Young adults are more likely to show signs of narcissism, while older adults tend to have lower levels of narcissism, according to a comprehensive new study of more than 250,000 participants. The survey results are Journal of Personality and Social Psychologyalso show that men, on average, tend to display slightly more narcissistic traits than women.
Narcissism is a personality trait characterized by excessive self-esteem, a strong need for attention and admiration, a lack of empathy for others, and a tendency to exploit or manipulate others for personal gain. Masu. People with narcissistic traits often ignore or downplay the feelings and needs of others while believing that they are special and entitled to special treatment.
Researchers wanted to explore age and gender differences in narcissism. The perception that young people are more self-involved and narcissistic than older people has been a long held belief. This study aimed to empirically investigate whether this perception is true and to examine the role of gender in these differences.
‘Narcissism (and narcissists) has always fascinated me,’ said study author Rebecca Weidman, Postdoctoral Fellow at Michigan State University. “This is a personality trait that clearly has a negative impact in terms of things like long-term relationships, but it also has a positive side in terms of things like leadership and entrepreneurship.”
“This paper is a collaborative effort of many laboratories and co-authors to explore how age and gender are related to narcissism. Since it varies, we wanted to see if these age and gender effects generalize across different scales.”
Weidman et al. first conducted an initial study to assess the degree of overlap or correlation between various measures of narcissism. Researchers want to understand how closely related these measures are within a single sample, and whether they represent very similar structures or exploit different aspects of narcissism. It was intended to establish whether the
This methodology involved recruiting a sample of 5,736 participants who completed eight different measures of narcissism. These participants were drawn from both university subject groups and Amazon Mechanical Turk. The eight scales are: Narcissistic Personality Inventory, Irritable Narcissism Scale, Dirty Dozen Narcissism, Psychological Entitlement Scale, DSM-IV Narcissistic Personality Disorder Symptoms (DSM-IV NPD), Self A simplified version of the Love Admiration and Rivalry Questionnaire (NARQ-S), the Single-Item Narcissism Scale, and the Pathological Narcissism Inventory.
The researchers found that none of the measures of narcissism exhibited high multicollinearity with each other. This indicates that the measurements are not measuring the exact same configuration. In other words, these measures captured distinct aspects of narcissism and were not overly redundant in the information they provided.
Weidman et al. then conducted a second study to examine whether young people exhibited higher levels of narcissism than older people, and found that these age differences were consistent across different subscales within each narcissism inventory. We also investigated whether
Data for the second study were collected from a consortium of individual difference researchers who provided 42 different datasets, each containing at least one measure of narcissism. The combined dataset included her 270,029 unique individuals from various sources such as online surveys, panel studies, student subject pools and community/clinical samples. Since some data sets included multiple measures of narcissism, the data were restructured to form separate data sets for each measure. This produced eight datasets, one for each measure of narcissism used in the study.
“Bill ChopicAs the second author, he organized this large collaboration,” Weidman explained.
The researchers found that narcissism tends to decline with age, with higher levels of narcissism in younger adults compared to older adults. Men generally scored higher on narcissism than women.
“We found age and gender to be associated with narcissism consistently across all measures. showed low narcissism,” Weidman told PsyPost.
However, the magnitude of these age and gender effects, while consistent, was limited in their ability to explain differences in narcissism. The researchers also noted that the effects of age and gender on narcissism varied across scales, indicating that different aspects of narcissism may be sensitive to different developmental mechanisms.
“It is striking to find such consistency in the effects of age and gender, even though some of the measures of narcissism did not overlap (or correlate) as much as we would have expected. It was interesting,” Weidman said. “This has raised many new questions about how we measure narcissism and what causes age and gender effects.”
This study provides insight into the distribution of narcissism across adulthood and its relationship with age and gender, but the factors driving these differences require further investigation.
“Despite using data from over 250,000 participants and a variety of common measures of narcissism, we cannot draw any conclusions about lifespan development,” Weidman explained. “Because these findings are cross-cutting, it is difficult to say anything about whether these effects are caused by generational or developmental processes.”
the study, “Age and Gender Differences in Narcissism: A Comprehensive Study Across Eight Scales and Over 250,000 Participantsby Rebecca Weidman, William J. Chopic, Robert A. Ackerman, Mark Arlogen, Emily C. Bianchi, Courtney Bretchen, W. Keith Campbell, Tanja M. Garlach, Katharina Geuks, Emily Grijalva, Igor Grossman, Christopher J. Hopwood. , Ruth Huttemann, Sarah Konrad, Albrecht CP Küchner, Marius Reckert, Joshua D. Miller, Lars Penke, Aaron L. Pincus, Karl-Heinz Renner, David Richter, Brent W. Roberts, Chris G. Sibley, Leonard J. Sims, Eunice Wetzel, Aidan GC Wright, Mitya D. Buck.
