Deserve and diverge: Feeling entitled makes people more creative

•We manipulated people's sense of entitlement in four experiments.•People who felt more entitled were more creative.•A need for uniqueness meditated the relationship between entitlement and creativity.

Four studies demonstrated that making people feel more entitled leads them to be more creative. In Study 1, entitlement was manipulated through a writing prompt task, and entitled participants generated more creative uses for a common household object and drew more creative pictures than participants in the control condition did. In Study 2, the same manipulation was used, and entitled participants performed better than control participants on a task measuring creative performance but not on a task measuring non-creative performance. In Studies 3a and 3b, entitlement was manipulated through a sentence unscramble task, and entitled participants again were more creative than control participants. In Studies 2, 3a, and 3b, a need for uniqueness mediated the relationship between entitlement and creativity.