Self-focus blinds the narcissist to others, but there’s a way to break through.
Narcissistic individuals are highly self-focused, so they have a problem with empathy.
This makes them hard to deal with because they are not naturally that concerned about your point of view — or anyone else’s.
However, forcing a narcissist to put themselves in someone else’s shoes can help them empathise.
The conclusion comes from a new study looking at how people can be encouraged to make charitable donations.
The researchers found that narcissists were not affected by appeals that focused on the charity recipient — the starving man, diseased woman or lost child.
The narcissist can’t see how this is relevant to them.
However, they were moved to donate by appeals that asked them to imagine themselves being starving, diseased or lost.
The key, then, is making the narcissist really feel that the calamity is happening to them.
When the narcissist projects themselves into the distressed person, they are much more motivated to act.
Dr Arun Lakshmanan, study co-author, said:
“It’s the difference between showing the need and asking the donor to ‘stand in someone else’s shoes.
Charitable giving is about having empathy — recognizing and responding to the needs and emotions of other people.
Narcissists have difficulty with that, so asking them to imagine themselves as the person in need can help elicit genuine concern and, thus, donations.”
Narcissists could not be reached when they could not imagine themselves in the recipient’s circumstances.
For example, when the disease only affects the opposite gender or animals.
Dr Lakshmanan said:
“Particularly for causes to which donors have little personal connection — an unfamiliar disease, a need halfway around the globe — we recommend using vivid pictures, first-person stories and ‘imagine-self’ language to draw in high-narcissism donors.”
The study was published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (Kang & Lakshmanan, 2018).
