Individuals higher in psychological entitlement respond to bad luck with anger

Three studies examined the relationship between psychological entitlement and anger in the context of bad luck. Anger is often described as an emotion that arises when a person experiences a negative outcome for which someone else was responsible. Simple bad luck, without an intentional agent clearly responsible for one's misfortune, should therefore not usually engender anger. However, we predicted that individuals higher in psychological entitlement, with their high expectations for personal outcomes and tendency to moralize them, would be more likely to experience anger after bad luck as compared to individuals lower in psychological entitlement. We found that psychological entitlement was, indeed, positively correlated with anger after bad luck, and with perceptions of injustice (Study 1). The relationship between entitlement and anger was specific to personally-experienced bad luck; entitlement was not correlated with anger when people recalled an unfair event (Study 2), or when they imagined that bad luck happened to someone else (Study 3).