocco, & Bartels,

2007). Some of the unfair life events that participants thought about in our Studies 1 and

2 may have involved social exclusion or other forms of low or declining “relational evaluation” (Leary, 2001, 2005; Leary et al., 2006), such as being treated badly by a friend. But in Study 3, we utilized a type of wronging that could not be construed as social exclusion or a threat to relationships with other people—losing at a privately- played online game due to a glitch in the program—ruling out the possibility that social exclusion could explain our results.

Moreover, social exclusion research differs from the model we tested in at least two other important ways. First, we were specifically interested in cases of victimhood in which a person feels that he or she has been wronged unfairly, whereas when people are socially excluded or rejected in some way, the exclusion can seem justified to the person suffering it—in fact, Baumeister, DeWall, Ciarocco, and Twenge, (2005, Experiment 6) propose that social exclusion may lead people to think poorly of themselves for having deserved the rejection they suffered (see also Leary et al., 2006; Williams, 2001). Second, we have demonstrated that being wronged unfairly makes people feel a sense of entitlement that, in turn, causes them to behave more selfishly, whereas social exclusion is thought to inhibit prosocial behavior through a reduction in emotional sensitivity in general and in empathic concern for others in particular (DeWall & Baumeister, 2006;

Twenge et al., 2007). Thus, although there may be some conceptual overlap between our work and that on social exclusion, the process driving our phenomenon (i.e., suffering unfairly leading to entitlement) is distinct from that addressed by social exclusion researchers, and reactions to social exclusion cannot explain the results of Study 3, in which participants felt wronged by a computer error.

Remaining Questions and Future Research Directions

Effect of impersonal injustice. One remaining question is whether people feel entitled to behave selfishly after suffering injustices themselves, as we have been proposing, or whether they feel entitled to behave selfishly after witnessing or learning about any injustice. The studies described above all involved participants’ reactions to perceived personal injustice. Participants either recalled something unfair that had happened to them in the past, lost a computer game for an unfair reason, or had bad luck in a random system. We have been hypothesizing that individuals feel a heightened sense of entitlement after being wronged because they feel they have already done their fair share of suffering and therefore want to compensate for the bad event in some way.

Because entitlement is self-focused, we believed that it would only result after people had personally experienced an unfair event. However, it is also possible that witnessing any injustice makes people feel entitled to behave selfishly. In one study, after participants read about an injustice in a newspaper article (i.e., a person convicted of something that participants did not think should be a crime), they were more likely to take a borrowed pen (Mullen & Nadler, 2008), suggesting that injustice that is not personal may also lead to selfish behavior. However, the taking of the pen occurred only for participants who had a moral mandate related to the event described in the article. It is possible that for

these participants, because the event in the newspaper went against their moral values, it felt a bit more like personal injustice. Future research should aim to compare people’s reactions to an unfair, bad event that happens to them personally with their reactions when the same event happens to someone else. Research has shown that reactions to personal injustice and injustice to others are not always the same (e.g., Lind, Kray, &

Thompson, 1998). People may be more concerned with injustices that affect themselves

(Lerner & Miller, 1978), and thus they may only develop a heightened sense of entitlement after personally experiencing injustice and feeling wronged.

Entitlement to hurt others. In the studies presented in this paper, we found that people who have been wronged feel entitled to behave in a selfish way, often exhibited by their refusal to help others. Our dependent variables did not really look at a participant’s likelihood of hurting someone else, but some research suggests that being severely wronged can lead people to commit major crimes and seriously hurt others. For example, there is a large body of research showing a “victim-to-victimizer” cycle in sexual child abuse (e.g., Burton, 2003; Burton, Miller, & Shill, 2002; Garland &

Dougher, 1990; Glasser et al., 2001; Hilton & Mezey, 1996). Moreover, having suffered childhood sexual abuse is associated with a slightly higher likelihood of committing not only sexual abuse, but also general criminal infractions such as theft, property destruction, and nonsexual assault as adults (Burgess, Hartman, & McCormack, 1987).

There is also a relationship between being a victim and being an offender of other hurtful behaviors, such as bullying (Smith & Ecob, 2007). This research is strictly correlational in nature, and there are surely multiple causes that influence these relationships, but the fact that these links have been found so many times is still noteworthy and relevant. Our

finding that people who are wronged feel entitled to behave selfishly might partly explain these real-world victim-to-perpetrator relationships, particularly because offenders of various crimes often have an exaggerated sense of entitlement (e.g., Beech, Fisher, &

Ward, 2005; Beech, Ward, & Fisher, 2006; Foster, 2000; Lamb, 1996; Marziano, Ward,

Beech, & Pattison, 2006; Ward & Keenan, 1999). This phenomenon might also operate at a group level. Recent research suggests that groups who are reminded of their victimization are less likely to feel guilty about harm done to other groups; for example, after being reminded of the attacks against their country on September 11, 2001,

Americans report feeling less guilt about the suffering of Iraqis due to the American invasion of their country (Wohl & Branscombe, 2008).

This research, taken together with our findings, suggests that injustice and poor treatment can have a rippling effect that goes far beyond the initial incident: Not only does wronging lead to unhappiness on the part of the victim, but it can potentially hurt someone else at a later point if the victim ends up behaving selfishly. To the extent that the people affected by the first victim’s selfish behavior in turn feel wronged, one can imagine a domino effect of increased selfish behavior (or decreased prosocial motivation) ad infinitum. Future research should delve more deeply into the possibility that individual and collective victims might feel entitled to harm others when it benefits them.

Furthermore, it would be useful to learn who is the most likely victim of a wronged individual’s selfish behavior. Do wronged individuals want to behave selfishly toward (or harm) anyone as long as they can benefit from doing so, or do they target people who have not recently suffered, for example? Understanding this could help us protect potential victims.

What happens after selfish behavior. Another direction for future research involves understanding what happens after wronged individuals behave selfishly. It would be interesting to see whether behaving selfishly reduces the wronged individuals’ sense of entitlement (perhaps because they have now compensated for the unfair event) or whether they will continue to behave selfishly as long as the unfair event is on their minds. To begin to address this issue, participants in future studies could be given an opportunity to behave selfishly before they are asked to report their entitlement.

Moderators. In the current research, we found that gender was a moderator in the studies in which participants experienced bad luck in a fair, random system. Men seemed to be the ones who thought the bad luck was unfair. Whether or not a bad event is perceived to be unfair is one thing that seems to affect whether people feel entitled to behave selfishly after suffering through the bad event (see Study 3). In general, what is perceived as fair or unfair varies by cultural and societal group (e.g., Berman, Murphy-

Berman, & Singh, 1985), and the readiness to appraise something as unjust or immoral varies by culture as well (Scherer, 1997). Thus, we would expect there to be many bad events in which some people feel wronged (and consequently feel entitled to behave selfishly) and other people do not. Our manipulation in the first two studies had the benefit of allowing participants to define the unfair event themselves, and it was interesting to see the wide range of things about which participants wrote.

Even when everyone agrees an event was unfair, not everyone feels entitled to behave selfishly after experiencing the bad event. For example, it is possible that a belief in a just world would moderate the effect, as research has shown that people with strong just-world beliefs do not feel as much of a threat to their personal deservingness after

they recall an unfair event as do people with weaker just-world beliefs (Chen & Young,

2010). Furthermore, people who are especially high on trait empathy or perspective- taking ability (Davis, 1983)—that is, those who are more sensitive to the feelings and needs of others—might be less likely to behave selfishly after being wronged than they would be otherwise because they might see that their own selfish behavior could bother or hurt someone else (e.g., refusing to help an experimenter means he or she will have to spend more time asking other people to help). Staub and Vollhardt (Staub, 2005, Staub &

Vollhardt, 2008; Vollhardt, 2009) have discussed how altruism might be born of suffering in some cases. Future research should examine the personality characteristics and situational factors that affect when someone does and does not feel entitled to behave selfishly after being wronged.

Reactions to undeserved good fortune. On a more positive note, we hope that the reverse phenomenon would also occur, where the perception that one has been the recipient of unfair treatment that actually benefits the person could lead to greater prosocial motivation. This pattern is commonly described by public figures who express that they have been fortunate and wish to “give back” (implying of course that they have received), and is consistent with some experimental evidence. For example, Austin and

Walster (1975) also showed that participants who received more money than was equitable tended to later take less for themselves when allocating money between themselves and a new partner. In another study, participants who were helped with a broken computer by someone they thought was a fellow participant spent more time helping either their benefactor or a stranger by filling out a questionnaire (Bartlett &

DeSteno, 2006). Haidt (2003) has suggested that remembering exemplary moral behavior

inspires people to emulate the good deed; besides this modeling effect, we wonder in line with the work presented here if being the recipient of blessings that are “unfair” in a positive sense—unearned, that is, and beyond what is expected—might give rise to prosocial motivation. Perhaps being reminded of an unfairly positive event reduces one’s sense of entitlement and activates some sort of responsibility mindset, leading to more helping (see Schwartz, 1973). However, the way in which well-off individuals interpret their good fortune is probably an important moderator here—if people believe that they deserve the good things in their lives or that they are special in some way, they might actually have a heightened sense of entitlement as well.

Conclusions

Our research has shown that people who have just been wronged or reminded of a time when they were wronged feel entitled to positive outcomes, leading them to behave selfishly. They no longer feel obligated to suffer for others and therefore pass up opportunities to be helpful. This research contributes to our general understanding of the determinants of selfishness and points toward one possible impediment to people’s engagement in charitable behavior. Future research in this vein, then, has the potential to identify novel methods to encourage altruism, thereby stemming the cycle of suffering- to-selfishness suggested by our research.

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Footnotes

1 Hereafter we use the term entitlement as shorthand for this particular type of entitlement unless otherwise noted.

2Please see the Acknowledgments section for further information about the

relationship between the published article and this dissertation. The published article is

DOI: 10.1037/a0017168).

3 Based on debriefing comments from some of the early participants, we clarified

the initial directions to the letter search game halfway through the study. Analyses

revealed that this minor change did not affect our dependent variables, nor did it interact

with the manipulation, so we do not discuss it further.

4There was no lottery number by gender interaction for the question asking how

happy they were with their lottery numbers, t(93) = -.43, p = .67. Thus, it appears that neither gender liked getting a bad lottery number, but men felt more wronged by it.

5Participants were able to test an otherwise identical (and normal) die as the

experimenter told them the instructions so that they could see that the die was unbiased.

The normal die was later replaced with the trick die unbeknownst to the participants.

6In this study, we did not have evidence from a direct measurement that men felt

more wronged by the die roll than the women did, but we can infer it from the heightened

sense of entitlement and increased selfish behavior exhibited by the men as opposed to the women.

Appendix

Behavioral Intentions Questionnaire Used in Study 2

Selfish and unselfish behavior items:

1. Will you donate blood at future blood drives?

2. If there were a water shortage on campus due to a drought and you were asked not

to shower for 48 hours, would you comply?

3. After you have graduated, will you donate to Stanford?

4. If you finished a drink and there were no recycling bins in sight, would you throw

your bottle in a trash can?

5. Will you attend an Alternative Spring Break trip (where you do a service project

and learn to be an advocate of social change) sometime in the future while you are at

Stanford?

6. Will you participate in some kind of volunteer work while at Stanford?

7. Suppose your friend was really struggling in a class you had together. You have

helped this friend several times before. If this friend asked you to help when you

would rather watch a movie at that time, would you help?

8. Suppose that while studying at the library you received a call on your cell phone

from a friend you had not spoken to recently. Would you answer your phone if there

were other people around?

9. Suppose that you have a bike. If you were running late for class, would you ride

your bike on the walkways where bikes are prohibited if it got you there faster?

10. [The main campus eatery] is now offering compostable containers for your food.

You can purchase them as a substitute for the styrofoam containers. They cost less

than 50 cents. Will you purchase one in the future?

11. Would you purchase a compostable container if they raised the price to $1?

Filler items:

1. Will you try to form a study group in a future class?

2. Will you try to make friends by eating at other dining halls sometime while you are

at Stanford?

3. Will you go on a ski trip?

4. If you were given tickets to a Stanford basketball game that would take place the

night before you had a test, would you attend?

5. Will you work as a research assistant for a grad student or faculty member?

6. Will you attend a frat party in the future?

7. If your friends were hanging out in your room, would you ask them to leave when

you needed to study?

The 18 items were presented in random order (with the two items about compostable food bins together).