Entitlement Makes People Ignorant, Egocentric, and Mean

This chapter explores the ways in which entitlement facilitates ignorance, egocentrism, and inconsiderateness. People with power tend to engage in shoddy information processing. Compared to those who are marginalized, dominant group members think in shortcuts. Power emboldens people to be careless about repercussions, at least compared to those without power. Power holders do not feel compelled to view things from another person’s perspective and they do not feel obliged to know much about people with less power. For marginalized people, their very lives depend on understanding the idiosyncrasies of power holders and they understand these dynamics much better than powerful people. Power entitles people to conveniently and self-servingly assume they know more than they actually do when it comes to telling women and people of color how to think about sexism and racism (e.g., mansplaining and whitesplaining). At the same time, power entitles people to claim they know less than they actually do when they are called to account for sexual violence.

Enraged, Rattled, and Wronged

Chapter 6 explores the backlash to social progress by the entitled. Dominant group members are not accustomed to being bossed around. They tend to be ill-equipped to adapt to changing circumstances, and their resistance to change comes in many forms, with a range of consequences to themselves and others. Dominant group members are both highly sensitive to criticism and object to being sidelined. The history of divide and rule by elites toward poor and working people begins Chapter 6. This history helps us understand why a less-educated working- or middle-class White person comes to share a sense of the same group position to that of wealthy and influential Whites rather than working- or middle-class people of color. Some White people have so internalized their superiority over people of color, that even Whites who are in economic distress support legislation and politicians that have no intention of aiding them. They reject government assistance that they desperately need, they refuse to sign up for the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) because they believe that these initiatives help undeserving minorities. These White people are dying of Whiteness. And politicians capitalize on this White racial resentment. The entitled resentment of those who feel their superior status is undermined manifests in various ways. White fragility and fragile masculinity are emotionally hyperbolic reactions by dominant group members when they are asked to acknowledge the existence of racism and sexism.

Introduction

The introduction lays out the thesis of Enraged, Rattled, and Wronged. In order to understand the political and social backlash against efforts toward equality of the last few decades, culminating in the election of Donald Trump for US president, we must understand entitlement. The introduction begins with the inexplicable election of Donald Trump in 2016. White voters, both women and men, put Donald Trump in the Whitehouse. His campaign of entitled resentment resonated with these voters. This book is not about Donald Trump, however. Rather, it is about those who have been traditionally advantaged due to their social identity of maleness and whiteness and yet believe they are being shut out of the American dream. They are the victims of supposed progress. The introduction ends with an outline of each chapter.

Power, Privilege, and Entitlement

Chapter 1, Power, Privilege, and Entitlement, situates entitlement among related terms that help explain inequality, such as power and privilege. This chapter defines entitlement and details the way entitlement is measured. Experiments that assess entitlement find reliable differences in women’s and men’s sense of entitlement. Men tend to have an inflated sense of entitlement relative to women. White individuals tend to have a higher sense of entitlement compared to people of color. In addition to entitlement to pay, research on academic entitlement is examined as well. Academically entitled students hold attitudes toward learning and teachers that they should receive more from their academic experience than they put in; that professors should bend rules for them; that they should not have to work as hard as others. Academic entitlement is correlated with academic disengagement, cheating, and classroom incivility.

Entitlement’s Enablers: Parents and Teachers

This chapter explores the development of entitlement in individuals. What entities surrounding the newborn, the child, and young adult facilitate the sense of deservingness that some people have relative to others? This chapter begins with the role that parents play in producing a child with a social dominance orientation or authoritarian tendencies: two ideologies that are associated with entitlement. Parents’ ideas about race and gender are also significant in how their child will think about their place in the world. Globally, boys are the preferred gender, and this preference is due to the fact that in most cultures, men have more status and power than do women. Chapter 3 explores the gendered treatment of children by caregivers, beginning with parents’ attitudes toward their newborn daughters and sons. Adult heterosexual men tend to have a sense of domestic entitlement, meaning they feel justified doing less domestic labor than their spouse. This sense of entitlement begins with the toys and then chores parents assign to their daughters and sons. Chapter 3 next examines teachers’ role in facilitating entitlement. Teachers’ expectations and treatment of students unintentionally influences entitlement in boys relative to girls, and in White students relative to students of color. If teachers’ expectations (and biases) can have a measurable impact over the course of one school year, imagine the consequences over a student’s entire academic career. Being the normative racial category allows one to be given the benefit of the doubt when it comes to school discipline. Unlike students of color, for White kids, the school experience allows them to feel entitled to impartial or even preferential treatment by law enforcement and the criminal legal system.

Entitlement’s Enablers: Peers and Popular Culture

Chapter 4 further explores the development of entitlement. This chapter is divided into two parts as it considers two areas of developmental influence: the peer group and mass media. The chapter begins with a look at the impact of social dominance goals (e.g., establishing power) of the peer group and the degree to which these goals affect peer interaction and disruptive classroom behavior. Homophobic bullying and gender policing are also addressed in this chapter. The price for entitlement is the all-out avoidance of femininity and all-in conformity to male norms. Boys and men may come to see conforming to rigid gender rules as a relatively small price to pay for privilege and entitlement. Sexualized violence is then considered through the lens of entitlement. In some male peer groups, the mistreatment of girls and women is not condemned, but rather it actually helps men gain status within that group. Chapter 4 next considers the influence of media and popular culture on the valuing of dominant groups over subordinated groups. The different representations of gender, race, and sexuality in mass media facilitate entitlement in dominant groups. Finally, the impact of media is considered with a review of experimental and correlational research on how media messages affect viewers.

Entitlement’s Cruel Cousins

Chapter 2, Entitlement’s Cruel Cousins, surveys the psychological correlates of entitlement. What attitudes coincide with entitlement that perpetuate inequality? For example, entitlement is associated with overconfidence and immodesty. Entitlement is also associated with individualism and the belief in the myth of meritocracy. From poverty to sexual assault, those who value individualism and meritocracy tend to see bad things happening to people as their own fault. Entitlement is linked to narcissism as well. Finally, entitlement is also correlated with dangerous worldviews such as authoritarianism and social dominance orientation—both of which are necessary to examine given trends toward increased authoritarian political tactics in the United States and globally.

Conclusion

The conclusion presents the consequences of entitlement for individuals, the planet, and democracy. Entitlement makes people cognitively inflexible but also behaviorally, professionally, and politically unable to adapt to change. Dominant group members do not believe they should have to change and adapt, and they react emotionally when they are asked to do so. Economically struggling White people support policies that are self-destructive to themselves and their communities. Many White people vote according to their racial status against their economic needs. They support politicians who offer policies that objectively advantage the wealthy and harm working-class and poor White people. Entitlement can help us understand climate change denial if we consider it in the context of anti-intellectualism, individualism, and fragile masculinity—topics covered in previous chapters. Finally, entitlement could end democracy. The grievance politics of the entitled has knocked down some crucial pillars that historically have upheld democracy in the United States. In order to stay in power, Republican politicians must cheat because their initiatives are so unpopular, they would not win elections if everyone voted. Therefore, they gerrymander districts to absurdity, they remove voters of color from voter lists, they close voting locations in ethnic minority communities, and they limit early voting, weekend voting, and even voting by mail during a global pandemic.