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Narcissists often attain leadership positions, but at the same time do not care for others and often engage in unethical behaviors. We therefore explored the role of leader narcissism as an antecedent of abusive supervision, a form of unethical leadership. We based our study on the narcissistic admiration and rivalry concept (NARC) and proposed a direct positive effect of leaders’ narcissistic rivalry—the maladaptive narcissism dimension—on abusive supervision. In line with trait activation and threatened egotism theory, we also proposed a moderated mediation assuming that leaders high in narcissistic rivalry would be particularly prone to showing abusive supervision in reaction to followers’ supervisor-directed deviance, as this form of follower behavior would threaten their self-esteem. We conducted a field study with leader–follower dyads (Study 1) and an experimental vignette study with leaders (Study 2). Leaders’ narcissistic rivalry was positively related to abusive supervision (intentions) in both studies. This effect was independent of followers’ supervisor-directed deviance and leaders’ perceived self-esteem threat. We discuss our findings in light of the NARC, as well as threatened egotism theory, and offer directions for future research. Finally, we make practical recommendations for organizations.

Economic games are used to investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying cooperative behaviour, and show that intuition supports cooperation in social dilemmas, whereas reflection can undermine these cooperative impulses. Generosity is a question of timing Many people are willing to make sacrifices for the common good, but little is known about the cognitive mechanisms that underlie such cooperative behaviour. In economic experiments subjects often contribute cooperatively against what rational self-interest should dictate. This study uses a series of ten varied experimental designs, including both one-shot and repeated games, to establish whether we are intuitively predisposed to cooperate or to act selfishly. And it seems our gut response is to cooperate — but given more time to think the logic of self-interest undermines collective action and we become less generous. Cooperation is central to human social behaviour 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 . However, choosing to cooperate requires individuals to incur a personal cost to benefit others. Here we explore the cognitive basis of cooperative decision-making in humans using a dual-process framework 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 . We ask whether people are predisposed towards selfishness, behaving cooperatively only through active self-control; or whether they are intuitively cooperative, with reflection and prospective reasoning favouring ‘rational’ self-interest. To investigate this issue, we perform ten studies using economic games. We find that across a range of experimental designs, subjects who reach their decisions more quickly are more cooperative. Furthermore, forcing subjects to decide quickly increases contributions, whereas instructing them to reflect and forcing them to decide slowly decreases contributions. Finally, an induction that primes subjects to trust their intuitions increases contributions compared with an induction that promotes greater reflection. To explain these results, we propose that cooperation is intuitive because cooperative heuristics are developed in daily life where cooperation is typically advantageous. We then validate predictions generated by this proposed mechanism. Our results provide convergent evidence that intuition supports cooperation in social dilemmas, and that reflection can undermine these cooperative impulses.

This study explored the roles of proenvironmental attitude and willingness to pay as mediators of the relationship between egoistic value and proenvironmental purchasing behavior. I conducted an online survey with 421 Korean adults aged 20-49 years. The results showed that both proenvironmental attitude and willingness to pay mediated the relationship between egoistic value and proenvironmental purchasing behavior. Furthermore, proenvironmental attitude and willingness to pay played a chain mediating role in this relationship. Thus, egoistic value can predict consumers' proenvironmental purchasing behavior both directly and indirectly through proenvironmental attitude and willingness to pay. The findings of this study provide theoretical insights and offer practical management strategies for promoting consumers' proenvironmental purchasing behavior.

We investigate the widespread yet under-researched social phenomenon of consumer arrogance—the propensity to broadcast one’s superiority over others in the consumption domain. Building on the theory of positive illusions, we examine how and under what conditions triggering people’s consumer arrogance prompts their positive and negative word-of-mouth communication. In a pilot study and five experiments, we establish that triggering people’s sense of consumer arrogance will increase their word-of-mouth inclinations and behaviors. We show that triggering consumers’ sense of arrogance will result in a greater propensity for word-of-mouth communication than triggering their sense of superiority or desire to brag independently. While most consumers engage in positive word-of-mouth, consumer arrogance fuels both positive and negative word-of-mouth communication. Furthermore, whereas the former stems from self-enhancement needs, negative word-of-mouth communication arises from the needs for both self-affirmation and self-enhancement, especially in a social context. Overall, the results highlight the uniqueness and strategic potential of consumer arrogance as a social phenomenon.

We examined the effect of sense of entitlement on students' entrepreneurial intention, and assessed attitude toward entrepreneurship as a mediator and authenticity as a moderator of this relationship. Data were collected from 265 Chinese undergraduate students. The effect of sense of entitlement on participants' entrepreneurial intention was supported. In addition, attitude mediated the link between the sense of entitlement and entrepreneurial intention, and authenticity moderated this link. We explored how participants' sense of entitlement that stems from personality traits relates to their entrepreneurial intention, and our results have implications for improvement of entrepreneurial intention and practice.

Virtual reality has become a popular means to study human behavior in a wide range of settings, including the role of pedestrians in traffic research. To understand distance perception in virtual environments is thereby crucial to the interpretation of results, as reactions to complex and dynamic traffic scenarios depend on perceptual processes allowing for the correct anticipation of future events. A number of approaches have been suggested to quantify perceived distances. While previous studies imply that the selected method influences the estimates' accuracy, it is unclear how the respective estimates depend on depth information provided by different perceptual modalities. In the present study, six methodological approaches were compared in a virtual city scenery. The respective influence of visual and non-visual cues was investigated by manipulating the ratio between visually perceived and physically walked distances. In a repeated measures design with 30 participants, significant differences between methods were observed, with the smallest error occurring for visually guided walking and verbal estimates. A linear relation emerged between the visual-to-physical ratio and the extent of underestimation, indicating that non-visual cues during walking affected distance estimates. This relationship was mainly evident for methods building on actual or imagined walking movements and verbal estimates.

In general, strategies for spatial navigation could employ one of two spatial reference frames: egocentric or allocentric. Notwithstanding intuitive explanations, it remains unclear however under what circumstances one strategy is chosen over another, and how neural representations should be related to the chosen strategy. Here, we first use a deep reinforcement learning model to investigate whether a particular type of navigation strategy arises spontaneously during spatial learning without imposing a bias onto the model. We then examine the spatial representations that emerge in the network to support navigation. To this end, we study two tasks that are ethologically valid for mammals—guidance, where the agent has to navigate to a goal location fixed in allocentric space, and aiming, where the agent navigates to a visible cue. We find that when both navigation strategies are available to the agent, the solutions it develops for guidance and aiming are heavily biased towards the allocentric or the egocentric strategy, respectively, as one might expect. Nevertheless, the agent can learn both tasks using either type of strategy. Furthermore, we find that place-cell-like allocentric representations emerge preferentially in guidance when using an allocentric strategy, whereas egocentric vector representations emerge when using an egocentric strategy in aiming. We thus find that alongside the type of navigational strategy, the nature of the task plays a pivotal role in the type of spatial representations that emerge.

Members of a society can be characterized by a large number of features, such as gender, age, ethnicity, religion, social status, and shared activities. One of the main tie-forming factors between individuals in human societies is homophily, the tendency of being attracted to similar others. Homophily has been studied mainly in the context of link formation and social dynamics. However, less is known about the role of the multidimensional homophily in forming egocentric communities on Information and Communications Technology (ICT) services. To close this gap, we analyze three ICT datasets, namely, two online social networks and one network deduced from mobile phone calls, in all of which data about individual features are available. We identify communities within egocentric networks and surprisingly find that the larger the community, the more overlap is found between features of its members and the ego. We interpret this finding in terms of the effort needed to manage the communities; the larger diversity requires more effort such that maintaining a large diverse group may exceed the capacity of the members. As the ego reaches out to their alters on an ICT service, we observe that the first alter in each community tends to have a higher feature overlap with the ego than the rest. Moreover, the feature overlap of the ego with all their alters displays a non-monotonic behavior as a function of the ego’s degree. We propose a simple mechanism of how people add links in their egocentric networks of alters that reproduces the empirical observations and shows the reason behind non-monotonic tendency of the egocentric feature overlap as a function of the ego’s degree.

Perceiving that a partner is highly committed tends to benefit close relationships. However, there may be relational drawbacks to perceiving high commitment. In particular, given that high commitment may signal that a partner is unlikely to leave the relationship, perceiving that a partner is highly committed might lead people low in agreeableness to feel comfortable behaving more selfishly toward that partner. One correlational study consisting of a highly diverse sample of individuals ( n = 307), one observational study of newlywed couples ( n = 202), and one experiment with undergraduate couples ( n = 252) examined whether the implications of perceived partner commitment for selfish behaviors depend on agreeableness. Results demonstrated that perceiving high commitment resulted in more selfish behavior among disagreeable participants (Studies 1–3), but less selfish behavior among agreeable participants (Studies 1 and 3). Together, these results suggest that signaling commitment to disagreeable partners may backfire in romantic relationships.

Nietzsche’s idea of ‘will to power’ is one of the most influential concepts of history of philosophy that emerges out as a result of his criticism of certain knowledge and tradition morality. The rejection of certain knowledge and traditional morality lead Nietzsche to regard human interest and ‘supremacy’ as most prior. Nietzsche conceives ‘will to power’ as act of ‘free spirit’. He believes that ‘will to power’ being act of ‘free spirit’ is an inner potential by virtue of which men overcome their false beliefs which are barriers in human projection and authenticity of self. Santayana argues that ‘will to power’ is a mistaken concept. He believes that ‘life’ is not necessarily assertion of power to get supremacy over others. He raises an objection that the idea of ‘will to power’ ultimately leads to admiration of ‘egotism’ that takes superiority of human for granted and creates disharmony between human and reality. Santayana links Nietzsche’s thought to German philosophical tradition that pursues ‘free spirit’ and authenticity of self but embraces egotism. For Santayana, one can pursue authenticity of self through his wisdom and creativeness like Greek who had been supporter of ‘free spirit’ but always had harmony with reality. This paper aims to explore Santayana’s question that inquires how authenticity of self can be achieved without egotistic implication. I will revisit the notion of authenticity of self by giving an analysis of Nietzsche’s theory of ‘will to power’ and Santayana’s critique of this theory.