Examining interactions between narcissistic leaders and anxious followers
asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
> To collect our ground truth dataset for the prediction of narcissism, we recruited participants via an article published on the webpage of Psychology Today. At the end of the article, a link to a short survey was provided, in which, after providing consent, participants were asked to complete a scale on narcissism by Konrath et al. (2014), namely “To what extent do you agree with this statement: ‘I am a narcissist? (Note: The word ‘narcissist’ means egotistical, self-focused, and vain)” using a 7-point Likert scale (1 = “Not Very True of Me” to 7 = “Very True of Me”), and to provide their public Twitter username/handle for research purposes. In total, 1,067 participants, located in the United States, completed the survey, indicated their public Twitter username, and provided consent for their social media data to be used for research. In total, 309,417 tweets were obtained from these participants.
Psychology research already struggles with reproducibility issues at an alarmingly high rate. I fear that machining learning models are an easy way for researchers to get the answer they want from a dataset by tweaking the model until it produces the answer they want.
Their model included variables like average Tweet length and number of upper-case words. Notably, they built the model on one demographic (volunteer Psychology Today readers) but tested it on a demographic using Twitter for entirely different reasons (public-facing leaders of companies on Crunchbase)
It’s not hard to imagine a model like this creating a lot of false positives when applied to public-facing leaders of popular startups they found on Crunchbase
> Using an initial database of organizational leaders and employees, provided by Crunchbase (crunchbase.com), we randomly selected 500 highly active leaders on Twitter, and downloaded their public Twitter profile data.
They trained the model on one demographic (readers of a psychology magazine) and then applied it to a different demographic (public faces of startups) and assumed that the model was equally accurate for this entirely different demographic.
First, this study is clearly about me, but they don't admit that anywhere. Second, I am not a narcissist, because among all other people, I'm probably the least egotistical (I am but a modest demi-god), self-focused (the things I create are actually gifts to the world), or vain (my beauty is natural and effortless). So obviously I answered the poll with all ones, excluding myself from the training data and rendering this study pointless.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/narcissistic-...
The method of self-reporting seems like a real problem, as nobody is going to be reporting their dangerous pathologies out of a sense of civic mindedness. The crux of this seems to be they wanted to show they could use an ML model to their peers.
It's worth looking at it more clinically instead of using it as a proxy for "kicking up," at leaders or charismatic people who may be otherwise pretty average. Elevating disorders to represent symbols of powerful evil and applying them to hate figures is superstitious villager quality reasoning.
A useful example of narcisism is a more banal version, where someone manages their personal brand, and becomes actuated by external validation and the approval of others in a way that is pathological. Their neuroticism means they are much less likely to be leaders at all, and plausibly more like actors, lawyers, celebrities, academics, and indeed, politicians and other artifacts of fame and attention, but not because they are leaders. Rather, status occupations are watering holes for narcissists and their cousin pathology, psychopaths. A psychologist friend once quipped, if you want to see the Galapogos Islands of personality disorders in the wild just go to a strip club, which I thought was very insightful because the people there feel the attention and money and status but divorced from social norms.
I would wonder in this paper whether they bothered to detect narcisism in the twitter followers, or is this just about leaders, and then, really, why? It's the need for reflected representations of status, and arguably not a leadership trait at all.
Is foresight a bad thing?
[!] Is it common to have grammar errors in publications like this? Wouldn't the author have preferred to say "more favorable"?
"Have you been staring into a pool of water for a very long time?"
If your answer is yes: you're a narcissist
If your answer is no: you're probably not a narcissist
/s
When Narcissus died the pool of his pleasure changed from a cup of sweet waters into a cup of salt tears, and the Oreads came weeping through the woodland that they might sing to the pool and give it comfort.
And when they saw that the pool had changed from a cup of sweet waters into a cup of salt tears, they loosened the green tresses of their hair and cried to the pool and said, `We do not wonder that you should mourn in this manner for Narcissus, so beautiful was he.'
`But was Narcissus beautiful?' said the pool.
`Who should know that better than you?' answered the Oreads. `Us did he ever pass by, but you he sought for, and would lie on your banks and look down at you, and in the mirror of your waters he would mirror his own beauty.'
And the pool answered, `But I loved Narcissus because, as he lay on my banks and looked down at me, in the mirror of his eyes I saw ever my own beauty mirrored.'
This reputation then changes the more people know them. I wonder how that's possible for attractiveness though? You'd think people's perceptions of that wouldn't change.
Also if narcissists are generally regarded as attractive does that mean they are, and in this one dimension they aren't totally out of touch?
Because narcissism is almost always driven by a deep feeling of trauma, inadequacy, and insecurity which was coped for by delusions of grandiosity - this comes out in various ways, and to various degrees of success based on how high functioning they are.
A low functioning narcissist may be unable to get themselves in physical shape, or dress well, or groom themselves, or may have terrible plastic surgery, etc. and resort to attacking naysayers and spouting clear delusion that is easy to identify.
A high functioning narcissist may be working out at the gym regularly, groom themselves well, and had any obvious flaws fixed with (high quality) plastic surgery - and be objectively physically attractive. They may be well practiced in debate and oratory skills, and have spent time improving social skills. These are relatively rare, as it takes SOME degree of awareness that these are not already perfect to get here, which a Narcissist will struggle with. There is a non-trivial overlap with what some high functioning psychopaths do here, but they are different in key and important ways.
A different but related axis occurs around their ability to convince others of their delusions (and themselves). Low functioning, all but the most gullible or susceptible know it's bullshit, and avoids them. They can be self harming in clear ways as they aren't able to convince themselves well either sometimes.
High functioning can be VERY VERY convincing, with almost everyone convinced and anyone who figures it out targeted quite successfully and removed from the social group (or sometimes from society in general, driven to suicide, or outright murdered depending on the degree of power and the amount of threat felt by that particular narcissist).
They can convince themselves most (or all) of the time too, which makes it 'easier' as there is less cognitive dissonance. Those who disagree are clearly evil and out to get them, so no need to look at evidence or consider they might have a point.
Where you draw the line on this for the clear pathology vs 'not really narcissism' is of course subjective and on a case by case basis.
There ARE folks who are clearly narcissists, and having met one? God damn.
It is very true that it is overused and ‘trendy’ right now to label folks that are a pain in the ass or that people don’t like that way, which is unfortunate. Doesn’t mean they don’t actually exist though.
There ARE folks that fundamentally don’t work the way most people think people work, and that have (and which will continue to) cause sometimes catastrophic damage to themselves or others. Many of those folks can be fit into specific named boxes. Some cannot. If you consider that a dark secret or not is up to you.
Arguably "attractiveness" is a proxy for ephemeral attributes like status and other sorts of signaling narcissists excel at.
There are a lot of incongruities in research surrounding them that psychology fails to address and warrants skepticism.
For example, more recent longitudinal studies on personality disorders like Borderline Personality Disorder (BDP) pretty consistently show that 80 - 90% of people once diagnosed with the disorder no longer meet the diagnostic criteria after a decade.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abst...
I find this interesting, because Abnormal Psychology usually teaches that personality is resistant to change, and thus personality disorders rarely show improvement.
Moreover, studies like this one
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%252Fs11920-014-044...
indicate that Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is actually pretty controversial among psychologists, with a wide variation in how it is measured and diagnosed. They note a lack of longitudinal studies as well -- perhaps NPD shows a similar phenomena as BPD where 9/10 no longer meet the diagnostic criteria several year later (despite showing other social defecits).
Am I a narcissist for challenging psychologists to provide better scientific evidence for the disorder? Hopefully not! Yet I still view the construct of personality disorders with skepticism.
It doesn't matter. The narcissist is not psychologically equipped to use this information, if they even have it. Narcissists will more likely attempt to use their self-awareness against you for their own benefit semi-unconsciously. Narcissism is a reaction to deep childhood trauma that cannot be healed with drugs or therapy in figuratively 99.9% of cases.