Entitlement –> Breaking Rules
Article Link: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-new-resilience/201801/why-entitled-people-will-disregard-rules-others-follow
The article above is titled, “Why Entitled People Will Disregard Rules That Others Follow.” Written by Douglas LaBier, this short article introduces a recent study that looks into why certain people who feel “entitled” often do not make decisions based on how others in the society behave. The writer begins the article by introducing a joint study made by Cornell and Harvard Medical School; this study found that “people with a greater sense of entitlement are less likely to follow instructions than less entitled people are, because they view the instructions as ‘unfair’ imposition on them.” In other words, this study introduced this new idea that entitled people would rather lose something or get punished, rather than submitting to the rules of others. This articles goes on to explain in further details the joint study and the implications of the results. Most importantly, this article brings into light the idea that people who feel special or entitled –– often due to their narcissistic personality–– will do almost anything to do whatever they feel is most fair to himself or herself.
This article is very relevant to the topic of information cascade. However, rather than looking at the reasons why people follow other peoples’ behavior, this article focuses on the reasons why people don’t follow other people’s behavior. In class, we talked about different scenarios where people would copy other people’s decisions because often times there is a good reason why everyone is choosing to do a certain activity. What’s interesting is that this article focuses on the idea of “entitlement” and how one’s narcissistic personality can make it really hard for him/her to go along with the rules. I really enjoyed reading this article and writing about it because it made me realize there are so many factors to think about when analyzing how individuals make the decisions that they do.