A sense of entitlement appears to be linked to sexism, say psychologists who believe entitled men are more likely to endorse hostile views of women while entitled women are more likely to think women are frail and need extra care.
Entitled men were found to be more likely to endorse views of women as manipulative, deceptive, and untrustworthy — attitudes, which past psychology papers
say are predictors of violence toward women.
Before you go indicting men or women, this is a psychology paper, and so a survey of college students and people they paid to take a survey. In this case, it is undergraduate students and so not even a representative sample of one college much less society at large. Amazon's Mechanical Turk online workforce has become the other go-to source for psychology claims.
The primarily teenage college students, 333 in an introductory psychology class in one group and 437 adults who signed up via Amazon's Mechanical Turk workforce database in the other, responded to questions in an online survey the researchers developed, "Personality, Beliefs, and Behavior," that explored individuals' attitudes about how deserving they are of special treatment as well as their openness to new experiences.
Both groups showed entitlement related to benevolent sexism in women and hostile sexism in men. There were also relationships, to smaller degrees, in the relationships between entitlement and hostile sexism in women and benevolent sexism in men.
They focused on two forms of sexism (hostile and benevolent) and how feelings of entitlement might predict those roles differently for men and women.Their surveys led them to conclude that entitled men were more prone to exhibiting hostile sexism, indicating that they viewed women as manipulative and demanding, while entitled women exhibited benevolent sexism, indicating that they think women deserve special care and treatment. Assuming a woman got promoted ahead of a man due to flirting is hostile sexism while quotas for jobs in science, or separate standards on military physical fitness tests, are examples of benevolent sexism.
"When you consider that entitlement has been shown to be rising across recent generations, linking it to sexist attitudes is particularly alarming," said Joshua Grubbs, a Case Western Reserve University doctoral student and the lead author on the article, who says he hopes his paper highlights the dangers of unchecked entitlement and entitled attitudes.
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