Category: Narcissism

The study found links between signatures and the darker parts of narcissism, such as authoritativeness and exploitativeness.

People with bigger signatures are more likely to be narcissists, research finds.

The conclusion comes from a study of the signatures of 500 chief financial officers.

They found that the CFOs with the largest signatures were more likely to bend the truth.

In this case by misreporting the company’s earnings or relaxing internal controls.

Dr Charles Ham, one of the study’s authors, said:

“In an ideal setting, you would be in direct contact with executives and have them take a personality test.

But that’s not usually possible.

A signature comes directly from the executive.

We used two laboratory tests to establish the link between signature size and narcissism.”

Sometimes people think of narcissism as being an advantage, said Dr Ham:

“When people think of narcissism, their first thought is Steve Jobs.

They think of it as a good trait.”

However, only some parts of narcissism are positive, such as the self-confidence.

The researchers only found links with the darker parts of narcissism, such as authoritativeness and exploitativeness.

Dr Ham said:

“We’ve looked for that silver lining, and we haven’t found it.

We didn’t predict at first that signature size would be related only to the dark elements of narcissism.

But that’s what we found.”

The signatures were taken from notarised documents provided to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Professor Nick Seybert, a study co-author, said:

“We controlled for factors such as gender, tenure and corporate history.

We also measured the size of CEO signatures to determine the interplay — and to see if it was really the CFO driving the oversight process.”

Other ways to spot narcissism in a signature include the use of extra lines or exclamation marks.

The study was published in the Journal of Research in Personality (Mailhos et al., 2016).

Just the eyebrows are enough to reveal narcissistic tendencies — no other facial feature is predictive of the trait.

People can identify narcissists just from looking at their faces, psychologists have discovered.

In fact, the eyebrows alone can reveal narcissistic traits in people, research reveals.

Grandiose narcissists have thicker and denser eyebrows and people automatically pick up on this cue.

Across a series of studies, hundreds of participants were asked to look at pictures of people with varying degrees of narcissism.

Grandiose narcissists tend to strongly agree with statements like “If I ruled the world it would be a better place,” and “I like to show off my body.”

What they found was curious: when the eyebrows were deleted from people’s pictures, participants could not spot the narcissists.

Next, participants were shown just people’s eyebrows.

This did the trick, suggesting the eyebrow contains particularly salient information about narcissists.

It also suggests that there is little information about whether someone is a narcissist from their eyes, mouths, cheeks or any other part of their face.

The study’s authors write:

“…people can accurately identify narcissism from facial features, even as little as a single eyebrow.

Moreover, although perceivers considered eyebrow femininity, grooming, and distinctiveness when judging narcissism, only the last of these related to their accuracy.

Grandiose narcissists thus seem to have more distinct eyebrows (e.g., thicker and denser), explaining how participants arrived at their accurate narcissism judgments.”

In a subsequent study, the researchers were able to make people look more or less narcissistic by manipulating their eyebrows.

The authors conclude:

“The ability to identify dark personality traits at zero-acquaintance provides particular value for avoiding exploitation and manipulation.

The increasing incidence of narcissism underscores this value.

Fortunately, people can accurately judge others’ narcissism based on how they act, what they say, what they wear, and what their faces look like.

Here, we isolated the facial features that explain the last of these, finding that narcissism judgments principally depend on targets’ eyebrows.”

→ Read on: Signs Of Narcissism: What You Need To Know

The study was published in the Journal of Personality (Giacomin & Rule, 2018).

How to tell the difference between a narcissist and someone with high self-esteem.

Criticism makes narcissists aggressive, research finds.

But people with high self-esteem are not particularly bothered by criticism.

This is because, at heart, narcissists often have a strange relationship with their self-esteem, so they hate to be criticised.

Any criticism will usually make them aggressive in response [see: narcissistic rage].

Psychologists measured the self-esteem, narcissism and aggressive behaviour of 540 undergraduate students.

They found that the more narcissistic students tended to verbally lash out more when they were criticised.

The study’s authors write:

“Narcissists mainly want to punish or defeat someone who has threatened their highly favorable views of themselves.

People who are preoccupied with validating a grandiose self-image apparently find criticism highly upsetting and lash out against the source of it.”

People who had high self-esteem did not become more aggressive towards those who criticised them.

Narcissists, meanwhile, find the threat to their ego too great.

The seeds of narcissism can be sown at a young age, said Professor Brad J. Bushman, the study’s first author:

“…if kids begin to develop unrealistically optimistic opinions of themselves and those beliefs are constantly rejected by others, their feelings of self-love could make these kids potentially dangerous to those around them.”

If provoking the narcissist sounds dangerous, then another method of identifying the narcissist is simply to ask them.

Professor Bushman, speaking about a previous study, explained:

“People who are willing to admit they are more narcissistic than others probably actually are more narcissistic.

People who are narcissists are almost proud of the fact.

You can ask them directly because they don’t see narcissism as a negative quality — they believe they are superior to other people and are fine with saying that publicly.”

The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Bushman & Baumeister, 1998).

Lack of this emotion helps identifies a certain type of narcissist.

Many narcissist do not feel much envy, research finds.

This is because grandiose narcissists have an inflated sense of superiority.

Dr Zlatan Krizan, the study’s lead author, said:

“They really buy into their own fantasy.

If you think you’re the greatest, it makes sense that you wouldn’t envy others because everybody is beneath you, so there’s nothing to envy.

It’s really the vulnerability that predicts envy and it predicts it very, very strongly.”

The conclusion comes from a survey of over 350 people asked about their feelings of envy, self-esteem, anxiety and depression.

Two types of narcissism emerged from their work:

• Grandiose narcissism: having an overinflated sense of one’s importance.
• Vulnerable narcissism: this is linked to more anxiety and depression.

Dr Krizan said:

“Narcissism is a more multi-faceted construct than we believe.

I think that’s an important point, because this public image of narcissism that most people have of this grandiose, dramatic individual is only one side of the coin.”

The vulnerable side of narcissism was also linked to lower self-esteem

Dr Krizan said:

“These individuals still think they’re special, entitled, and they want to be great, but they just can’t do it.

As a result they’re vulnerable, their self-esteem fluctuates a lot, they tend to be self-conscious and not very proactive, but passive, shy, and introverted.”

Vulnerable narcissists could potentially be more dangerous, Dr Krizan said:

“It’s these vulnerable individuals who are in some sense more worrisome because they are quiet, sort of festering in anger out there in a corner.

And it’s just a matter of time before they get frustrated and lash out and verbally assault somebody, maybe even an innocent party, because of some provocation that they felt.”

Dr Krizan said that narcissism and envy were possible motivations for the Columbine school shootings in 1999:

“If you look at evidence that is often left over, in Columbine for example you had those videos, these shooting escapades seem to be a kind of power grab by these individuals.

The tapes are also narratives, in which they are the person taking control, they’re the one in charge and they will determine how things will go.”

The study was published in the Journal of Personality (Krizan & Johar, 2012).