Deserving Special Treatment? The Effect of Psychological Entitlement on Support for International Law

Abstract Previous studies in Psychology have identified Psychological Entitlement (PE) as an important variable that affects a wide variety of attitudes and behaviors in humans. PE is an individual-level character trait that describes a tendency to expect unwarranted and unearned rewards. In this paper, we build on existing research in Psychology and we investigate the effect of PE on foreign policy attitudes. Theoretically, we expect that those who score high on PE will score higher on American exceptionalism and—as a result—they will have more negative attitudes toward international law. We test our hypotheses on a nationally representative sample of the United States adult population. Respondents were asked a number of questions designed to tap into their PE scores, foreign policy attitudes, and general demographic characteristics. Our models provide broad support for our theoretical expectations. An experimental follow-up analysis (in which entitlement levels were manipulated) corroborates our findings.