The Influence Of Psychological Entitlement And Social Comparison On Altruistic Behavior

In daily life,some people think that they are more special than others and deserve better resources(special treatment,a lot of money,superman’s reputation and status,etc.),regardless of whether these resources match their actual situation.This is psychological entitlement.According to related theories,psychological entitlement will stimulate an individual’s positive self-schema,strengthen the subjective experience that takes me first,and show more self-serving and unethical behavior.Although the psychologically entitled individual has a positive self-concept,because the concept is mainly derived from the individual’s strong subjective perception and lacks an objective basis,it is susceptible to the influence of external contextual factors and needs to be continuously maintained and strengthened through external information.As a social animal,human beings often make social comparison unconsciously.In this process,the individual’s self-evaluation comes into being,and their self-concept also changes,which in turn affects the individual’s behavior decisions,showing the difference between the self-interest and altruism.The purpose of this paper is to explore how social comparison affects the altruistic behavior of individuals with psychological entitlement,and how the mechanism of individual altruistic behavior changes under different social comparison conditions?Through three experiments,this paper comprehensively examines the relationship between an individual’s level of psychological entitlement and his altruistic behavior in different social comparative situations from the perspective of implicit altruism and explicit altruism.In experiment 1,implicit association paradigm was used to directly investigate the relationship between the level of psychological entitlement and the tendency of individual implicit altruistic behavior.In Experiment 2,the participants were designed with 2 factors(psychological entitlement: the high level of psychological entitlement,the low level of psychological entitlement)× 3 factors(social comparison: upward social comparison,downward social comparison,and controlcomparison)to manipulate social comparison by presenting a virtual intelligence test,by filling in the scale of psychological entitlement to distinguish the level of psychological entitlement,and explored the impact of social comparison situation on individual altruism tokens distribution behavior in dictator’s game paradigm.On the basis of experiment 2,experiment 3 was carried out.244 subjects were randomly recruited to measure the changes in their core self-evaluation under different social comparison situations,so as to explore the internal mechanism of the changes in altruistic token allocation behavior.The results show that:(1)altruistic behavior is common in all subjects,but there are differences among individuals.The specific manifestation is that the implicit altruistic tendency of psychologically entitled individuals is significantly lower than that of non-psychologically entitled individuals;(2)Social comparison has a significant impact on individual altruisitic behavior.Compared with the downward social comparison and control comparison scenario,the altruistic behavior of the psychological entitled group performing the upward social comparison is significantly affected;the altruistic behavior of the non-psychologically entitled group under the three social comparison conditions did not change significantly.(3)The impact of social comparison on the altruistic behavior of psychologically entitled individuals is mediated by core self-evaluation.