Via Tyler Cowen Eric Barker of Barking Up the Wrong Tree points to an interesting-looking social psychology paper on entitlement and selfishness as it relates to a sense of victimization.
Does feeling like a victim make you selfish?:
Three experiments demonstrated that feeling wronged leads to a sense of entitlement and to selfish behavior. In Experiment 1, participants instructed to recall a time when their lives were unfair were more likely to refuse to help the experimenter with a supplementary task than were participants who recalled a time when they were bored. In Experiment 2, the same manipulation increased intentions to engage in a number of selfish behaviors, and this effect was mediated by self-reported entitlement to obtain positive (and avoid negative) outcomes. In Experiment 3, participants who lost at a computer game for an unfair reason (a glitch in the program) requested a more selfish money allocation for a future task than did participants who lost the game for a fair reason, and this effect was again mediated by entitlement.
via Journal of Personality and Social Psychology – Vol 97, Iss 5
Quick note: Barker may have been citing the print version. For whatever reason, though, the the article appears online in JPSP Vol 98, Issue 2: Victim entitlement to behave selfishly Zitek, Emily M.; Jordan, Alexander H.; Monin, Benoît; Leach, Frederick R. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol 98(2), Feb 2010, 245-255.
I’m not going to cough up ~$12.00 to read the gated version but while digging around for more information it looks like the same results turn up quite a few similar studies of selfishness, fairness, and sense of entitlement. I ought to add it makes sense because it’s been my intuition, stated repeatedly online and in real life, that privilege and entitlement (stereotypical male in particular, kyriarchal in general) derives more from insecurity and resentment than the stereotypical spoon-in-your-mouth aristocratic sense of “the peasants are revolting.” And finally makes sense because I’ve been around my children and their friends for 13 years now… although that experience might be unscientifically anecdotal. :-)
At any rate, assuming the research supports the conclusion, and assuming it confirms similar prior research, it’s going to supports my contention that those who exercise privilege tend to perceive their actions as defending themselves from unfairness or attack. With the result that asking, say, men to “give up” their privileges never seems to work (and, when it does sort of work, seems really wimpy, half-hearted, or passive-aggressive. Or chivalrous, which would be by far the least productive!)
I think it also supports my developing strategy of attempting to recruit “oppressive” classes with the entirely reasonable (and often easily-observed) point that conditions that are worse for someone don’t necessarily imply that conditions are better for you.
I think people may also
Submitted by Holly Pervocracy (not verified) on Sun, 2010-01-24 14:28.I think people may also rankle when asked to “give up their privileges” because many members of theoretically privileged classes can read that and then look around their dingy studio apartments, cough a few times and wish they had health insurance, and worry how long their rustbucket car is going to be able to get them to their low-wage night job. Asking someone to “check your privilege” because of their race/gender/orientation/able-bodiedness/etc., when they don’t feel like they’re enjoying any actual, you know, privileges, is going to stir up some serious resentment.
The problem is that individuals feel like they’re being accused with the sins of the group. Laying the actions of white male politicians and executives on white male random folks is unfair. It’s hard to hear “life is easy for your kind” when life sure isn’t easy for me.
As you may have gathered, I don’t really like the language of “privilege.” It’s accusatory by nature and often unhelpful (even prejudiced) in the way that it conflates privileged-group membership and actual privileges. It might just be the semantic flipside, but I’d rather combat “injustice” than “privilege.” If women are treated poorly, that’s a much bigger concern to me than if men are treated well—and I don’t think the two always happen in concert.
Privileges are good things! Everyone should have some!
[Which is the point I’m evidently not making very well. :-) But yeah, exactly! I’d add, by the way, that it’s not just “privileged” people in the bottom, say 25th percentile that feel they’re just scraping by. There are people in the top .001% who feel the same way… because they’re rubbing shoulders with the top .00001% and feel left out because they feel like they’ll never catch up. Or something. Anyway, point being that yeah, most people don’t perceive where ever they are as privileged. Which is why at least since the invention of the college trust fund (to name one point of friction for a lot of people, both coming and going) the whole appeal to guilt thing has almost never worked. Which is why I think it’s more effective to take that “I was picked last for kickball” feeling more people than could possibly ever have actually been picked last feel and turn it into something that looks like a way out. Thanks, Holly. —fl]
oops, italics
Submitted by Holly Pervocracy (not verified) on Sun, 2010-01-24 14:28.oops, italics accident.
[Now fixed in your original comment. Thanks for the heads-up, Holly. —fl]
Still, what is considered
Submitted by Nightfall (not verified) on Sun, 2010-01-24 18:08.Still, what is considered “unfair” can vary considerably from person to person. I would not consider a computer glitch to be unfair (assuming you’re referring to a software error, which is properly referred to as a “bug” – a glitch is a random temporary hardware failure) since it will happen to anyone who uses it. Annoying, certainly, but only unfair if I was in a competition of some sort and someone else was just given superior software for no good reason.
On the other hand, my mother seems to think that virtually everything is “unfair”. Sometimes I think that the only way that she’ll ever be happy is if she somehow becomes able to empower other people to rewrite reality in a way that will allow her to single-handedly create a better world without herself rewriting reality. Or something like that. Meanwhile she behaves very selfishly, acting as a black hole for other people’s time, money, and emotional investments, but justifies it in that she will be able to more than make up for it by making the world better for everyone. Not surprisingly she has accomplished nothing but alienating most of her family and friends… and learning the long, hard way what things really don’t work when a bit of research would have sufficed to discover that. (I have pointed that out a few times, and she mostly agrees with it but thinks other people should tolerate it because she “has needs” and definitely will accomplish her destiny eventually because “there’s no choice”.)
Wow, sounds like your mother
Submitted by Shadow (not verified) on Mon, 2010-01-25 15:12.Wow, sounds like your mother really have the workings of the world backwards.
If you want something, it’s not about taking it or demand it. The more you give to others, the more they will give back. At least in theory.
After all, people tend to like sunshine better than stormclouds.
I think it’s more like a
Submitted by Nightfall (not verified) on Mon, 2010-01-25 18:26.I think it’s more like a social lottery – sort of like repeatedly asking to borrow money with the promise of paying it back, and then spending most of it on lottery tickets. Oh, sure, she’ll pay it back with interest, but only once she wins the million-dollar jackpot. And now it’s become a sort of gambler’s ruin – trying to make up for the losses by digging deeper into the hole. Because while originally she just wanted to gain and share the benefits, she now believes that only winning the jackpot can make up for the damage that’s already been done. If that metaphor makes any sense.
[It makes sense. I don’t think it’s even that uncommon a feeling. Of course the problem is that life doesn’t accumulate karma… at least not that way. One big “payout” doesn’t necessarily make everything that’s happened previously better. Good thing we have forgiveness though. Because otherwise it might go on for generations. Thanks, Nightfall. —fl]
I’m a feminist who feels that
Submitted by Redleader (not verified) on Sun, 2010-01-24 20:26. I’m a feminist who feels that the whole “privilege/oppression” model of understanding society is problematic. Basically what it does is take an obvious fact, namely that certain biases exist in our society, and sets out to demonstrate it (and maybe make it personal) by making statements (i.e. assumptions) about individual people’s lives and experiences. Some of these assumptions can be wrong. But if the assumptions are wrong with regards to a number of people in the room, either it gets turned into an argument against the idea that this bias exists. Or else that person is told that they are “an exception” or that their problems are the result of some situation where they also belong to a disadvantaged group. In short it was an attempt at consciousness raising that is/was made for and by people who are very concrete thinkers, and on the model of “make it personal” as the key to getting people to act. Also I think one assumption made is that people will only act if they feel that they have something to answer for personally. (Which goes back to some of my theories about how 12 step programs have influenced the culture and not necessarily for the better.) And some of the individual items are problem. One item commonly listed as “male privilege” is the ability to walk alone at night. I walk at night all the time by myself. My reasoning is that more women are killed in their own homes even if a stranger is involved, and has been since I left my parents’ house. (Also I was very lucky to have a karate teacher who told me that the “Don’t fight a rapist because he’ll kill you” theory was bullshit long before it was demonstrated to be wrong by criminologists. This goes to a set of related stories I’ve long wanted to tell you David.) So basically the idea that women can’t walk alone especially at night is a misperception but here it is being treated like a “sad reality of society”. Other thing I’ve seen listed as “white privilege” in have been “The President has the same skin color I do.” Well personally, I’m happier now with one that doesn’t, then I was 2000-2008, so how meaningful is that? Other things I’ve seen are “My ancestors came to the Americas voluntarily and were never forced to relocate.” Actually my ancestors came to the US (or at least left Ireland) involuntarily and were forced to relocate both in the US and Ireland. But with that you get people who either use the Irish experience to say that “slavery wasn’t so bad after all”, or try to undercut it by painting Irish Americans as the most right winged, racist group in America. Both of which are absolutely despicable in my mind. But I look at a lot of the items listed as “privileges” in these exercises and think “How meaningful can that truly be unless you are a complete bigot to begin with?” In short, I see that whole model as troubling, divisive, and basically just a bad style of diversity training. Logically you should not have to make such definitive pronouncements about the lives of every individual in the room in order to demonstrate that certain prejudices are common in a society. And making pronouncements about the lives of individuals that may or may not gel with their own experiences has always been problematic.[Excellent points, Red. Because I’ve got so many family records from the 1800s I’ve got a really… interesting perspective on the notion that people with last names like “Ronald Reagan” or “Patrick Buchanan” or, for that matter “Antonin Scalia” and “Samuel Alito” think of themselves as “white.” Because, dudes, seriously, no. Not till the 1920s at the earliest. Also, as Holly Pervocracy puts it, privileges are a good thing — you want everybody to have the same ones. Thanks! —fl]
Can you elaborate on the
Submitted by Nobilis Reed (not verified) on Mon, 2010-01-25 03:19.Can you elaborate on the comment that “chivalrous” is less productive than “really wimpy, half-hearted, or passive-aggressive”?
[That’s easy, Nobilis. There are a couple of big problems with chivalry in feminism. First because it presumes men are a protector class and chilvalry is an exercise in that protection. Second because it can be really patronizing. “We ought to give the little missies their equality” doesn’t have the most equalitarian ring to it. (Nor does “we ought to help the ladies out, they’ve had it so tough,” which was how I thought about it for decades.) Third, there’s always the other side of chivalry which is a tacit expectation of reward — even if it’s just a smile of thanks for… opening a door or tipping a hat. Yet another problem with chivalry is that expectations of gendered male sacrifice (e.g. women and children first; we only draft boys; or even the Willie-Loman-style notion that a man’s role is to work himself to death for his family) are pretty oppressive of men. The final problem with chivalry, related to the second, above, and the preceding one, is that it encourages the impression that feminism is of benefit only to women because men are just fine (“we can take it”) or perfect (all we have to do is make women as equal as men.) Add it all up and those are worse reasons than passive-aggression or wimpiness because it arises precisely out of one of the biggest things men need to give up. Hope that helps. —fl]