Cusimano Corey, Kim Jin, Wong Jared
Marketing Department, Yale School of Management, New Haven, CT 06511.
D'Amore-McKim School of Business, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2025 May 13;122(19):e2409131122. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2409131122. Epub 2025 May 8.
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.
人们常说，他们觉得自己有权获得奖励——他们认为基于自己的努力和成就，他们已经赢得或理应获得这些奖励。然而，努力和成就依据不同的原则来证明奖励的合理性。它们在人们何时应觉得自己有权获得奖励这一问题上也可能存在冲突。这些观察结果引发了一个问题：在日常情境中，人们是因为自己的努力、成就，还是两者的某种结合而觉得有权获得奖励呢？为了确定努力和成就如何导致人们产生应得感，我们雇佣了在线工作者，并改变他们工作所带来的努力感和成就感。然后，我们让这些工作者决定我们随后付给他们的奖金数额。成就强烈地预测了参与者给自己支付的金额。相比之下，努力所起的作用微乎其微，几乎难以察觉。
