Look Who’s Talking! Entitled Individuals Break the Rules but Also Enforce Them

We have all witnessed this scene: People stand in a line in front of a desk patiently waiting to buy a ticket, when Person X jumps the queue and goes straight to the front. Some people let it pass, others give an angry stare, but Person Y steps forward and says: ‘If you want to get tickets, you will have to join the queue!’ What kind of personality does Person Y have, and what triggered her reaction?

Norms, such as joining a queue, help keep anarchy at bay. Well-functioning groups depend not only on people’s willingness to follow the norms, but also on people’s readiness to reinforce the norms when someone violates them. To understand what makes people reinforce the rules by reacting negatively to norm violators, my colleagues and I at the University of Amsterdam examined people’s feelings of entitlement.

Entitlement refers to an inflated view of self-worth and the accompanying sense of deserving to be treated better than other people. This sense of deserving more than other people propels entitled individuals to violate social norms that stand in the way of obtaining desired outcomes. For example, entitled individuals are more likely to misbehave in the classroom, cheat on their romantic partners, commit research misconduct, and play politics at work. Importantly, entitled people often break rules to improve their social status, because status fuels their sense of self-worth.

Given the strong link between feeling entitled and breaking rules, one might expect that entitled individuals would react less negatively to other people who also break rules.  After all, entitled people are rule-breakers themselves.  On the other hand, because entitlement involves the desire to advance one’s own interests, one might expect that entitled individuals would react more negatively to other people’s norm violations. After all, those other people are moving ahead of them without deserving it!

We tested these competing expectations about the role of entitlement in a series of experiments where we increased people’s feelings of entitlement by having them complete a writing task. Specifically, we instructed one group of research participants to write down a few reasons why they should demand the best in life, deserve more than others, and should get their way in life (high entitlement).  We instructed another group of participants to write down reasons why they should not demand the best in life, do not deserve more than other people, and should not always get their way (low entitlement).

After writing reasons why they should or should not be entitled to get what they want in life, participants were asked to imagine a political debate in which a candidate running for president was asked to express his core values. Some participants read that the candidate stated that he strongly believes that rules are there to be broken and that he is ready to break all rules that prevent the nation from achieving its goals, showing that the candidate is willing to violate social norms. Other participants read that the candidate stated that rules should be followed at all times and he is ready to follow all the rules that allow the nation to achieve its goals, indicating that this candidate believes that norms should be followed.  

Next, participants rated their willingness to support the political candidate as leader and their willingness to punish him for his political views. Both reduced leader support and increased punishment are negative reactions that would indicate that participants rejected the candidate. The results of our research showed that high-entitlement individuals have the most negative reactions to norm violators: Highly entitled people are both less inclined to support candidates who advocated violating norms as leaders and more willing to punish them.

We also asked participants how threatened they felt about their own status. After reading about a norm-violating political candidate, high-entitlement participants felt most threatened about their status. Further analyses showed that high-entitlement participants reacted more negatively toward the violator because they experienced greater status threat.

To get back to jumping queues, Person Y—the woman who challenged Person X’s effort to get to the front of the line—may have felt more entitled than average and more threatened about her status, which explains why she revolted against Person X.

Now you may wonder: “Isn’t it hypocritical for entitled individuals to break rules themselves and at the same time tell other rule breakers off?” Probably so, but one has to also acknowledge that, despite their selfish motives to protect their own status and to get as much as they can, entitled people’s insistence that other people follow norms helps to sustain social order.

The finding that entitlement may have a positive effect on norm enforcement is intriguing because entitlement is often associated with negative, maladaptive, and antisocial effects. However, here is a caveat: Before one starts thinking about how one can instigate feelings of entitlement to curb rule-breaking in schools, the workplace, and politics, one has to consider that entitlement has two distinct aspects: an antisocial aspect that involves exploiting others for one’s own benefit and an aspect that reflects individuals’ evaluation of their self-worth. My research suggests that it is the latter variant of entitlement that makes people sensitive to their status and willing to enforce the norms.

So how can this research improve your ability to call out someone who is hurting you—or other people—by breaking a rule? The next time someone jumps the queue, think of what you are rightfully entitled to and you may find yourself more likely to speak up. And enforcing the social rules that society depends on will be to everyone’s benefit.


For Further Reading:

Stamkou, E., Van Kleef, G. A., & Homan, A. C. (2019). Feeling entitled to rules: Entitled individuals prevent norm violators from rising up the ranks. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 84, 103790. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2019.03.001

Stamkou, E., Van Kleef, G. A., Homan, A. C., Gelfand, M. J., Van de Vijver, F., van Egmond, M. C., et al. (2019). Cultural collectivism and tightness moderate responses to norm violators: Effects on power perception, moral emotions, and leader support. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 45, 947-964. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167218802832

Stamkou, E., Van Kleef, G. A., & Homan, A. C. (2018). The art of influence: When and why deviant artists gain impact. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 115, 276-303. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000131


Eftychia Stamkou is an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam and a Fulbright scholar at University of California, Berkeley. She studies how the sociocultural context influences reactions to norm violations at work, in politics, and in the art world.

Does Human Nature Include an Emotion Signaling System?

Humans everywhere easily read each other’s emotions from their faces – facial expressions of basic emotions are universally recognized -- or so we are told in our textbooks.  A new series of studies raise doubts about this claim.

The most famous studies assumed to establish the universality of recognition of emotions from facial expressions were carried out by Paul Ekman, Wallace Friesen, and E. Richard Sorenson, who trekked to Papua New Guinea in 1967 and 1968.  They found a small-scale society, the Fore, that they characterized as a Stone-age people isolated from other human societies.  Ekman and colleagues had with them photographs of Americans showing the hypothesized universal facial expressions of a half dozen or so basic emotions.  Their experiments seemed to show that the Fore were not bewildered by the facial expressions, but recognized what emotion was conveyed. 

Not enough emphasis has been put on one feature of those facial expressions: they were all posed.

A posed facial expression is created with the purpose of conveying one and only one emotion in the clearest way possible.  Many such expressions were photographed, and then the experimenters selected among the photos for the clearest and most expressive.  The question arises, therefore, whether, during emotional episodes, human beings naturally and spontaneously produce the same facial expressions.  And, do other people then recognize the specific emotion from those spontaneous facial expressions?  When emotions were created in the laboratory, recognition of emotion from the resulting facial expressions was weak to non-existent, but perhaps a laboratory setting inhibits expressiveness and fails to produce the intense emotions of everyday life.

During his trips to Papua New Guinea, Paul Ekman photographed spontaneous facial expressions of the Fore as they went about their everyday life.  The Fore did not know about cameras and were therefore not camera-shy.  Ekman found examples of faces he thought expressed the basic emotions and published them in his book, The Face of Man.  This book is an invaluable record, for Ekman knew not only each face, but the expresser’s situation, behavior, and words.

Recently, a research expedition to Papua New Guinea was organized by Jose Miguel Fernandez Dols. He sent a team consisting of a psychologist (Carlos Crivelli), who specializes in methodology, and an anthropologist (Sergio Jarillo), who had established a field station in the Trobriand Islands, which lie to the north of the mainland. The two scientists spent months learning the vernacular and local customs and establishing rapport.  A series of studies were conducted.  In one, the Papua New Guineans were shown Ekman’s photos from The Face of Man

Trobriander adolescents (N = 32, 14 to 17 years) were shown five of the facial expressions -- happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, and disgust-- and asked to use any word they wanted to describe how each person shown felt. Other Trobrianders (N = 24, 12 to 14 years) were shown the same photographs but asked to choose their response from a short list. In both studies, agreement with Ekman’s predicted labels was low: 0 to 16% and 13 to 38% of observers, respectively.

As my colleagues and I conclude in our article, "much evidence confirms that both core affect and basic emotion theory provide at best only a first rough approximation of an account of how people make sense of the facial expressions of others. ... Our results invite the development of new methods, but also new theories that seek a better understanding of facial expressions and their interpretation."


James A. Russell is a Professor of Psychology at Boston College. His research examines the expression and experience of emotion, including developmental and cultural influences.

Freaks, Geeks, Norms and Mores: Why People Use the Status Quo as a Moral Compass

The Binewskis are no ordinary family. Arty has flippers instead of limbs; Iphy and Elly are Siamese twins; Chick has telekinetic powers. These traveling circus performers see their differences as talents, but others consider them freaks with “no values or morals.” However, appearances can be misleading: The true villain of the Binewski tale is arguably Miss Lick, a physically “normal” woman with nefarious intentions.

Much like the fictional characters of Katherine Dunn’sGeek Love,” everyday people often mistake normality as a criterion for morality. Yet, freaks and norms alike may find themselves anywhere along the good/bad continuum. Still, people use what’s typical as a benchmark for what’s good, and are often averse to behavior that goes against the norm. Why?

In a series of studies, psychologist Andrei Cimpian and I investigated why people use the status quo as a moral codebook – a way to decipher right from wrong and good from bad. Our inspiration for the project was philosopher David Hume, who pointed out that people tend to allow the status quo (“what is”) to guide their moral judgments (“what ought to be”). Just because a behavior or practice exists, that doesn’t mean it’s good – but that’s exactly how people often reason. Slavery and child labor, for example, were and still are popular in some parts of the world, but their existence doesn’t make them right or OK. We wanted to understand the psychology behind the reasoning that prevalence is grounds for moral goodness.

To examine the roots of such “is-to-ought inferences,” we turned to a basic element of human cognition: how we explain what we observe in our environments. From a young age, we try to understand what’s going on around us, and we often do so by explaining. Explanations are at the root of many deeply held beliefs. Might people’s explanations also influence their beliefs about right and wrong?

Quick shortcuts to explain our environment

When coming up with explanations to make sense of the world around us, the need for efficiency often trumps the need for accuracy. (People don’t have the time and cognitive resources to strive for perfection with every explanation, decision, or judgment.) Under most circumstances, they just need to quickly get the job done, cognitively speaking. When faced with an unknown, an efficient detective takes shortcuts, relying on simple information that comes to mind readily.

More often than not, what comes to mind first tends to involve “inherent” or “intrinsic” characteristics of whatever is being explained.

For example, if I’m explaining why men and women have separate public bathrooms, I might first say it’s because of the anatomical differences between the sexes. The tendency to explain using such inherent features often leads people to ignore other relevant information about the circumstances or the history of the phenomenon being explained. In reality, public bathrooms in the United States became segregated by gender only in the late 19th century – not as an acknowledgment of the different anatomies of men and women, but rather as part of a series of political changes that reinforced the notion that women’s place in society was different from that of men.

Testing the link

We wanted to know if the tendency to explain things based on their inherent qualities also leads people to value what’s typical.

To test whether people’s preference for inherent explanations is related to their is-to-ought inferences, we first asked our participants to rate their agreement with a number of inherent explanations: For example, girls wear pink because it’s a dainty, flower-like color. This served as a measure of participants’ preference for inherent explanations.

In another part of the study, we asked people to read mock press releases that reported statistics about common behaviors. For example, one stated that 90 percent of Americans drink coffee. Participants were then asked whether these behaviors were “good” and “as it should be.” That gave us a measure of participants’ is-to-ought inferences.

These two measures were closely related: People who favored inherent explanations were also more likely to think that typical behaviors are what people should do.

We tend to see the commonplace as good and how things should be. For example, if I think public bathrooms are segregated by gender because of the inherent differences between men and women, I might also think this practice is appropriate and good (a value judgment).

This relationship was present even when we statistically adjusted for a number of other cognitive or ideological tendencies. We wondered, for example, if the link between explanation and moral judgment might be accounted for by participants’ political views. Maybe people who are more politically conservative view the status quo as good, and also lean toward inherence when explaining? This alternative was not supported by the data, however, and neither were any of the others we considered. Rather, our results revealed a unique link between explanation biases and moral judgment.

A built-in bias affecting our moral judgments

We also wanted to find out at what age the link between explanation and moral judgment develops. The earlier in life this link is present, the greater its influence may be on the development of children’s ideas about right and wrong.

From prior work, we knew that the bias to explain via inherent information is present even in four-year-old children. Preschoolers are more likely to think that brides wear white at weddings, for example, because of something about the color white itself, and not because of a fashion trend people just decided to follow.

Does this bias also affect children’s moral judgment?

Indeed, as we found with adults, 4- to 7-year-old children who favored inherent explanations were also more likely to see typical behaviors (such as boys wearing pants and girls wearing dresses) as being good and right.

If what we’re claiming is correct, changes in how people explain what’s typical should change how they think about right and wrong. When people have access to more information about how the world works, it might be easier for them to imagine the world being different. In particular, if people are given explanations they may not have considered initially, they may be less likely to assume “what is” equals “what ought to be.”

Consistent with this possibility, we found that by subtly manipulating people’s explanations, we could change their tendency to make is-to-ought inferences. When we put adults in what we call a more “extrinsic” (and less inherent) mindset, they were less likely to think that common behaviors are necessarily what people should do. For instance, even children were less likely to view the status quo (brides wear white) as good and right when they were provided with an external explanation for it (a popular queen long ago wore white at her wedding, and then everyone started copying her).

Implications for social change

Our studies reveal some of the psychology behind the human tendency to make the leap from “is” to “ought.” Although there are probably many factors that feed into this tendency, one of its sources seems to be a simple quirk of our cognitive systems: the early emerging bias toward inherence that’s present in our everyday explanations.

This quirk may be one reason why people – even very young ones – have such harsh reactions to behaviors that go against the norm. For matters pertaining to social and political reform, it may be useful to consider how such cognitive factors lead people to resist social change.


Christina Tworek, Ph.D. Student in Developmental Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Boosting Your Status: When and Why Trying Matters

People kill for status, sometimes literally. The desire for high-status sneakers has inspired robbery and murder since the introduction of Air Jordans in the 1980s. In India, where status historically depended more on family than footwear, parents have killed daughters to prevent them from marrying lower-status men. While most people don't kill for status, they do spend a great deal of their time and money trying to gain status by buying products, collecting experiences, curating sophisticated tastes, showing off how easily they can avoid work, or showing how hard they work.

But those who pursue status should watch out! Putting effort into earning status is a minefield. Sometimes people admire that effort, and other times they admire effortlessness. So, what should you do if you want to earn status?

My colleagues and I conducted studies to figure out when and why trying to earn status and admiration works, and when it backfires. We found that effort can increase or decrease status depending on how that effort fits into people's beliefs about the different types of status a person can attain and how to get it.

For example, in the United States, people can gain status for coolness and wealth. But Americans have different beliefs about how people should become cool or wealthy. Cool people gain status by being independent and creative. They break norms; they don't follow or replicate them. Society benefits because of their independence and creativity. In contrast, wealthy people gain status by working hard and growing the economy. Society benefits from their productivity. These different beliefs about how being cool or wealthy increases status mean that trying hard to achieve each type of status has different results. Trying hard to be cool seems wrong because it's the antithesis of cool people's presumed independence and creativity. But trying hard to become wealthy seems appropriate because it fits the work ethic required to be productive.

To test these ideas, we asked 400 people to describe someone who either does cool things or has a lot of money and does so either "effortlessly" or "through a great deal of effort." To detect how much status people awarded to the person they described, we asked how much they admire, look up to, and want to be like the person. As we predicted, the effortlessly cool person was more admired than the person who tried to be cool, but the effortlessly wealthy person was less admired than the person who tried to be wealthy.

Three additional studies showed that people award status to people who contribute towards a shared goal. Effortlessly cool people are seen as contributing more than people who try to be cool. In contrast, people who try to be wealthy are seen as contributing more than people who are effortlessly wealthy.

Although these beliefs hold a lot of sway, they aren't hard and fast rules. We also found that people who try to be cool can earn status if they are trying to be cool to help other people. For example, one study described an influencer who "worked hard to become cool so that he could help struggling entertainers." Even though the influencer tried to be cool, he was admired because his effort was focused on improving society. Similarly, people who try to become wealthy aren't given more status if their efforts disregard the welfare of the group. For example, another study described an influencer who "worked tirelessly to become financially successful, while paying little regard to what is fair and how his success impacts others." Here, the influencer was not admired, as his effort was not a sign that he would contribute to the group.

So, if you want to earn admiration and status, you should understand people's beliefs about the kind of status you're seeking. For example, if you want to be cool, you should know that people believe independence and creativity are the way to become cool. Next, learn the rules for contributing towards that goal, in this case, for being independent and creative. For example, in some cultures, creativity could mean painting a girl holding a balloon, while in other cultures, creativity could mean shredding that same artwork. If you follow a culture's unwritten rules for contributing to a goal, you will earn status.

Unfortunately for the status-seeking majority, there are many beliefs about status, and they can shift over time. Therefore, we recommend looking for people with status, figuring out how they contributed, and then replicating it, if you can. For example, Ronaldo contributes by being a phenomenal football player, and you too can earn status if you can play like Ronaldo. If that is not an option, you could also earn status in other ways, such as contributing towards the shared goals of your community or family. Unfortunately, earning status in a small group with local goals and beliefs won't earn the same respect as the status Ronaldo earns, because his status comes from the shared ideals of football fans around the globe, but it's a start!


For Further Reading

Warren, N. B., & Warren, C. (2024). Trying too hard or not hard enough: How effort shapes status. Journal of Consumer Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcpy.1400

Bellezza, S. (2023). Distance and alternative signals of status: A unifying framework. Journal of Consumer Research, 50(2), 322-342. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucac049

Goor, D., Keinan, A., & Ordabayeva, N. (2021). Status pivoting. Journal of Consumer Research, 47(6), 978-1002. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucaa057 

Nathan Warren is Associate Professor of Marketing at BI Norwegian Business School.

Caleb Warren is Associate Professor of Marketing at Eller College of Management, University of Arizona. Both are grateful to Wren Warren for her help in the initial development of this project.

Jeanne Tsai

Jeanne Tsai is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and the director of the Culture and Emotion Lab. She received her B.A. from Stanford University, and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on how our cultural ideas and practices shape our emotions, and the implications for mental health, decision-making, and person perception.

What led you to choose a career in personality and social psychology?

A combination of factors led me to personality and social psychology.  When I started college, I was interested in understanding people, but I didn’t realize that psychology was a science until I heard a guest lecture by Al Hastorf. He talked about classic studies in social psychology. I loved learning about psychological findings but also about the specific methods that psychologists used, probably because my parents are both scientists. So I started taking as many psychology courses as I could. While I was taking those courses, I was struck by how some of the findings and theories I was learning didn’t describe my own experiences growing up in the U.S. with Taiwanese parents. In particular, the studies that referred to Chinese and Japanese as emotionally stoic seemed odd given how emotional my own family was. So, my first studies tested some common assumptions about differences related to emotion and old age between US and Chinese contexts. As an undergraduate, I worked primarily with faculty who were in personality and social psychology---Laura Carstensen, Lee Ross, Mark Lepper. Although I went to a graduate program in clinical psychology to work with Bob Levenson, I continued to study culture and emotion, topics that are now central to personality and social psychology.

Briefly summarize your current research, and any future research interests you plan to pursue. 

My research examines how our cultural ideas and practices shape affective processes (emotions, moods, feelings) and the implications these cultural differences have for peoples’ decisions, their health and illness, and their perceptions and responses to others in an increasingly multicultural world. In particular, we’ve focused on the affective states that people ideally want to feel, or their “ideal affect.”  For example, we find that many European Americans ideally want to feel excited, enthusiastic---what researchers refer to as high arousal positive states---more than many East Asians, whereas many East Asians want to feel calm, peaceful, relaxed----what researchers refer to as low arousal positive states. We’ve shown through a series of studies that these cultural differences in ideal affect are related to independent vs. interdependent values; that they are reflected in and transmitted through popular media (including children’s storybooks, Facebook photos, and leaders’ official photos); and that they predict a whole host of outcomes, including people’s recreational and consumer choices, even whom they prefer to have as a physician.

Recently, my students and I have been working on something we’ve called “ideal affect match,” or what happens when we meet people whose emotions match how we ideally want to feel---and how ideal affect match influences our judgments of others and even our willingness to share resources with them. For instance, in a recently published paper (Park, Blevins, Knutson, & Tsai, 2017), we found that when playing multiple trials of a Dictator Game with different partners whose pictures they viewed, European Americans shared more with excited vs. calm recipients, whereas Koreans shared more with calm vs. excited recipients, regardless of recipients’ race or sex. In part, this was because European Americans trusted excited vs. calm recipients more, whereas Koreans trusted calm vs. excited recipients more. These findings suggest that ideal affect match may serve as a potent signal of ingroup---under some circumstances, it may be even more powerful than race or sex. We are currently examining the conditions under which ideal affect match increases or decreases trust and resource sharing, as well as how these processes may influence important outcomes in applied settings, including the corporation, the classroom, and the clinic.

Park, B., Blevins, E., Knutson, B., & Tsai, J.L. (2017). Neurocultural evidence that ideal affect promotes giving. Social Cognitive Affective Neuroscience. Online access. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsx047

Why did you join SPSP?

I joined SPSP because it is the society that most social and personality psychologists belong to, and the conference that most social and personality psychologists attend. So, in order to keep track of the latest personality and social psychology research, one needs to attend SPSP. I also like the format of the conference--- being able to connect with other scholars and learn about recent work in my specific field at the emotion and culture pre-conferences --- and then being able to hear about other work in related areas in the main conference.

What is your most memorable SPSP Annual Convention experience?

I don’t have just one (or if I did, I forgot it!) --- but in general, I love attending the convention because I get to see a wide range of people who I’ve worked with or come to know over my 20+ years in the field: close friends and colleagues, former students, senior mentors. I like to track how they are doing, what research they are excited about, what issues they are grappling with personally and professionally. I also like to see how their work has evolved over time---I’m especially inspired by talks that illustrate how science is a process of discovery that you often can’t predict in advance. I always tell my students that conferences get better and better over time.

How has being a member of SPSP helped to advance your career?

It’s given me the opportunity to present and learn about new research, and to meet with friends and colleagues from around the globe.

Do you have any advice for individuals who wish to pursue a career in personality and social psychology?

Have fun pursuing and exploring your ideas. Do something that connects to real world problems. Try to learn new things and move beyond paradigms that you’ve been taught. Be persistent. Seek help and advice, and give it in return: as my wonderful colleague Hazel Markus says, “You can’t be a self by yourself!”

Outside of psychology, how do you spend your free time?

I like to run and swim outdoors, eat delicious food, and discover new things, especially with my family and friends.