Portuguese Validation of the Psychological Entitlement Scale

Introduction Psychological entitlement can be conceived as a disposition to believe that one deserves or is entitled to more than others. This pervasive sense has a wide impact on social behaviour, namely undesirable social outcomes. Given these theoretical implications on self-concept and interpersonal functioning, Campbell and Bonacci developed a shorter questionnaire of the Psychological Entitlement Scale (PES) to evaluate this construct by reducing from the original version from 57 to 9 items. Objective To investigate the psychometric properties of Psychological Entitlement Portuguese version. Methods A community sample composed of 286 university students (69.2% females; mean age = 21.09 ± 2.133; range: 17–33) answered the Portuguese preliminary versions of the PES, of the Dirty Dozen and of the honesty-humility dimension from the HEXACO-100. Results The PES Cronbach alpha was “very good” ( a = 0.75). Following Kaiser and Cattel Scree Plot criteria, only one factor was extracted (explained variance = 35.46%), meaning that the scale is unidimensional. Pearson correlation coefficient of between PES and narcissism ( r = 0.36), psychopathy ( r = 0.21) and Machiavelism ( r = 0.24) were positive, moderate and significant ( P < 0.01). Pearson correlation between PES and honesty-humility was negative, moderate and significant ( r = −0.43 P < 0.05). Conclusions The Portuguese version of PES present good internal consistency and convergent-divergent validity. Because we consider that psychological entitlement reflects a stable disposition, it is our intent to analyze PES temporal stability within the ongoing research project on the relationship between perfectionism and other personality traits. PES could be very useful both in clinical and research contexts. Disclosure of interest The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.