Debunking the BIGGEST myths about narcissists
There’s so many things that people misunderstand about what it means to be a narcissist. They think that their boss is a narcissist, their ex is a narcissist, their friend is a narcissist, but they’re often wrong about this. At least they’re wrong if we think about it in the technical sense of a narcissist being someone with narcissistic personality disorder. Many people have some narcissistic traits. They might be a bit arrogant or a bit egotistical. But that’s not the same as
Being a narcissist in the technical sense of having narcissistic personality disorder. Few people, only a few percent actually are narcissists. It’s also the case that some people who do have narcissistic personality disorder hide in plain sight where people don’t realize they have it. And that’s because they engage in behaviors that people wouldn’t expect. So, what are the actual traits of a true narcissist in the sense of narcissistic personality disorder? Well, they tend to be grandiose, believe
They’re superior to other people, and that their plans and projects are better than other people’s. They also tend to be egotistical and have low empathy for other people. Additionally, they tend to be exploitative and manipulative. Very importantly, they also tend to be very focused on building up their ego through getting admiration and attention. Some people wonder since all of these aspects of narcissism are just traits where there’s natural variation, what’s the point of having a category like NPD?
Can’t we just say, oh, this person has some narcissistic traits? And I think it’s useful to have a category because if you’re extreme enough on these traits, it creates a lot of similarity in behavior. So, people who are just a bit narcissistic don’t tend to behave very much like each other. But people who are extreme on all of these different traits who fall into the narcissistic personality disorder bucket tend to have a lot in common. And so it
Can be useful to group them together so that we can talk about them as a group. We can talk about what can be done to help them. We can talk about what can be done to protect people from them. Sometimes the traits of highly narcissistic people are really different than what you’d expect. A friend of mine was dating someone extremely narcissistic and she said to me, “You know, I never felt that he could be narcissistic because he would give away
Money to charity and he would do it anonymously. That’s not at all a narcissistic thing to do.” So, I thought about that for a moment and then I said, “Well, how did you know that?” And it turned out he was constantly bragging about his anonymous donations. People might assume that a narcissist wouldn’t give you a lot of compliments because isn’t giving compliments a nice thing to do? Isn’t that the opposite of narcissism? Well, narcissists like giving compliments. And the reason is
Because one, they really want to be liked and admired. That builds up their ego and makes them feel really good. And giving someone compliments is a great way to get them to like you. Second, when you give someone a compliment, it tends to make them feel obliged to give you a compliment back. And narcissists tend to love getting compliments because it builds up their ego. So, it’s actually a way for them to get compliments by giving you compliments.
So, we have to be very careful when we think about the behavior of narcissists. It matters not just what they’re doing, but why they’re doing it. I think it’s important to consider the idea that narcissists are experts of a sort. They’re an expert at building up their ego, getting attention and admiration. And when you think about that, you realize a lot of things about them. For example, there was a really fascinating study done where they had people
Introduce themselves to a room and they measured the narcissism level of the people introducing themselves. And then they asked people, “How much did you like that person who introduced themselves?” And the remarkable thing is that not only did people like narcissists more hearing them introduce themselves, they even liked them more if they blanked out the audio so you couldn’t hear the words they said, and they even like them more if they use just a still frame photograph so you
Couldn’t even see them move. So the idea is that narcissists tend to be better at presenting themselves in a positive way through their clothing, through their facial expressions, through the way they talk, through the words they say. They tend to be experts in being liked and being admired. That’s one of the driving forces in their lives, being liked and admired. However, interestingly enough, people tend to like narcissists less over time as you get to know them. And
That makes sense because they tend, not always, but they tend to have traits that make them unlikable in the long term, like being self-interested and being manipulative. Another way that narcissists may behave differently than people expect, is that they can really build up the people around them. For instance, they might tell you, “Oh, you’ve got to meet my friend Jim. is so amazing. Or they might tell you how amazing you are. Why do they do this?
Well, it’s not just to be liked. Part of the reason they do this is they like to think of themselves as special and amazing. And if they’re around amazing people, that gives them a feeling that they’re amazing, too. It helps build up their ego. So, they might talk up the people around them as part of shared grandiosity, essentially pulling you and the other people around them into their grandiose fantasies. A really common misconception about narcissists is
People think that narcissists are super confident. And people often think that because narcissists project confidence. They act as though they’re better than other people or that they’re really amazing. The thing about this is the narcissist is typically trying to keep their ego built up. They feel really good when they build their ego up, but their ego can completely collapse as well. They can suddenly go into spirals of self-loathing and self-hate. So, I think it’s more accurate to say that
Narcissists tend to be propping up their ego all the time and they often project confidence, but their ego tends to be unstable. It’s not that they’re super confident. It’s that they feel really good when they build up their ego and so they work really hard to do that. And they feel really horrible when their ego collapses. So they have more of an unstable ego than they do true genuine confidence. If someone’s truly and genuinely confident, they don’t tend to
Brag a lot. They don’t tend to work really, really hard to get people to like and admire them. Whereas when people have an unstable ego, they work really hard to get people to like them, to admire them, to build their ego up, to protect it from collapse. And that’s more what narcissists are like. Is it true that narcissists don’t have empathy? Well, this is a bit complicated. On average, narcissists do tend to have lower empathy than other
People, and there are narcissists that have effectively no empathy. But I would argue that most narcissists have at least some empathy, but the empathy tends to be conditional. They tend to be empathetic when it’s low cost and it’s not a direct competition between their needs and someone else’s. But when their needs and someone else’s are pitted directly against each other, their empathy tends to dissipate really quickly. Maybe if they see you trip and fall in the street, they might help you
Up. They might ask if you’re okay. They might check in on you later. That may make them feel good about themselves. It may make them feel magnanimous. But if you want something and they want the opposite, their empathy may completely disappear as they focus entirely on their needs at the moment rather than yours. Unfortunately, there’s not nearly enough research on treating narcissism or at least making narcissists be more pro-social and less likely to harm people. Um, there are very few studies
And when there are such studies, they tend to involve very few narcissists or be of low quality. There are some therapists that can claim they can cure narcissism, but I’d really like to see more evidence in the form of high-quality studies. Narcissism tends to be egoonic, which means that narcissists tend to view their traits as positive or at least not negative. And so, they often don’t want treatment. They don’t want to be different. And so what some therapists will do is they’ll
Talk to people with narcissistic personality disorder about ways that their behavior undermines their own goals. So they actually have a selfish reason to engage in these more pro-social behaviors. The reality is is that many of the harmful behaviors narcissists engage in are not even good for the narcissist in the long term. They may give them short-term gains in terms of feeling good or getting attention, but often in the long term the narcissist isn’t actually made happy
By this and they often have very unstable relationships and they may end up with a lot of people that hate them. The reality is that most people that people call narcissists are not narcissists in the technical sense. They tend to just be people that have somewhat elevated narcissistic traits or sometimes they’re just being miscatategorized altogether. They may not even be narcissistic at all. Only a few% of people have narcissistic personality disorder. That’s a small enough number that we know that many
People who are claimed to be narcissists aren’t really. At the same time, that’s a large enough number that the vast majority of people know at least one person with narcissistic personality disorder, whether they realize it or not. If you want to go much deeper into this topic, check out my interview with a nameless narcissist on the Clear Thinking podcast. We talk about what it’s like to be a narcissist and many other attributes of narcissism that are
Commonly misunderstood.