Entitlement (ENTL)

Abstract

The Psychological Entitlement Scale (often abbreviated as PES or ENTL) is an influential, psychometrically validated nine-item self-report inventory developed by W. Keith Campbell, Angelica M. Bonacci, Jeremy Shelton, Julie J. Exline, and Brad J. Bushman (2004). Designed to capture psychological entitlement as a stable, pervasive, and unidimensional personality disposition, the instrument assesses the pervasive cognitive and affective belief that an individual is inherently deserving of positive outcomes, preferential treatment, and unearned privileges compared to others, irrespective of actual competence, effort, or contribution. Evaluated across an authentic 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (strong disagreement) to 7 (strong agreement), the instrument contains eight positively keyed assertions and one reverse-scored item (Item 5). Across numerous validation cohorts spanning undergraduate student samples, adult community samples, and corporate populations, the scale demonstrates high internal consistency (with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients routinely ranging between .79 and .88) and robust test-retest reliability across multi-week intervals (r > .70). Confirmatory and exploratory factor analyses consistently replicate a stable, single-factor latent structure. Psychometric evaluations substantiate convergent validity through robust positive associations with grandiose narcissism, exploitativeness, hostility, dominance, and self-enhancement, alongside discriminant validity evidenced by distinct divergence from self-esteem, neurosis, and objective ability. Predictive validity is confirmed in empirical paradigms involving commons dilemma resource depletion, aggressive retaliation following perceived ego threat, workplace incivility, and heightened consumer dissatisfaction. This article provides a comprehensive academic review of the scale’s historical development, structural dimensionality, psychometric properties, theoretical underpinnings, and extensive cross-disciplinary applications across clinical, organizational, and consumer psychology.

Keywords

Psychological Entitlement Scale, ENTL, psychological entitlement, narcissism, self-deservingness, personality assessment, Dark Triad, interpersonal exploitation, social exchange theory, psychometrics, consumer behavior

Authors

The Psychological Entitlement Scale was formulated and psychometrically standardized by a consortium of prominent social, clinical, and personality psychologists:

• W. Keith Campbell, Ph.D. — Professor of Psychology at the University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, USA. Dr. Campbell is an internationally recognized authority on narcissism, self-enhancement, egocentric social dynamics, and interpersonal relations.
• Angelica M. Bonacci, Ph.D. — Researcher affiliated with the Department of Psychology at the University of Georgia during the instrument’s initial validation program, specializing in social psychology, group dynamics, and interpersonal processes.
• Jeremy Shelton, Ph.D. — Department of Psychology, University of Georgia; noted for research into self-evaluation, social cognition, and measurement methodologies.
• Julie J. Exline, Ph.D. — Professor of Psychological Sciences at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA. Dr. Exline’s scholarly work investigates the psychology of forgiveness, spiritual struggle, humility, interpersonal alienation, and psychological entitlement.
• Brad J. Bushman, Ph.D. — Professor of Communication and the Margaret Hall and R. M. Rinehart Chair of Mass Communication at The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA. Dr. Bushman is a pioneering scholar in human aggression, violent media effects, social rejection, and narcissistic retaliation.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Psychological Entitlement Scale is to provide researchers, behavioral scientists, and clinical diagnosticians with an efficient, reliable, and construct-pure psychometric instrument to measure individual differences in pervasive psychological entitlement. Prior to the development of the scale in 2004, entitlement was predominantly measured as a subordinate, multi-item subfacet within broader multidimensional inventories—most notably the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI; Raskin & Hall, 1979; Raskin & Terry, 1988). However, measuring entitlement strictly as a subscale of narcissism presented acute methodological and theoretical liabilities. In the NPI, the Entitlement/Exploitativeness subscales were statistically confounded with vanity, exhibitionism, superiority, and self-sufficiency, obscuring whether downstream interpersonal dysfunctions were driven by entitlement per se or by other facets of the narcissistic phenotype. Consequently, Campbell and colleagues designed the PES to isolate psychological entitlement as a standalone, domain-general personality construct.

The theoretical rationale behind the instrument rests upon the clinical and social observation that entitlement operates as an overarching perceptual heuristic that influences how individuals interpret their relationship to social groups, institutional authorities, and normative contracts. Entitled individuals systematically overestimate their intrinsic worth relative to their peers and maintain unconditional expectations that the socio-physical environment should cater to their desires without requiring commensurate reciprocal exchange. By establishing a brief, psychometrically sound, single-factor scale, the authors aimed to enable rigorous empirical testing of entitlement across clinical, occupational, laboratory, and market environments.

In applied and clinical settings, the scale serves as a valuable diagnostic adjunct for assessing maladaptive cognitive schemas related to borderline, antisocial, and narcissistic personality structures, helping clinicians identify core beliefs regarding unearned privilege, vulnerability to narcissistic injury, and chronic interpersonal friction. In organizational behavior research, the scale is routinely deployed to predict counterproductive work behaviors (CWBs), supervisory conflict, employee turnover intentions, workplace incivility, and unrealistic salary negotiations. In consumer research and behavioral economics, the instrument effectively models post-purchase dissatisfaction, luxury goods acquisition, aggressive customer service complaining behavior, and uncooperative conduct in social commons dilemmas.

Psychological Construct

Psychological entitlement is conceptualized within contemporary personality literature as a stable, cognitive-affective trait characterized by the enduring expectation of special privileges, preferential treatment, and unearned rewards, accompanied by an absolute conviction that one’s intrinsic deservingness surpasses that of others. Unlike situational deservingness—wherein expectations of favorable outcomes are grounded in verified effort, merit, ethical virtue, or formal contractual agreements—psychological entitlement is pervasive, self-centered, and largely detached from objective reality, competence, or reciprocal social investments.

Although the Psychological Entitlement Scale is structurally unidimensional, the latent construct encompasses several intercorrelated thematic facets that together define the entitled personality profile:

• Comparative Deservingness: The fundamental subjective conviction that one is qualitatively and inherently more deserving of life’s positive resources than other human beings. Captured directly by items such as “I honestly feel I’m just more deserving than others,” this dimension represents a baseline comparative asymmetry in which the self is consistently privileged over the collective.
• Anticipation of Unearned Rewards: The persistent expectation that exceptional fortunes, accolades, and material windfalls should naturally flow to the individual without requisite sacrifice, labor, or formal qualification. This is exemplified by the item “Great things should come to me” and reflects an externalized attribution style where reality is expected to self-organize around the individual’s needs.
• Egocentric Priority and Survival Precedence: The assumption that one’s personal well-being, convenience, and preservation supersede the fundamental rights and survival needs of peers. This is vividly captured by the famous hyperbolic item “If I were on the Titanic, I would deserve to be on the first lifeboat!” This facet reflects the profound disregard for egalitarian social contracts and the moral prioritization of the self during crisis situations or zero-sum allocations.
• Demand for Elite Treatment and Exclusivity: The assertive insistence that ordinary or standard procedures, products, and accommodations are inadequate for an individual of such elevated intrinsic stature. Operationalized through items like “I demand the best because I’m worth it,” this reflects consumerism, status-seeking, and an intolerance for conventional or democratic service standards.
• Unconditional Outcome Expectations: The psychological expectation that environmental, organizational, and interpersonal situations must adapt to personal preferences rather than requiring personal behavioral adaptation. Reflected in items such as “Things should go my way” and “I feel entitled to more of everything,” this cognitive schema results in rapid frustration, outrage, and retaliatory aggression when desires are impeded by external realities.

Importantly, psychological entitlement must be distinguished from healthy self-esteem and self-efficacy. Whereas high self-esteem involves positive self-regard that is typically resilient, adaptive, and compatible with profound empathy for others, psychological entitlement is inherently zero-sum, competitive, and socially extractive. When entitled individuals experience outcome deprivation, they do not self-reflect or recalibrate their efforts; instead, they experience perceived injustice, hostile victimhood, and affective alienation.

Theoretical Framework

The Psychological Entitlement Scale is grounded in several foundational paradigms within social, cognitive, and personality psychology, primarily drawing from social exchange theory, equity theory, psychodynamic theories of narcissism, and evolutionary models of resource acquisition.

From the perspective of Equity Theory (Adams, 1965; Walster, Berscheid, & Walster, 1973), harmonious social interactions rely on the subjective perception of parity between inputs (e.g., labor, skill, emotional support) and outcomes (e.g., compensation, praise, resources). In normative relationships, individuals experience cognitive dissonance or guilt if their outcome-to-input ratio drastically exceeds that of their relational partners. In contrast, Campbell et al. (2004) posited that psychologically entitled individuals maintain an intrinsically skewed internal baseline for equity: they recalibrate their internal metric of inputs to encompass their mere existence or self-perceived specialness. Because their subjective input is perceived as infinitely high due to innate exceptionality, they perceive asymmetrical, advantageous outcomes not as exploitative or unfair, but as the only equitable state of affairs. Conversely, when entitled individuals receive strictly equal or fair distributions, they paradoxically experience intense under-benefiting, leading to acute subjective feelings of deprivation, resentment, and grievance.

Within the framework of Psychodynamic and Object Relations Theories (Kernberg, 1975; Kohut, 1971), entitlement represents a central defense mechanism of the pathological narcissistic structure. According to Otto Kernberg, archaic entitlement emerges as a compensatory defense against underlying feelings of inadequacy, vulnerability, and abandonment. By adopting a grandiose self-structure that demands unconditional admiration and subservience from the environment, the individual defends against unconscious feelings of unworthiness. In Heinz Kohut’s self-psychology framework, non-optimal developmental frustration of archaic grandiosity causes an individual’s normal developmental entitlement to become fixated, leaving adult individuals emotionally dependent on continuous external mirroring and preferential handling to sustain psychological homeostasis.

From an Evolutionary and Behavioral Ecology perspective, psychological entitlement can be conceptualized as an interpersonal cheater strategy within cooperation frameworks. In non-zero-sum game theoretical models, such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma or common-pool resource replenishment dilemmas, entitled individuals systematically defect. They consume shared public goods at rates exceeding the regenerative capacity of the environment (e.g., Campbell et al., 2004, Study 5). Because they perceive themselves as fundamentally more deserving, they externalize depletion costs onto the collective while monopolizing immediate gains, displaying low cooperative restraint and reduced relational accountability.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the Psychological Entitlement Scale has been confirmed through extensive multi-method research, establishing construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity.

Convergent Validity

In the original scale validation studies by Campbell et al. (2004), the PES demonstrated robust convergent correlations with related constructs. The scale correlates strongly with the Narcissistic Personality Inventory total score (r = .35 to .46, p < .001), exhibiting especially elevated correlations with the NPI Entitlement subscale (r = .52 to .68) and the Exploitativeness subscale (r = .40). Furthermore, the scale demonstrates significant positive associations with the Dark Triad traits of Machiavellianism (r ≈ .32) and psychopathy (r ≈ .38), along with elevated scores on dominance, interpersonal hostility, external locus of control for failures, and competitive orientation.

Discriminant Validity

Crucially, Campbell et al. (2004) verified that psychological entitlement is psychometrically distinct from self-esteem. When correlated with the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES), the PES displays weak to negligible associations (r ranging from .12 to .19, frequently nonsignificant after controlling for narcissism). This demonstrates that feeling inherently superior and deserving of unearned rewards is empirically distinct from holding a stable, positive evaluation of one’s intrinsic human worth. Furthermore, the PES shows negligible correlations with objective cognitive ability, general intelligence (r ≈ .02), and academic performance indicators (such as SAT scores and grade point averages), proving that entitled self-appraisals are not veridical reflections of intellectual or functional competence. The scale also shows negative correlations with agreeableness (r = -.30 to -.40) and empathy (r = -.25 to -.35), demonstrating that the instrument successfully taps an antagonistic, self-centered interpersonal orientation.

Predictive and Behavioral Validity

The behavioral and predictive validity of the scale is exceptionally well-documented across experimental paradigms:

• Commons Dilemma Exploitation: In laboratory simulations assessing sustainable resource harvesting (e.g., managing shared forestry plots or water reserves), participants with elevated scores on the PES harvested significantly more resources for their individual accounts, leading to rapid ecological collapse of the shared commons (Campbell et al., 2004, Study 5).
• Ego-Threat Aggression: Following negative evaluation or mild social rejection in experimental settings, high-entitlement individuals direct significantly higher levels of retaliatory physical and social aggression against evaluators (measured via noise blasts and derogatory peer evaluations; Campbell et al., 2004; Bushman & Baumeister, 1998).
• Workplace Deviance: Organizational research indicates that the PES prospectively predicts counterproductive work behaviors, fraudulent expense reporting, chronic supervisor conflict, and perceptions of psychological contract breach, even when organizational support is held constant (Harvey & Martinko, 2009).
• Consumer Misbehavior: In marketing contexts, the scale strongly predicts aggressive complaint behaviors, demands for unearned promotional discounts, product return abuse, and low brand loyalty (Fisk et al., 2010).

Reliability

The Psychological Entitlement Scale exhibits consistently strong psychometric reliability across diverse populations, languages, and settings. In the initial development program conducted across four distinct university cohorts (Campbell et al., 2004), internal consistency estimates (Cronbach’s alpha, α) remained consistently elevated:

• Study 1 (Scale Construction Cohort, N = 338): α = .85
• Study 2 (Cross-Validation Cohort, N = 168): α = .87
• Study 3 (Behavioral Assessment Cohort, N = 177): α = .79
• Study 4 (Relationship Dynamics Cohort, N = 119): α = .85

Subsequent investigations across diverse adult and international samples have documented Cronbach’s alpha coefficients routinely exceeding .80, typically ranging between .82 and .89 (e.g., Lessard et al., 2011; Miller et al., 2017). Composite reliability indices (ω) derived from structural equation modeling consistently match or surpass these alpha levels, demonstrating high internal consistency.

The temporal stability of the scale has been corroborated through test-retest reliability analyses. Campbell et al. (2004, Study 1) evaluated a subsample re-tested after an interval of two months (8 weeks) and documented a test-retest correlation coefficient of r = .70 (p < .001), indicating that psychological entitlement behaves as an enduring, stable trait rather than a transient, state-dependent mood fluctuation. Re-test assessments across multi-month intervals in longitudinal organizational cohorts have confirmed stability coefficients ranging from .68 to .76, supporting the instrument’s utility for prospective, longitudinal study designs.

Factor Analysis

The internal dimensionality of the Psychological Entitlement Scale was established through a sequence of rigorous exploratory factor analyses (EFA) and confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) during its psychometric construction.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Initial item generation yielded an exploratory pool of 57 items reflecting varied components of entitlement, deservingness, special status, and reward expectation. Principal components analyses (PCA) and principal axis factoring (PAF) using both orthogonal (Varimax) and oblique (Promax) rotations unambiguously revealed a dominant first factor accounting for the vast majority of the common variance. Scree plots displayed a sharp, definitive break after the first eigenvalue (initial eigenvalue > 4.0), while subsequent eigenvalues dropped immediately below 1.10. Through iterative reduction based on factor loading strength (> .45), cross-loading minimization, and conceptual clarity, the inventory was condensed to nine highly focused items that loaded clearly on this single latent construct. Item-to-total correlations ranged from .45 to .73.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Model Fit

Confirmatory factor analyses across independent validation samples have consistently established that a unidimensional (single-factor) model provides an excellent, parsimonious fit to the data. Standard goodness-of-fit indices reported across the empirical literature (Campbell et al., 2004; Pryor et al., 2008) routinely demonstrate acceptable to exceptional structural parameters:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI) ≥ .94 to .98
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) ≥ .92 to .97
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) ≤ .048 to .068 (90% CI [.032, .081])
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) ≤ .035 to .045

Standardized factor loadings (λ) for the nine items are consistently robust, generally falling between .52 and .82. The sole reverse-worded item (Item 5: “I do not necessarily deserve any special treatment”) consistently demonstrates the lowest, though psychometrically acceptable, factor loading (typically λ ≈ .42 to .55), a pattern typical of reverse-scored items due to method variance. Removal of Item 5 marginally elevates alpha in select samples, but retention is generally favored to safeguard against acquiescence response bias.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Formal Name: Psychological Entitlement Scale (PES; ENTL)
• Construct Assessed: Psychological entitlement (pervasive, stable sense of unearned deservingness and expectation of preferential treatment)
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil self-report inventory, computerized administration, or online survey module
• Target Population: Adults and adolescents aged 16 and older; widely used across university, community, clinical, and corporate organizational populations
• Item Count: 9 statements
• Authentic Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale (1 = strong disagreement, 7 = strong agreement)
• Keyed Polarity: Eight direct-scored items (1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9); one reverse-scored item (Item 5)
• Scoring Methodology:
  • Step 1: Reverse-score Item 5 such that 1 becomes 7, 2 becomes 6, 3 becomes 5, 4 remains 4, 5 becomes 3, 6 becomes 2, and 7 becomes 1 (i.e., Inverted Score = 8 − Raw Score).
  • Step 2: Compute the individual’s psychological entitlement index either by summing all 9 items (yielding an absolute score range from 9 to 63) or by calculating the arithmetic mean of all 9 items (yielding a scale metric range from 1.0 to 7.0).
  • Interpretation: Higher composite or mean scores directly signify elevated levels of psychological entitlement, reflecting greater egocentric expectations of preferential treatment and unearned rewards.
• Completion Duration: Approximately 2 to 4 minutes

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Psychological Entitlement Scale was developed in 2004 and published by the American Psychological Association / Lawrence Erlbaum Associates in the Journal of Personality Assessment (Campbell, Bonacci, Shelton, Exline, & Bushman, 2004). The scale was placed in the public academic domain by the original authors for scholarly, educational, and clinical research use. No licensing fees or royalty payments are required for non-commercial academic research, pedagogical purposes, or empirical student investigations, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution is formally accorded to Campbell et al. (2004). Commercial organizations, consulting firms, corporate recruiters, and proprietary testing vendors seeking to integrate the PES into profit-generating pre-employment selection batterers or commercial psychometric testing software should consult the primary author (W. Keith Campbell, Department of Psychology, University of Georgia) or the publisher of the Journal of Personality Assessment (Taylor & Francis / Routledge) regarding institutional permissions and contractual licensing requirements.

References

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Items of the Scale