Achievement (not effort) makes people feel entitled to rewards
Edited by Robert Bjork, University of California, Los Angeles, CA; received May 20, 2024; accepted January 12, 2025
Significance
Subjective entitlements predict when people feel comfortable taking and fighting for rewards. Much prior work assumes that effort is an important input to subjective entitlement because it is virtuous and relatively immune from luck. Whether one does one’s job well, on the other hand, is often affected by luck. We find that achievement is the primary input into feelings of entitlement while effort seems to matter little. Moreover, we found that people feel entitled to rewards even when they know the role that luck played in putting them in an easy and effortless position to do well.
Abstract
It is common to say that people feel entitled to rewards—they think they have earned or deserve them—based on their effort and achievement. However, effort and achievement draw on different principles to justify reward. They can also conflict over when people should feel entitled to rewards. These observations raise the question: In everyday settings, do people feel entitled to rewards because of their effort, achievement, or some combination of the two? To determine how effort and achievement contribute to feelings of entitlement, we hired online workers and varied the feelings of effort and achievement that their work induced. We then let those workers decide how large of a bonus we then paid them. Achievement strongly predicted how much participants paid themselves. Hard work, by contrast, played little-to-no detectable role.
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Data, Materials, and Software Availability
.csv data have been deposited in ResearchBox (https://researchbox.org/2921) (44).
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Ike Silver, Jen Dannals, Philip Fernbach, Shane Frederick, several anonymous reviewers, and audiences at BDRM and the Yale SOM Marketing group for helpful advice on how to improve this work. And we thank Rick Xiang, Joey Cumpian, and Sebastian Li for their assistance in cleaning and coding data.
Author contributions
C.C., J.K., and J.W. designed research; C.C., J.K., and J.W. performed research; C.C., J.K., and J.W. analyzed data; and C.C. and J.K. wrote the paper.
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interest.
Supporting Information
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Copyright © 2025 the Author(s). Published by PNAS. This article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND).
Data, Materials, and Software Availability
.csv data have been deposited in ResearchBox (https://researchbox.org/2921) (44).
Submission history
Received: May 20, 2024
Accepted: January 12, 2025
Published online: May 8, 2025
Published in issue: May 13, 2025
Keywords
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Ike Silver, Jen Dannals, Philip Fernbach, Shane Frederick, several anonymous reviewers, and audiences at BDRM and the Yale SOM Marketing group for helpful advice on how to improve this work. And we thank Rick Xiang, Joey Cumpian, and Sebastian Li for their assistance in cleaning and coding data.
Author contributions
C.C., J.K., and J.W. designed research; C.C., J.K., and J.W. performed research; C.C., J.K., and J.W. analyzed data; and C.C. and J.K. wrote the paper.
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interest.
Notes
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
*
†
This null result is important for another reason. Participants were more likely to exit the study without completing it in the difficult conditions compared to the easy conditions (SI Appendix, Table S2 in the section 2). This pattern raises the worry that the participants who endured the two tasks differed in ways that confound our findings. For instance, participants who endured the difficult task may have been more tired or may have tended toward noisier responses compared to participants who endured the easy task. The null result in the “financially best” condition suggests that the differences we observe elsewhere do not simply reflect these kinds of differences. Our findings also replicate in Study 5 wherein we do not observe meaningful differences in attrition across conditions.
‡
In the SI Appendix, section 19, we report Study S3 which further probes the role that social comparisons play in our studies. We find that participants’ judgments regarding how well they did, or how hard they worked, relative to others, played little-to-no role predicting bonuses.
§
A pilot study (N = 202) confirmed that participants in the effortful condition rated the task as more effortful (M = 3.8, SD = 1.1) compared to participants in the easy condition (M = 3.3, SD = 1.2, t = 2.99, P = 0.003, d = 0.42).
¶
Study 10 is informative for another reason. Prolific policy is to pay participants based on the time required to complete studies. If subjective entitlements simply reflected this policy, then participants should have taken different amounts of money in the easy and effortful conditions (which required very different amounts of time). They did not do so.
#
These results, and results from tests for interactions reported elsewhere, are robust when analyzing data using generalized additive models (SI Appendix, section 18) (48).
||
This explanation is unlikely. Participants are anonymous. And, the worst we could do is block their ID from future studies. This outcome barely qualifies as a consequence. Indeed, the unlucky participants assigned to the more difficult tasks should care less about this outcome (compared with those assigned to easier ones) but they are the ones leaving cash on the table.
**
We also found a gender gap in performance-based self-pay. After accounting for objective performance, as measured by transcript score, women paid themselves less than men did (P < 0.001). This gap appears to have reflected a tendency for low-performing men to feel better about their performance compared to low-performing women, and in turn, take higher bonuses (SI Appendix, section 15 and Fig. S5). These results corroborate recent work on gender in negotiation. Women desire and feel justified pursuing good outcomes for themselves just like men do (49, 50), but men think more highly of themselves (51).
††
On-going work of ours appears to vindicate this prediction: In a paradigm similar to the studies reported here, workers who pay themselves after writing tasks (which lack objective criteria for quality) pay themselves based on how well they think the writing turned out but not how hard they think they worked (40).
‡‡
Our studies were probably not long or fatiguing enough for people to consider the opportunity costs of their effort. Participants may have also considered the base pay for the study their compensation for their opportunity costs.
§§
We included the word “completing” in Studies 4 and 6 because we did not want participants to think that they might have to revisit their transcript or do another one. However, we began to worry that the word “complete” might induce participants to consider achievement-based entitlements. We dropped this wording in Studies 5 and 7 to 12. This change had no apparent effect on our findings.
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Achievement (not effort) makes people feel entitled to rewards, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.
122 (19) e2409131122,
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2409131122
(2025).
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