Society for
Personality and Social Psychology
From job applications
to being in line at the DMV, instructions, and the expectations that we follow
them, are everywhere.
Recent research found
people with a greater sense of entitlement are less likely to follow
instructions than less entitled people are, because they view the instructions
as an unfair imposition on them. The results appear in the journal Social
Psychological and Personality Science.
Scientists already
know entitled people -- technically, individuals with a higher sense of
entitlement -- are more likely to believe they deserve preferences and
resources that others don't and that they are less concerned about what is
socially acceptable or beneficial. For authors Emily Zitek (Cornell University)
and Alexander Jordan (Harvard Medical School), understanding the reasons for
their behavior could lead to solutions as well.
"The fact that there are a lot of complaints these days about having to deal with entitled students and entitled employees," says Zitek, "suggests the need for a solution."
Zitek and Jordan
conducted a series of studies, first to see who was more likely to avoid
following instructions in a word search.
After establishing that
people who scored high on measures of entitled personality were less likely to
follow instructions, they provided a set of scenarios to try to understand why
the entitled individuals ignore the instructions: selfishness, control, or
punishment.
But none of these
affected the outcomes; entitled people still wouldn't follow instructions.
The researchers were
surprised that it was so hard to get entitled individuals to follow
instructions.
"We thought that
everyone would follow instructions when we told people that they would
definitely get punished for not doing so, but entitled individuals still were
less likely to follow instructions than less entitled individuals," said
Zitek.
A final set of
experiments, exploring fairness, finally got to the reason: "Entitled
people do not follow instructions because they would rather take a loss
themselves than agree to something unfair," wrote the authors.
"A challenge for
managers, professors, and anyone else who needs to get people with a sense of
entitlement to follow instructions is to think about how to frame the
instructions to make them seem fairer or more legitimate," said Zitek.
Zitek and Jordan write
that organizations and societies run more smoothly when people are willing to
follow instructions.
