Narcissistic Students Get Better Grades from Narcissistic Professors | Hacker News Reader

Narcissistic Students Get Better Grades from Narcissistic Professors

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44 pointsjimsojim18 comments

> the idea that narcissism has increased among college students over the last 25 years is worrisome from an organizational perspective. Millennials are the next generation of leaders.

When i was in school, everyone was raving at me, barking madly that all of us students had to be the leaders of tomorrow. Maybe it's because everyone is obsessed with who gets to be a leader that people presume that they should be leaders. Millenials are also the next generation of followers, or workers, or you know, discarding hierarchical considerations: millenials are the next generation of humans. Which is tautological.

Looking at the current field of candidates for leader of the most powerful (by a few metrics, but not all) government of the world, i think the bar has been set very low for millenials and the people who write articles like this merely have some heavily tinted rose-colored glasses on about their "generation of leaders".

That said, i don't think it's surprising that people in positions of power in a hierarchical structure, like a university setting, are biased towards people like them and hence create a selection effect within that power structure. Isn't that the basic observation that validates affirmative action? Nepotism, cronyism are commonly understood terms, but clearly they are specific cases of a general phenomenon. You cannot separate the exercise of power from its social implications. People being social creatures, they will exercise their power in ways that have social consequences. That's why people are put in positions of power in the first place.

This is an interesting point, and one I've seen from the other side as well: When leaving secondary (high) school, for university, a common piece of advice is: "You may have been one of the smartest people here, but be careful, you probably won't be where you're going, so you have to manage your expectations." But if everyone is being told this, then those who could become some of the "smartest people at university", are being told it too, and some of these people could be unnecessarily lowering their expectations. I've always thought this was a great shame.

Preoccupation with status hardly helps cultivate the virtue that status was supposed to indicate.

> manage your expectations

is not the same as "reduce your achievements"

The 'leadership culture' was something I noticed when I moved to the US from London. Where I'm from kids are mostly told they need to worry about getting a job, here in the US the grooming to hold a leadership/supervisory position is much more explicit and intense. Perhaps due to the hereditary aristocracy in the UK and many other european countries, it's implicit that social leaders will most likely be those born into aristocratic or well-off families, as has been the case through most of history, whereas in the US anyone can play (theoretically at least). I've never quite got used to it, though I don't necessarily think it's bad.

Seems to me that "narcissism fit" definitely applies to a lot of schools and companies. (Though to be fair, it's particular subgroups inside those organizations that this really applies to.)

coughivyleaguecough

Yeah, definitely to subsets, but certainly not to a majority is my guess. There are always people who meet the stereotype of a school, and always those who don't. For every rich son-of-an-alum at Princeton there's someone on heavy financial aid, more or less.

coughivyleaguecough

I'm one. This is part of how I know.

I can't find a reference but I read that people with less empathy are more successful in hierarchical organizations.

>And yet despite narcissists’ flaws, there’s lots of evidence that people are drawn to them, not least because they tend to be very charismatic.

Is it possible to be both charismatic and not-narcissistic at all? I can't think of a single example, to be honest, of a leader displaying charisma and not being somewhat narcissistic.

Yes. Well, depending on what you mean by narcissistic. We can't exactly get our proposed examples to take an inventory test to measure their narcissism as it is defined in this article.

Emma Goldman comes to mind, for me.

For someone to be charismatic, they may either inspire devotion by "followers" or claim they are receiving divine inspiration. If someone finds themselves with a bunch of people who are devoted to them, this is a form of implicit trust. i.e. the thing that inspired originally may have been trustworthy, but eventually the trust becomes implicit in that the "followers" will follow more regardless of inspiration. I've written about this effect on cloud services before.

Divine inspiration also deals with trust channels. If someone claims to be divinely inspired (which I personally believe is possible - see Buddhism Insight for example) then whoever they relate this information to will then have to implicitly trust the information coming to them is actually represented as the divine intended it (assuming they don't have direct access themselves). Obviously, that's caused a lot of problems in the past for us, so it's non-tenable. Teachers of the way[1] avoid dictating teachings received from insight because of this. It's also probably why sutras tend to be very terse, now I think about it.

The answer to your question is that it might be possible, but it's unlikely to be possible for long as the trust channels turn implicit, which then has an impact on the individual's relationship with their followers. When someone trusts you implicitly, there is no feedback on whether their trust is warranted or not, or put another way, there's no way for you to to trust if the trust you are receiving is real. And that is just as bad as you not being trustworthy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Way

Maybe "narcissism" will be over and done with, by the time we come up with a popular stereotype for the next generation.

There is nothing new under the sun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_generation The baby boomers ... were dubbed the "Me" generation by writer Tom Wolfe during the 1970s; Christopher Lasch was another writer who commented on the rise of a culture of narcissism among the younger generation.

Is it ironic that it is often the "Me generation" that derides millennials as being self-absorbed? Not that gen Xers don't as well.

"[young]... lives are regulated more by moral feeling than by reasoning -- all their mistakes are in the direction of doing things excessively and vehemently. They overdo everything -- they love too much, hate too much, and the same with everything else." - Aristotle

Griping about those wacky young folks goes way back.

Unlikely, given that the idea has been around since the days of Ancient Greece. Plato (speaking through the character of Socrates) grumbled about excessive pandering to youth in The Republic.

A true fairytale ending.

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