How to spot a narcissist... with a simple question.

A seemingly harmless question that no narcissist manages to answer successfully.

It is possible that, at some point in your life, you have wondered if that friend, family member, acquaintance or co-worker is a narcissist. 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 who is asked the question.

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 his or her personality. The second option is to learn how to administer the 40-item diagnostic tool of the Narcissistic Personality Inventoryand convincing that person to take the test.

One study hits the nail on the head

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

Sara Konrath and her team at Indiana University, U.S.A, have succeeded in developing a single-question diagnostic scale for narcissism.. This is unusual, since scales are usually composed of large numbers of items. The scale developed by these academics is the so-called Single-Item-Narcissism Scale (SINS).

Reasonable skepticism

When the news that Konrath and his collaborators had come up with a single-item scale hit the press, most academic and scientific circles were highly skeptical that the question in question asked. "Are you a narcissist?" could discriminate between those subjects with a clinically relevant propensity toward narcissism, and those who did not. Above all, this seemed unlikely considering that narcissism is a complex and multidimensional personality profile.. Personally, my reaction upon reading the headline in Psychology Today was to think: "Yet another yellow article".

This widespread skepticism toward the Indiana University study served to spur several experiments that sought to disprove or verify the results. So 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 the subject.

The new study yielded very similar data and conclusions.

To van der Linden's own surprise, his study (recently published in the Journal of Personality and Individual Differences) replicated the findings of the original study. The conclusions of the study were as follows:

1. The single-question scale correlated positively with the much more complexly structured 40-items NPI. 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 appears to confound some cases of narcissism with normality or healthy self-esteem, the single-question scale did not report any narcissism, the single-question scale reported no correlation with high self-esteem.. In other words, the measure does not seem to fail, in the sense that it does not pick up people who might have some subclinical traits associated with narcissism, i.e., mild cases. This is good news since a simple question can reasonably well discriminate people with pronounced and unambiguous narcissism.

What is the typical response of a narcissistic person?

At this point when we know how the research was done and its proven reliability, I bet you're eager to find out, I bet you are eager to know what exactly is the expected response of someone exhibiting narcissistic traits?.

As we've seen, the question is much simpler than you might expect: "Are you a narcissist?". This is the question you should be asking. It may seem counter-intuitive, because it certainly isn't 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 case of narcissism is quite special.

Narcissists perceive narcissism as something... positive.

In reality, narcissists do not consider narcissism as something bad or reprehensible. In fact, they tend to be quite proud of it. A good deal of research has found that narcissists often readily admit that they are behaving in a narcissistic mannerThey 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 quintessential narcissistic response

As you can deduce from the above, narcissistic people tend to respond "yes" most of the time.yes" 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 may lie, for whatever reason. Moreover, a simple answer tells us neither the degree of narcissism nor the "type". In other words, an affirmative answer may be a clear statistical indication that we are dealing with a case of narcissism, but it does not give us more information about it.

You can't have it all: a simple question almost never provides a true, complete and nuanced answer.

Conclusions

In short, these studies have allowed us to determine that the SINS scale question does not provide us with detailed data on the personality profile of the respondent, but it does measure reasonably well the presence or absence of narcissism..

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?".