How to Detect a Narcissist… with a Simple Question

It is possible that, at some point in your life, you have wondered if that friend, family member, acquaintance or co-worker is a narcissistic It is understandable: many behaviors can be associated with this personality category, although it is difficult to know to what extent these constitute a real problem. In a previous article I already talked about Narcissistic Personality Disorder and its characteristic features.

But today’s text goes further by starting with a question that, in the opinion of experts, manages to unmask any narcissistic person to whom the question is asked.

Narcissistic personality: easy or difficult to detect?

If you want to identify a person with narcissistic traits you have three options. The first is to accompany this person to a mental health professional who can make a diagnosis about their personality. The second option is to learn to manage the 40-item diagnostic tool of the Narcissistic Personality Inventoryand convince that person to answer the test.

A study finds the key

Obviously these two mentioned options are a bit complicated to carry out for most mortals. Fortunately, there is a third option, which also has the support of several scientific studies fresh out of the oven.

Sara Konrath and her team at Indiana University, in the United States, have managed to develop a single-question narcissism diagnostic scale This is not common, since scales are usually made up of large numbers of items. The scale that these academics have developed is called Single-Item-Narcissism Scale (SINS).

Reasonable skepticism

When the news that Konrath and his collaborators had achieved a single-item scale hit the press, most academic and scientific circles were very skeptical that the question at hand “Are you a narcissist?” could discriminate between those subjects with a clinically relevant propensity towards narcissism, and those who do not. Above all, This seemed unlikely considering that narcissism is a complex and multidimensional personality profile Personally, my reaction to reading the headline in Psychology Today was to think, “Just another yellow article.”

This general skepticism towards the Indiana University study served to promote several experiments that sought to disprove or verify the results. Thus, Sander van der Linden decided to carry out another similar study, this time with a sample of 2,000 people, to try to shed some light on this issue.

The new study yielded very similar data and conclusions

To van der Linden’s own surprise, his study (recently published in ) replicated the findings of the original study Its conclusions were the following:

1 The single-question scale correlated positively with the 40-item NPI, which has a much more complex structure. In summary, both scales were shown to correctly measure narcissism.

2 An important issue to note is that, while the scale based on the NPI model seems to confuse some cases of narcissism with normality or healthy self-esteem, the single-question scale did not report any correlation with high self-esteem In other words, the measure does not seem to fail, in the sense that it does not capture people who could have some subclinical traits associated with narcissism, that is, mild cases. This is good news since with a simple question you can discriminate reasonably well against people with pronounced and unequivocal narcissism.

What is the typical response of a narcissistic person?

At this point where we know how the investigations were carried out and their demonstrated reliability, I bet you want to know what exactly the response is expected from someone who presents narcissistic traits

As we have seen, the question is much simpler than one might expect: “Are you a narcissist?”. This is the question you should ask. It may seem counter-intuitive, because it’s certainly not very often that we ask someone directly about their personality traits (as if that someone couldn’t lie or have an unrealistic view of themselves!), but the truth is that the The case of narcissism is quite special.

Narcissists perceive narcissism as something… positive

In reality, narcissists do not consider narcissism to be something bad or reprehensible. In fact, they tend to be quite proud of it. A good number of investigations have detected that Narcissists often readily admit that they behave in a narcissistic manner, and they do not feel any discomfort describing themselves as conceited, arrogant, etc. They even seem to strive to be more narcissistic!

It also seems that narcissists are aware that others perceive them less positively compared to how they see themselves, but this simply does not matter to them.

The narcissistic response par excellence

As you can deduce from all the above, Narcissistic people mostly tend to answer “Yeah” To the question In this way, they claim to be narcissistic people and inflate their ego at the same time.

Discussion

Obviously, the answers do not always match the personality of the respondent. Participants can lie, for any reason. Furthermore, a simple answer does not tell us either the degree of narcissism or the “type.” That is, an affirmative answer can be a clear statistical indication that we are dealing with a case of narcissism, but it doesn’t give us more information about it

You can’t have everything: with a simple question you almost never get a true, complete and nuanced answer.

Conclusions

In short, these studies have allowed us to determine that the SINS scale question does not offer us detailed data about the personality profile of the respondent, but It does measure the presence or absence of narcissism reasonably well

From now on, when you want to know if someone in your environment is or is not a narcissist, you can try asking the question: “Are you a narcissist?”