Academic entitlement

• Expectation of academic success without

personal responsibility for achieving that
success
• Individual difference related to narcissism,
psychological entitlement
• Explains some of the variance in uncivil
student attitudes and behaviors
• e.g. rude emails demanding special
consideration for a late paper
 Prior research
• Scale development, question generation
(2002-2005)
• Situational vignettes (2005)
• Student ratings of appropriateness and likelihood
• Instructor ratings of appropriateness

• Correlates of academic entitlement (2005-

2006)
• Factor structure of the scale (2005-2006)
 Behavioral validation
• Prior research shows that participants high
in self-esteem1, narcissism2, and academic
contingencies of self-worth3 typically have
negative reactions to self-threatening
feedback
• These reactions include greater
antagonism4, aggression5, derogation of
others (including friends)6, exaggeration of
positive traits7, and less likeability4
 Behavioral validation
• Entitled students should respond
differently than non-entitled students to
academic feedback, especially negative
feedback

• Proposed procedure
 Procedure (1)

• Collect self-reported psychological

entitlement, grandiosity, academic
entitlement online in prescreening
• Recruit participants with extreme scores,
but allow unrestricted signups
• Run two parallel studies with two informed
consents for one half-hour (or one hour)
of credit
 Procedure (2)

• Explain cover story (with first informed

consent: “Academic Task Calibration”) of
obtaining norms at OU for this diagnostic
task to add to national database
• Emphasize incentives to do well: task is
predictive of success, cash prizes
• Administer task, take responses out of the
room to be graded
 Procedure (3)

• Give second informed consent:

“Personality Correlates” for self report
measures (Cognitive style, Entitlement)
• Once self-report measures are completed,
return folder to participants in the
feedback conditions
• Graded response sheet with red marks
• Answer sheet with high/low “national norms”
 Procedure (4)

• Evaluation of task, experimenter, etc.

• Validity of task in measuring college
success
• Accuracy, fairness, suitability
• Competence of experimenter
• Usefulness, helpfulness, accuracy of grading
• Open-ended comments
• 2nd trial on task
• Debriefing
 Manipulation
• Objective academic task to induce self-
threat with negative feedback
• Remote Associates Test
• Boggle task
• GRE/SAT items
• Your ideas?
 Boggle task
• The Boggler Classic game uses a 4 x 4 matrix.
There is a 3 minute time limit. Valid words must
be at least three letters long.
• Example:
• Problems: Boggle is
Y A T R printed in the OU Daily
• Believability that this is
P H N E predictive of academic
X C L Y success?

S V E T
 Remote Associates Test
• Mednick, 1968, Shames, 1994
• ‘Easy’ items: • ‘Difficult’ items:
• Widow Bite Monkey • Sore Shoulder Sweat
• Coin Quick Spoon • Note Dive Chair
• Used by Vohs & Heatherton (2000, 2001, 2004…)

• Benefits: Can manipulate difficulty level

Increased believability