Entitled to Expect: System Justification Theory, Socioeconomic Status, and the Ultimatum Game

Abstract

Economic inequality can have grave impacts on health and wellbeing, yet the mechanisms behind it are still not fully understood. Previous studies on entitlement suggest that people from lower socioeconomic status (SES) brackets express a depressed sense of entitlement in relation to people with higher SES. However, the effect of entitlement in unfair and socially provocative situations is unclear. This study used the ultimatum game (UG) to generate a socially provocative situation in which participants in an all-male study played as responders and had the decision to accept or reject an unfair offer. To measure entitlement, participants reported how much they expected the proposer to offer them in the UG. As expected, SES predicted expectations, such that the higher one’s SES, the greater their expectations in the UG. Furthermore, expectations mediated the relationships between subjective SES and offer decisions, perceptions of the offer as unfair, and feelings towards the offer (bothered, dejected, angry). These findings suggest that entitlement plays a role in the relationship between SES and behaviors in unfair and socially provocative situations such as the UG.