Deprived and Grandiose Explanations for Psychological Entitlement: Implications for Theory and Measurement

This work aimed to corroborate "vulnerable-based" and "grandiose-based" forms of psychological entitlement by amending the Psychological Entitlement Scale (PES; Campbell, Bonacci, Shelton, Exline, & Bushman, 2004), a popular unidimensional index of psychological entitlement. In 2 studies, participants completed PES items amended to include both deprived-identity-based and grandiose-identity-based rationales for item agreement and various individual-difference measures of constructs related to entitlement, self-evaluation, personality, and interpersonal orientations. The modified PES yielded a grandiose-based (PES-G) and vulnerable-based (PES-V) entitlement scale that showed good psychometric qualities. PES-G and PES-V converged well on core features of psychological entitlement (e.g., antagonistic outcomes) but generally failed to converge on self-evaluation, acquisitive versus defensive forms of entitlement, behavioral inhibition system and behavioral activation system, and interpersonal behavior indicative of claiming and cultivating grandiose versus deprived identities. This research supports the presence of grandiose-based and vulnerable-based entitlement forms, demonstrates a measurement technique to tap these forms, and suggests some theoretical implications.