People in society show anger in various ways, for seemingly unrelated reasons. Three major sources of unnecessary anger in society include when individuals don't get what they want, have differing opinions, and when they feel their time is being wasted. An article by Edward O'Brien, Brad Bushman, and Phyllis Anastasio explores the role of a sense of entitlement on the perception of the passage of time. The idea is quite simple. At all times, everyone feels some sort of entitlement. While standing in the checkout line at a retailer, you may feel especially empowered to receive better service. So a 10 minute wait for a slow cashier can feel like an hour. On the other hand, if you were sitting in a White House waiting room before you had a chance to meet the President, you might consider yourself lucky to be there. In this case, a 10 minute wait might not seem that long. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay In one of the studies, the authors simply looked at the correlation between people's sense of entitlement and their perception of time. The authors gave people a series of questionnaires, including one that measured feelings of entitlement. Then they asked the students to do a boring task, copying an array of letters. Or a less tedious task, using the same array of letters to find people's names. The students did this task for exactly 10 minutes, and were then asked how long it took. To make judging time more difficult, there were no clocks in the room and students were asked to remove their watches before beginning the study. When people did a relatively enjoyable task, there was no relationship between the amount of time they felt they spent doing the task and their overall sense of entitlement. In contrast, when students did the boring task, the more empowered people generally felt, the more time they felt they spent on the task. What does all this mean? Time is one of the most precious resources we have. The greater your sense of entitlement, the more you will want to avoid wasting that resource. As a result, the more entitled you feel, the more anger you feel when your time is wasted. While no one likes this frustration, this mechanism could be useful to have. If we didn't feel frustrated when our time was wasted, we might persist in doing things that aren't worth our effort.