We can probably all recognise those attention-seeking people
in our lives – and increasingly it seems in politics and pop culture – who have
a hugely inflated sense of their own importance and abilities, combined with a
relative disregard for other people’s. Psychologists call them narcissists,
after the character Narcissus from Greek mythology, who fell in love with his
own reflection.
When you meet someone like this, their bravado can be
alluring at first, but soon the sheen wears off as their look-at-me antics and
disdain for others becomes increasingly apparent. You’ve probably come to find
the narcissist in your office or family (or on your TV screen) arrogant and
annoying. If so, that’s understandable, but actually some of the latest
research findings in this area suggest that the most appropriate response to
narcissists is probably pity, and maybe even kindness.
Consider first the consistent discovery that beneath their
hubris and egomania, many narcissists actually suffer from chronic low
self-esteem. This has been demonstrated in many different ways, including using
a version of the “implicit association test”, which in this context measures
how readily people associate words referring to the self with pleasant or
unpleasant words. One telling study found that highly narcissistic people said
they had high self-esteem, yet when tested in the lab, they were very quick to
associate self-related words like “me”, “mine” or “myself” with unpleasant
words like “pain”, “agony” and “death”.
Another imaginative method that’s uncovered the inner
fragility of the narcissist is the so-called bogus pipeline technique. Some of
the participants are wired up to physiological recording equipment that they’re
told will reveal whether they are lying, while others in a comparison control
condition are connected to the equipment but they’re told it has been turned
off. A study involving 71 women found that the narcissists among the
participants reported having much lower self-esteem when they felt their lies
would be unmasked, compared with those narcissists in the control condition.
Indeed, they even reported lower self-worth than women who weren’t narcissists.
Increasingly, this picture of the narcissist as
over-compensating for their private self-doubt is being supported by findings
from brain imaging research. For example, one study involved male teenagers
having their brains scanned while they played a collaborative computer game
called cyber-ball. When their team-mates ignored them, the more narcissistic
participants didn’t say it bothered them any more than the others, and yet
their brains showed unusually high activity levels in regions that have
previously been associated with the experience of social and emotional pain.
More recently neuroscientists at the University of Kentucky
used a different kind of scanning technology to investigate the density of
connective tracts in different parts of the brains of their participants. The
research published earlier this year showed that the higher participants scored
on a questionnaire measure of narcissism, the less connective tissue they had
between the medial prefrontal cortex – a brain region associated with thinking
about the self – and the ventral striatum, which is a region tied to the
experience of reward and pleasure. The researchers said this “internal deficit
in self-reward connectivity” might make it difficult for narcissists to think
positively about themselves and that it could explain why they are always
trying so hard to get attention and shore up their self-confidence.
But the fact that narcissists are inwardly fragile is not
the only reason to feel sorry for them. Another line of research suggests that
behaving the way they do is going to make life stressful for them. A Swiss
study assessed hundreds of people several times over several six-month periods,
including measuring their narcissism and their experience of stressful events.
The results showed that higher scorers in narcissism tended to go on to
experience more stress in life, such as illness, accidents and relationship
breakups. Based on this, the researchers at the University of Bern concluded
that “narcissism is maladaptive for the individual, because narcissistic
individuals generate adverse events in their lives.”
This is particularly bad news, considering that they may be
more sensitive than most to the adverse effects of stress. For example, a team
led by Joey Cheng at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign asked 77
female undergrad students to keep a diary of their negative emotions and took
samples of their saliva to look for signs of a biological reaction to stress
(specifically, cortisol and the protein alpha-amylase). They found that those
who scored high in narcissism showed increased physiological signs of stress
the more negative emotions that they experienced, whereas non-narcissists did
not – findings that suggest that narcissists are surprisingly thin-skinned and
sensitive.
At the same time as recognising their fragility, it’s worth
remembering that narcissistic people do have some redeeming qualities; in some
contexts they can be unusually persistent in the face of set-backs, no doubt to
prove their worth to themselves and others, and there’s evidence that creative
teams can benefit from having a narcissist or two to help inspire a little
healthy internal competition. There’s even some evidence that with a little
encouragement – asking them to take other people’s perspective – narcissists
can be nudged into showing greater empathy.
Taking all these findings together there’s good reason to
try, if you can, to be a little more patient – more loving even – with the
narcissists in your life. More likely than not they are overcompensating for
their deep-rooted self-doubts, and while they might seem smug and to be
stealing all the lime-light, the chances are that longer-term they will not
fare well, especially if events turn against them.
Written by Dr Christian Jarrett
Dr Christian Jarrett edits the British Psychological
Society's Research Digest blog. His latest book is Great Myths of the Brain.
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