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, whereas 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.
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 article, 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, because of their heightened sense of entitlement, feel relieved from this communal obligation and therefore exhibit more selfish intentions and behavior.
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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. By contributing to our general understanding of the determinants of selfishness, this research points toward one possible impediment to people’s engagement in charitable behavior. Future research in this vein thus has the potential to identify novel methods to encourage altruism in people who feel wronged, thereby stemming the cycle of suffering-to-selfishness suggested by our research.
Emily M. Zitek, et. al., “Victim Entitlement to Behave Selfishly”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2010-02.
August 31, 2018
QotD: Victim mentality
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