Are Narcissists More Likely to Experience Impostor Syndrome?
blogs.scientificamerican.com
blogs.scientificamerican.com
It’s more likely narcissism and self doubt are just independent variables.
I'm not psychologically trained, so take this with a grain of salt, but I've met exactly one person that I think was a narcissist. He was a jerk, but mostly because he was utterly baffled by any concept that didn't involve him in the center. It was an attribute completely separate from his confidence. I feel like it is really hard to explain if you haven't met someone like that - I was routinely gobsmacked by his reactions - every human interaction I'd had to date had not prepared me for it.
Meanwhile, I have tons of anxiety and often cover it up with false confidence, and our reactions to similar events were dramatically different.
The part that made me realized I was dealing with mentally diseased people is that they truly believe the crap they throw at you. Their lies become an undeniable truth as soon as they spell it out loud.
I do the same thing though. I really wish I understood myself half as well as I think I understand other people.
In the workplace it's especial dangerous; you can force someone to question why they don't like a job or feel isolated or bullied by convincing them their perception is really the problem.
It doesn't take much effort to convince someone who is upset by circumstance that they have a problem. "You're too sensitive" "you're depressed" "that person has an anxiety problem" when really the environment at the job might really be the problem or some basic coaching might be the solution.
I worked somewhere in which people openly admitted the company culture drove them to therapy yet were so "grateful" for an "open and inclusive" environment. The cognitive dissonance there was very disturbing.
This occurs in families as well. I grew up in an abusive household and, well damn, your parents will do their best to convince you that you are the crazy one and need help.
If the problems disappear slowly, it could have been the environment, but it also could be your personal growth. But if they disappear overnight...
Case in point, there's a range of responses to trauma. Having bad memories or occasional nightmares as a response to trauma is normal. PTSD is not normal. Less than half of people involved in severe traumas will have problems coping normally and fewer develop diagnosable PTSD.
Primate dominance games.
I can think of a few people I know who took one year of highschool psychology or once read a pop-sci book about it who like to tell people what the root cause of their behavior is. It's usually done as a dominance move.
Women who refused to sleep with husbands were routinely committed.
Capitalism is intense and is resulting in mental health issues for many people. The system doesn’t self critique rather it labels the people as “ill” and sells them a pill, at a profit of course.
The practitioners often benefit and reinforce the dynamics that create the symptoms in our culture.
Open Dialogue is an approach which does a great job at healing folks in the context of community.
If someone has a broken arm it’s observable and it’s pretty clear what the next step is.
With mental health diagnosis it’s not clear what the underlying issue is and at best you’ll be given something to supress symptoms.
We are doing a bit better on this with things like Psychedelics and Open Dialogue, but mental health is more of a context than a condition.
I think these kind of categories that come from psychology are useful and also dangerous. Our innate tendency towards heuristics makes it difficult to talk about this stuff, especially with words like "narcissist" that have strongly negative connotations. The brain is a complicated mess. Maybe the most complicated mess in the universe. We try to impose some order on it without understanding it. It's true that "everyone in this room loves me" and "everyone in this room hates me" could be manifestations of a similar neurological configuration, and we could put the label "narcissist" on it. But the label is somewhat arbitrary and the behavioral results are often very different.
I, too, just learned that I'm a narcissist.
I had to squint quite a bit at the diagnostic list there, and sort of wedge my own psychological dispositions creatively into the qualifications list there but then yeah -- snap (and crap!) -- I'm a narcissist.
Oh, but if I use just a little more nuanced application of thought, then suddenly I'm not a narcissist. Or at least in a safer position on the linear spectrum that is assumed in this kind of "scientific" categorization.
Which is really quite absurd as you have pointed out.
But only when it comes to, say, J2EE?
Like I'm the 100th smartest person at J2EE in the world, and everyone else besides the approximately 100 above me are J2EE-inferior.
Am I a Narcissist? A J2EE-Narcissist?
"I know more about renewables than any human being on Earth."
"I understand social media. I understand the power of Twitter. I understand the power of Facebook maybe better than almost anybody"
"Nobody knows more about debt. I'm like the king. I love debt."
"I think nobody knows more about taxes than I do, maybe in the history of the world. Nobody knows more about taxes.
"Nobody knows banking better than I do"
"I understand money better than anybody."
"I think nobody knows the system better than I do."
"I know more about contributions than anybody."
"Nobody knows politicians better than Donald Trump."
"Nobody knows more about trade than me."
"Nobody knows jobs like I do! Don’t let them sell you out!"
"Nobody in the history of this country has ever known so much about infrastructure as Donald Trump."
"There's nobody bigger or better at the military than I am."
"I know more about ISIS than the generals do. Believe me."
"There is nobody who understands the horror of nuclear more than me."
"Because nobody knows the system better than me. I know the H1B. I know the H2B. Nobody knows it better than me."
"I’m very highly educated. I know words; I have the best words."
"No one has more respect for women than me."
"I have the best temperament or certainly one of the best temperaments of anybody that’s ever run for the office of president. Ever."
"Nobody reads the Bible more than me."
"I’m the most successful person ever to run for the presidency, by far. Nobody’s ever been more successful than me."
Tired yet? Because I could go on all day with these. That's what it's like to be an actual narcissist. If that's not like you, you're probably not a narcissist.
Look at it this way, even politicians who pander are able to exhibit some semblance of humility and self awareness. You'll be able to find exactly 0 instances from Trump admitting he's wrong about anything. In fact, he once said (to Jimmy Fallon) that he has never had to apologize because he's never done anything wrong.
Here's an example, my city has a water-related emergency and so the water system is temporarily broken. Local coffee shops have closed because it's too difficult to access suitable water. Meanwhile I am drinking coffee right now, and feeling quite smug that as a rank amateur I can do what Those Who Had One Job cannot. I frequently have this experience where I feel like I can do things better than other people. This is a giant red flag for narcissism.
If you dig into it though, I can make coffee because I have a weeks worth of supplies on hand because I had a rough childhood and certain things stay with you. I have two ISPs in case one goes down (and actually chose where I live for that reason), I have at least four modes of transit to get most places, I just chronically overplan for everything in life all the time. So when something goes wrong I will have two or three solutions ready to go while a normal person is trying to stop panicking.
That is a symptom of something, namely my generalized anxiety of having to rely on other people. But whereas a narcissist will berate a new cashier for not knowing how the POS system works, I surreptitiously memorized the right buttons from the last time I was here, help them get through the transaction as quickly as possible and say that I used to work here so they don't feel too bad.
The list explicitly part of a larger list of possible symptoms. The fact that you, I assume not a psychologist, were able to change your "diagnosis" by fudging the numbers a bit, doesn't really prove anything.
As I understand it, lists like these are tools. Not the formal definition of a mental illness. They are used to help guide mental health professionals in their diagnosis. They are meant to be used by people trained in the field.
Follow up I don't think mental health diagnoses are as black and white as you make it out to be. People can have moderate or severe forms of many illnesses.
Can you expand on this or provide some more reading for me? I believe my mother has NPD and have, on occasion, sworn she was on the spectrum as well.
A lot of the epistemological problems for people who are pathologically narcissistic come from understanding the difference between how they see things and how other people see things.
Part of the pathology is that they have a filter set up to protect a fragile image of themselves, and so they often don't understand why other people are acting in some way, specifically when other people's actions are only explicable in ways that contradict the fragile image.
They aren't able to take in information that would allow them to modify their behavior because even mild criticism will harm their understanding of themselves, and since that filter is strong they have a hard time knowing the difference between useful criticisms and all the other reasons people say mean or hurtful things to them.
This disconnection appears similarly to other pathologies where people have issues identifying other peoples' motivations.
For instance, most people have a healthy skepticism of other people's negative reactions: even though other people might think I'm a jerk for, say, constantly name dropping some person some behavior, I will probably keep doing it for a bit.
But at some point, I will (hopefully) notice the trend in negative reactions and either rework the name dropping habit so that other people find it interesting/relevant or understand that it's something that I should change about myself. But if I have such a strong filter against criticism of my identity that literally anything could harm that identity, I might not pick up on social cues that would tell me I need to alter my behavior.
I don't know a lot about asperger syndrome, so this is totally my lay-person's interpretation, but basically they seem similar because they both involve dysfunctions with how people parse other peoples' behavior.
In other words, it's a pathology of personality, analogous to pathological states of other biological systems. Trying to grasp it as if it was a simple trait (height, introversion/extraversion, BMI) is unlikely to be successful, because narcissism is a pattern of intra- and interpersonal dynamics. It's something that has to be reconstructed from multiple observations.
All people have some narcissistic tendencies, and in a sense I feel like my culture (I'm in Texas) amplifies and rewards those tendencies.
There is a difference between displaying a tendency and having your entire life torn apart because of a person's pathological need to defend an image of themself. I have a lot of sympathy for both Echo and Narcissus, because that's a hard story to live in.
Narcissism is not something you truly understand until you meet someone who really is one at the far end of the spectrum. Until you spend weeks, months or even years trying to work out why they have had their empathy glands removed you just don't fully understand the 'narcissism' concept. We see narcissists like The Donald and think that is it, actually you need to be on the sharp end of it, in a relationship directly or once removed through family or work to fully understand how insidious it is.
Only when you have learned the importance of 'no contact' do you understand narcissism fully.
All of us have a few traits that the narcissist has however, it is the cluster of characteristics that matters. With the HN readership I expect a fair few people here have genuinely found themselves on teambuilding exercises etc. where they really are the 'brightest person in the room' and have had to step up to 'leadership' because otherwise nothing would get done. That could be a tickbox on your internal 'I must be a narcissist' list. It doesn't make you one though. A lot of boxes have to be ticked.
Furthermore, the true narcissist does not have the brain cells to identify what the condition is. They can even hear of the story of Narcissus and think it is an 'incredibly sweet story', one worth sharing with others. How little they know...
Interestingly teambuilding exercises can lead to moments of 'imposter syndrome'. For instance you might never do sports yet fluke it with 'beginners luck' to beat everyone else. This happened with my sister who can't drive. When she went go-karting with her petrol-head workmates she somehow won. On that day she felt quite the 'imposter' in collecting the prize, not believing it. She was 'quite full of herself', ego brimming, and with a few 'narcissist checkboxes' ticked that day. So there is a correlation.
The "vulnerable narcissist" (as presented) is incredibly concerned with what other people think (at least on a shallow level), but often views themselves very negatively. They have a negative bias to self image and a lack of assertiveness but are nonetheless very focused on how they are perceived and themselves in general.
The "vulnerable" variety resonates with me quite a bit more. I could never agree with a statement like "I am a superior person", but I can agree with a statement like "I often feel as if I need compliments from others in order to be sure of myself." At various times in my life I have been very engaged in fishing for likes, compliments, whatever kind of approval I can get.
That has changed a lot for me recently, because I finally transitioned (I'm a transgender woman). Accepting that freed me from a lot of inauthenticity. I don't need the Internet to constantly validate my femininity any more, I don't feel terribly ashamed for wanting femininity in my life, etc. I still do think about gender, but rather to my surprise I spend way less time asking myself if I'm performing femininity correctly than I did performing masculinity - getting closer to that authentic place the article talks about.
I have been on the "sharp end" of the class sort courtesy of my mom. Like Trump, she lives in a bubble where reality itself distorts. One of the most obvious examples is whenever my gender comes up she always claims others in the family feel exactly the same way as she does, even when this is laughably and obviously incorrect. In fact she extends this to the rest of the world, claiming that e.g., I'm the laughing stock of all of my friends and they only act nice around me to be politically correct(even though, obviously, I'm in contact with them more than she is).
I could list countless other examples; for instance she claimed that the reason my brother and his wife decided not to have a child was because she wanted to fly to Paris and buy a purse. She simply warps reality to a space that is consistent with how she feels, even when that is absurd.
You shouldn't dismiss the resulting behavioral patterns that I have, though - for instance, constantly fishing for validation that refutes what she says. It tends to me being inauthentic and approval seeking. It also means that I do not put myself in vulnerable positions whenever possible. This means things like not interviewing for jobs and missing other opportunities because the risk of failure might validate all that negative talk. It means doing mediocre work intentionally so I can brush it off as "I didn't really try".
And most of all, like classic narcissism, it means failing to form deeper relationships or care about others on a level beyond figuring out what it takes to get them to like my selfie. At its most extreme, you get that intense reality distortion, but in a negative way - e.g., I actually believe her when she says things like all my friends are laughing at me as a man in a dress.
It's not accepting that how others view me isn't necessarily how I view myself, and instead believing in a world where everyone thinks the same things I do - or at least, they would, if they saw the "real me", which I have to hide. Hence, the link to impostor syndrome.
I am also interested in how our make up is determined by the mix of testosterone/estrogen that we get before we get born. As I understand it the mix can be set one way or the other at different stages of development therefore affecting the final outcome. You can get the mixture over-rided by the mum's mix of the two to end up far from binary male or binary female. If the anatomy is built on one mix and the brain developed on a different mix then anything could happen, including being left handed or being a 'gay man trapped inside a woman's body', or just straight gay. So much of our identity is complicated that it can be hard to see it as some changes in the mix. For instance, one of my school friends was the 'only gay in the village' but he was also the last child of eight siblings and I wasn't going to tell him that his sexuality and decade long coming out process was just because his mum's womb was just knackered and incapable of keeping the mix consistent. However, I wish that society was more accepting of this 'mix theory'.
Anyway, my original comment was really a reaction to comments of people self-diagnosing themselves as narcissist.
My main thought on narcissism is that we need to have some simple tests that we make our elected politicians take so we can weed out those that have no 'empathy glands'. Forget politics of the left and the right, just weed out those that are not wired for the job.
Specifically, having a narcissistic mother and being trans led to me being that other kind, that always feels phony and is always trying to come up with some version of self that's packaged for the approval of others.
Good luck getting any kind of change on the political front
The short test for narcissism is: "Are you a narcissist?" Actual, pathological, narcissists answer 'yes' so often that it's almost useful as a diagnostic tool. Most people have some idea of their shortcomings.
Citation?
(snip)
In a series of 11 experiments involving more than 2,200 people of all ages, the researchers found they could reliably identify narcissistic people by asking them this exact question (including the note):
To what extent do you agree with this statement: “I am a narcissist.” (Note: The word “narcissist” means egotistical, self-focused, and vain.)
Participants rated themselves on a scale of one (not very true of me) to seven (very true of me).
(snip)
Results showed that people’s answer to this question lined up very closely with several other validated measures of narcissism, including the widely used Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI).
For everyone in this thread freaking out about potentially being a narcissist, I highly recommend this book from a Harvard Medical School psychologist. Rethinking Narcissism: The Bad-and Surprising Good-About Feeling Special by Dr. Craig Malkin. Here's his test.
These are moral assessments of character, and ones that aren't wrong to make. But it's disingenuous to say that we have a medical definition of what is essentially an evil tendency that we can treat (and presumably, eradicate) as a disease.
The more literary theme among the obvious narcissists and psycho's I've met was they lacked self acceptance, and were pathologically actuated by the approval of others, particularly imagined others. They filtered their experiences to only ones that reflected a deep seated idea of a perfect and adorable self, and they had adapted to ferociously attack anything that threatened this perfect and vulnerable self image.
That's not a disease, it's poor parenting exacerbated by a culture that enables it.
People can learn and change, and they do it every day. The popular pseudo scientific discourse around narcissists and sociopaths is politically dangerous and in many cases, I suspect motivated by a purifying urge that is a much deeper evil.
For those who haven't seen it, I'd highly recommend the film Nightcrawler, which is essentially about the enablement of what we call narcissism/sociopathy in our media-driven society.
Any resources to better parenting than this?
Thanks!
(Also this needs more upvote)
I feel that covert NPD shares a lot of traits with BPD.
[1] https://outofthefog.website [2] http://samvak.tripod.com
True in a sense some of the symptoms of mania can be the same, but NPD is much different from BPD in that BPD is a mental illness that can be managed with medication and behavioral/situational adjustments. BPD sufferers can be completely normal people under the right conditions.
So yes, under capitalism any knowledge of the self in the working class is pathological.
> "To be clear: these results do not invalidate the fact that most of us experience feelings of impostorism or doubt our ability to make desired impressions on others at various points in our life. Instead, they suggest that no matter where any of us are on the impostor syndrome curve, one potential route to realizing your best self is through dialing down your excessive preoccupation with how you are being perceived by others. Don't worry about being an impostor; worry about being authentic."
This article gets it wrong. Vulnerable narcissists are still needy, egotistical and vain people. It’s just that they are introvert. Instead of presuming that any higher being can go back to sleep when they wake up, the introvert N will wonder if it would be possible for other people to recognize that they have everything under control and should just be trusted.
I’ve be raised by a N:bro and N:mom, not the introvert types, and I sure hope this article is a joke or written by a N looking for excuses!
Edit: few typos. I probably missed a few more. I am fuming!
Narcissists see other people entirely as threats or opportunities, not as separate individuals with lives and needs of their own.
They literally have no concept of empathy. Their actions are motivated by a need to destroy and devalue any perceived threats to their fragile self-image, while cultivating people, projects, and situations that make them look and feel good in front of the imaginary audience that judges everything they do.
There's no ability to think of others as equals. Everyone is either better or worse than a narcissist - not just in a passing way, but absolutely, infinitely, and obsessively.
The blog is long defunct, but the archives are definitely worth a read.
http://outofthefog.website/personality-disorders-1/2015/12/6...
You got anything to back up that claim? That sounds like a pretty big conclusion that you're jumping to without evidence.
It's not a "claim". It's literally the null hypothesis: two traits are assumed to be uncorrelated unless proven otherwise.
If you want to claim that a sense of "impostor syndrome" is actually indicative of increased skill, it's your job to prove it.
Also, again: null hypothesis. If you want to argue that there's a positive correlation between X & Y, you provide evidence.
It's not a "claim". It's literally the null hypothesis: two traits are assumed to be uncorrelated unless proven otherwise.
If you want to claim that a sense of "impostor syndrome" is actually indicative of increased skill, it's your job to prove it.