Tough luck!
Life doesn't always run smoothly: sometimes you lose out, even though it's not your fault. A certain type of person copes with this worse than others.
Whether your smartphone falls to the ground, your holiday flight is cancelled at short notice or someone snatches the last loaf of bread from under your nose at the bakery: everyone has bad luck in life! However, one group of people seems to cope particularly badly with this: people who display a certain degree of entitlement - psychologists also refer to this as "entitlement" - are more likely to fly into a rage when misfortune strikes, report Emily Zitek from Cornell University and Alexander Jordan from McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School following a multi-part series of experiments.
The two scientists initially asked 162 test subjects to fill out a questionnaire that measured their tendency to have a sense of entitlement. For example, the participants were asked to indicate whether they felt they deserved more in life than others. They then had to complete either a fun or an extremely boring task. These were allocated at random - or so the researchers led their test subjects to believe. In fact, all the test subjects were told that they had been unlucky and had been assigned the boring task at random. This essentially consisted of counting letters in a text.
People who thought they were more entitled to good treatment than others were more angry about this than participants who did not have a strong sense of entitlement, as a subsequent survey revealed. They were also more likely to feel unfairly treated - even if there was no one they could objectively blame for their misfortune.
In another experiment, test subjects were asked to recall real-life situations in which they had been unlucky. Here, too, those with an attitude of entitlement were more likely to be upset. Zitek and Jordan conclude in their work, which they published in the journal "Personality and Individual Differences", that the people concerned are more likely to expect to be lucky. The misfortune of others, on the other hand, does not outrage them nearly as much as their own. This was also proven by the researchers' experiments: if others were unlucky, people who liked to see themselves treated favourably showed even less compassion than their peers.
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