• DOI:10.1037/a0017168
• Corpus ID: 9760588

Victim entitlement to behave selfishly.

@article{Zitek2010VictimET,
  title={Victim entitlement to behave selfishly.},
  author={Emily M. Zitek and Alexander H. Jordan and Benoit Monin and Frederick R Leach},
  journal={Journal of personality and social psychology},
  year={2010},
  volume={98 2},
  pages={
          245-55
        }
}

• Emily M. Zitek, A. Jordan, +1 author Frederick R Leach
• Published 1 February 2010
• Psychology, Medicine
• Journal of personality and social psychology

Three experiments demonstrated that feeling wronged leads to a sense of entitlement and to selfish behavior. In Experiment 1, participants 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 Experiment 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 Experiment 3, participants who lost at 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.