Narcissists are all around you. They’re selfish, controlling, and have little empathy. But there’s some consolation: These unpleasant personality traits diminish with age, new research shows.
So narcissistic children become less disruptive as they get older, and as they get older, their narcissism decreases. What’s true: Differences between people remain stable. People who are more narcissistic than their peers as children remain so as adults. Swiss researchers have shown.
“These findings have important implications because narcissism can affect people’s lives in many ways, both the lives of narcissists themselves and the lives of their families and friends,” said lead researcher Ulrich Orth of Harvard University. University of Bern.
51 studies were examined.
Orth and colleagues analyzed data from 51 long-term studies, all of which looked at how participants’ levels of narcissism changed over time. In all, the study included nearly 40,000 people, ages 8 to 77, roughly an equal number of men and women. Some of the studies followed participants for decades. Most were conducted in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe, with one in China and one in New Zealand.
Three types of narcissism
Researchers distinguish three types of narcissism: so-called agentic narcissism, which involves feelings of grandiosity or superiority and a strong need for admiration; hostile narcissism, which involves traits such as arrogance, callousness, and lack of empathy; and neurotic narcissism, which involves emotional dysfunction and hypersensitivity. All three forms of narcissism decline from childhood to old age. This is most true of traits such as numbness and emotional dysfunction and slightly less so of feelings of superiority.
However, people’s narcissism relative to their peers doesn’t seem to have changed much over the years. Once you become more narcissistic than average, you’ll stay that way later in life. “This has been true even over very long periods of time, suggesting that narcissism is a stable personality trait,” Orth says.
Social roles
The researcher is now particularly curious about why narcissism declines as people get older. He would like to conduct research on this in the future. “According to one theory, the social roles we adopt as adults—for example, as a partner, parent, or employee—lead to the development of more mature personality traits, including a decline in narcissistic traits,” Orth concludes.
We often find excessive narcissists at the highest levels of the business world. This is not at all good for the company itself. As we wrote previously, companies with a narcissistic CEO were rated much worse by analysts, who consequently predicted lower stock prices. This was especially true in large companies, where there was a high risk that narcissistic leadership would clash with the bureaucracy within the company. Professor Feray Adiguzel Nottingham Business School “Despite some mitigating circumstances, investment analysts generally believe that CEO narcissism is of no value to the company. In fact, they expect it to have a negative impact on strategy and performance. Our research therefore provides further evidence that CEO narcissism harms the company and its shareholders,” he replied.
Wondering if you’re dealing with a narcissist? Simply ask one question: Are you a narcissist? According to research, this seems to work as well as a comprehensive psychological test. “People who are willing to admit that they’re more narcissistic than others are more likely to be narcissistic themselves,” researcher Brad Bushman said at the time. “Narcissistic people are almost proud of it. You can ask them directly because they don’t see narcissism as a negative trait—they think they’re better than others and it’s okay to say that out loud.”
