A recent study published in Personality and Individual Differences found that not all narcissists think alike. Specifically, grandiose and vulnerable narcissists differ significantly in their metacognitive abilities.
“As a field, we’re still trying to figure out how much, if at all, our personalities might be related to the ways we think and process information. On a superficial level, I think most people would probably expect that the two are related. But the bulk of the research evidence so far is mixed,” said Shane Littrell (@MetacogniShane), PhD, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto.
“We previously published a paper that looked at which kinds of thinking styles were associated with the two major types of narcissism. Narcissism is a personality cluster made up of varying levels of 3 core Big Five personality attributes: antagonism (low agreeableness), agentic extraversion, and neuroticism. From these, we get two main types of narcissism: grandiose narcissism – the more stereotypical type, where the person is exploitative, domineering, and prone to high self-esteem and grandiosity – and vulnerable narcissism – characterized by a sense of entitlement, need for admiration, high neuroticism, shame, distrust, and low self-esteem.”
“In that paper, we found that grandiose narcissism was unrelated to performance on measures of analytic and intuitive thinking, but strongly and positively predicted overconfidence for intellectual performance (i.e., metacognitive bias). On the other hand, vulnerable narcissism predicted worse performance on some of those same thinking measures but was unrelated to intellectual overconfidence. So, overall, we found that grandiose and vulnerable narcissists differ not only in terms of their personality and behavioral tendencies, but also in how they think and process certain kinds of information.”
“This latest study was our attempt to see if these differences in cognitive performance (between the two types of narcissism) extended to other types of thinking processes, like memory performance, memory overconfidence, and a type of metacognitive ability called metacognitive discrimination.”
A total of 208 participants from the U.S. and Canada were included in this research. Participants completed the Five Factor Narcissism Inventory Short form to assess traits related to grandiose and vulnerable narcissism. They also completed measures of cognitive abilities (focusing on numeracy and vocabulary) and metacognitive biases (overconfidence).
“We measured memory performance with a word-pair recall task; participants were given 30 word-pairs to memorize, presented one at a time,” explained Littrell.
“For each word-pair, participants were asked to rate how confident they were that they would remember that word pair later (prospective confidence). We also gave everyone a measure of intelligence of vocabulary questions and math problems. After completing the intelligence items, we asked them to rate how many they felt that they got right (retrospective confidence). From these measures, we calculated judgments-of-learning (confidence in how well you think you will do on a task), overconfidence bias (confidence in how you think you just did on a task), and discrimination index (how well you can distinguish when you performed well versus when you performed poorly).”
The researchers found that grandiose narcissism predicts greater metacognitive bias and less discrimination ability. That is, individuals who were high in grandiose narcissism were “significantly more overconfident overall, both in their judgments-of-learning memory performance (prospective overconfidence) and in their intellectual performance (retrospective overconfidence),” said Littrell.
“Higher grandiose narcissism was also associated with worse metacognitive discrimination. This means that people higher in grandiose narcissism are less able to recognize when they’ve made a mistake. This was reflected in the fact that, on average, they were just as confident in their correct responses as they were in their incorrect responses for certain cognitive tasks.”
“Interestingly, vulnerable narcissism was NOT related to performance on any of these metacognitive measures, although our previous work shows vulnerable narcissists are more likely to self-report being bad at them. Both types of narcissism were also negatively associated with intelligence, which supports previous work that has shown that higher narcissism correlates with lower intelligence.”
What can we take away from this research? Littrell explained, “Overall, our findings show that, despite sharing a few dispositional similarities, grandiose and vulnerable narcissists not only differ sometimes in the ways that they act, they also differ in meaningful ways in how they think and process information. This has important implications not only in terms of our general understanding of the different types of narcissism at the level of common personality traits, but also in terms of how clinicians might approach designing treatments for people whose narcissism reaches clinically diagnosable levels.”
I asked Dr. Littrell if there are any caveats. He responded that it was important to note that, “[our] failure to find any significant associations between vulnerable narcissism and any of our metacognitive measures doesn’t necessarily mean that vulnerable narcissism isn’t associated with poor metacognition at all. On the contrary, our previous studies found that vulnerable narcissism negatively predicts self-reported insight and understanding of one’s own metacognitive performance.”
“In other words, despite the fact that people higher in vulnerable narcissism don’t perform worse on objective metacognitive tasks, they still tend to think that their metacognitive abilities are worse than they actually are. This is further evidence that the metacognitive deficits associated with vulnerable narcissism are qualitatively different than those associated with grandiose narcissism.”
In terms of future research directions, the author explained that the failure to find a link with memory performance might have more to do with motivation than narcissism.
“Honestly, a memory task where you have to memorize 30 word-pairs can be really boring, so poor performance on it could very well have been the result of people just not being very mentally invested in the task. Future studies will need to come up with memory tasks that are more engaging (if that’s even possible).”
“Also, our memory task focused only on cued-recall and judgments-of-learning. Associations between narcissism and other memory tasks (e.g., free recall, recognition) and other types of metacognitive judgments (e.g., feelings-of-knowing, feelings-of-rightness) could yield different results than what we report in our paper. Another thing to consider is whether the two types of narcissists differ in overconfidence for non-cognitive, physical tasks like sports performance.”
“Related to that, we often tend to view the overconfidence and self-enhancing aspects of narcissism through a negative lens, but there could be situations where narcissism might provide benefits, such as enhanced performance. There are certain contexts in life (e.g., sports and other competitive activities) that provide opportunities for ego-boosting through better performance. It could be the case that one or both types of narcissism might actually help increase motivation and performance in those situations. It’s an interesting question that I think future research should definitely explore.”
The study, “The metacognitive abilities of narcissists: Individual differences between grandiose and vulnerable subtypes”, was authored by Shane Littrell, Jonathan A. Fugelsang, and Evan F. Risko.