Are We Getting More Narcissistic in the United States?

Narcissism is defined as inordinate fascination with oneself, vanity, and excessive self-love. It can lead to overconfidence and risk-taking, and materialism. This in and of itself is not enough to be classified as a disorder, to be labelled with narcissistic personality disorder one must also have a need for admiration, lack of empathy and a preoccupation with prestige. Narcissism is linked to trends of self-centeredness, attention-seeking-behavior, and rudeness.

And some studies are beginning to show that there is a an increase in narcissism in our culture. In The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement co-authored by Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell explores this trend, where it comes from, some possible causes and what the future may look like if the trend continues. One of the items in the book is a look at samples of college students who took the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, which is a personality test that shows your narcissistic tendencies. They studied the results from 1982 to 2006 and found that the number of college students who might be classifiable as having narcissistic personality disorder had increased from 1 in 7 to 1 in 4.

The book also follows up Jean Twenge’s book Generation Me: Why Young Americans are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled – and More Miserable Than Ever Before.  

The data presented in both books backs up the observation that we are in fact getting more narcissistic, both in terms of general characteristics as well as the clinical level. In a talk that was broadcast on Book-TV, Jean Twenge mentions the experience of presenting her data to the Me Generation and says that contrary to her expectations the information is not received poorly. Most will agree, and what the subjects of the study have said is that they were taught that in order to be competetive, they have to be narcissists. According to her information, this is not true. Narcissism can actually harm your chances of success because self-focused behavior and the inability to have or express empathy alienates other people, potentially people who might have otherwise helped you to succeed. Overconfident, risk-taking behaviors associated with narcissism can cause people to make gambles with resources that someone less narcissistic might not take – this applies to both physical and financial risk-taking.

While the origins of narcissistic personality disorder are not known, there are some theories about possible factors which vary from abuse in childhood to overindulgence and too much ego inflation by parents. Others have suggested that the disorder arises as a response to avoid or defend against feelings of shame.

It is unclear whether our pop culture is contributing to the rise in narcissism or is merely a reflection of it, but things like reality television and posting videos of yourself on youtube would seem to be linked in either case.