Smart, self-confident, bright… At the first meeting, they cause admiration. However, the charm does not last long. The truth about narcissists is that they are very easy to fall in love with, but extremely hard to bear once you know them.
There are probably daffodils among your acquaintances. And you know for sure that their charm and self-confidence often turns into arrogance; mind – self-satisfaction; charm – fawning.
They can talk endlessly about themselves, but when they ask about you… However, they never ask. And difficulties in communication (with friends, colleagues or spouses) are usually explained to themselves by envy or misunderstanding on the part of those who turn away from them. They cannot change their behavior, because they sincerely do not understand what is wrong with them.
That was the idea of narcissistic people until recently. And here’s the news: Psychologists have found that narcissists know they’re obnoxious. Their opinion of themselves is indeed extremely high, but over time they realize that their friends – or former friends – consider them complacent and selfish people. However, understanding this, alas, does not become an incentive to change something.1.
Narcissists have admitted that old acquaintances tend to judge them as obnoxious egocentrics.
In the course of the study, psychologists studied three aspects of narcissism: self-perception, perception of others, and metaperception – how narcissists think they are perceived by other people.
“We started with an experiment in which we tried to understand whether the first impression of meeting with narcissists coincides with what friends and long-term acquaintances think about them,” says psychologist, study leader Erika Carlson (Erika Carlson). “To participate in the experiment, we assembled a group of 201 students who did not know each other.”
Each of the participants filled out a questionnaire, noting their strengths and weaknesses, and answered 40 questions on a test called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. In particular, they required a “yes” or “no” answer to such paired judgments as “I am a born leader” and “Leadership is a quality that takes a long time to develop” or “Sometimes I am good at telling stories” and “Everyone loves to listen my stories.”
Then, breaking into pairs, the participants communicated with each other for several minutes, after which they again filled out the questionnaires, noting what they think about their interlocutor and what they think the interlocutor thought about them. At the same time, psychologists contacted friends and acquaintances of the students and asked them about the personal characteristics of their old friends.
It turned out that those participants in the study who took first place in the rating of narcissistic traits (that is, they rated themselves as especially smart, attractive and sociable) believed that new acquaintances had the same impression of them. And they were mostly right.
Moreover, surprisingly, they were aware that people who knew them well did not share their high opinion of themselves. They admitted that old acquaintances do indeed tend to judge them as unpleasantly egocentric. But still, they were sure that their close friends consider them funny, attractive, honest and smart, while in fact, if their friends once considered them as such, they had long since ceased.
This limited awareness of their own personality traits does not bode well for narcissists.
Psychology students in the second group (who had never met before) filled out questionnaires several times during the semester that determined their tendency to narcissism, their self-perception, metaperception, and ideas about the impression of other members of the group about them. Those who ranked high on the narcissism rankings made a dazzling first impression on their classmates at the beginning of the semester and knew it. But by the end of the semester, they were considered less pleasant, more presumptuous, prone to boasting or exaggerating their abilities. Narcissists understood that the attitude towards them had changed, but they themselves still valued themselves very highly.
“The metaperception of narcissists is closer to social reality than their self-perception,” says Erika Carlson. “Non-narcissistic study participants correctly identified that people with a narcissistic temperament believe they “deserve special privileges or special treatment,” know this, and yet continue to believe that they deserve it.
This limited awareness of their own personality traits does not bode well for narcissists, despite the fact that it indicates a greater capacity for introspection than hitherto thought.2. The psychologist recalls the statement of the famous American architect Frank Lloyd Wright: “In the beginning of my life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest insolence and see no reason to change my position.
Such confident narcissism can be forgiven for Wright, whose buildings have long outlived him, along with all his shortcomings. Most of us – whether we are narcissists or not – will achieve such recognition? Therefore, we should take more care of relationships with people, because they can be the best monument that we leave behind.
1 For more information, see the website of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (USA) – ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.
2 The Harvard Business Review January-February, 2000.