ABSTRACT
A cross-temporal meta-analysis found that narcissism levels have risen over the generations in 85 samples of American college students who completed the 40-item forced-choice Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) between 1979 and 2006 (total n516,475). Mean narcissism scores were significantly correlated with year of data collection when weighted by sample size (b5.53, po.001). Since 1982, NPI scores have increased 0.33 standard deviation. Thus, almost two-thirds of recent college students are above the mean 1979–1985 narcissism score, a 30% increase. The results complement previous studies finding increases in other individualistic traits such as assertiveness, agency, self-esteem, and extraversion.
"...The NPI is ideal for a cross-temporal meta-analysis assessing changes in narcissism. First, it is reliable, well validated, and widely used. Second, the NPI is somewhat protected from social desirability influences through its use of forced-choice dyads, and, perhaps as a result, is not correlated with measures of social desirability (Watson, Grisham, Trotter, & Biderman, 1984). For each of the 40 forcedchoice dyads on the NPI, participants choose either the narcissistic response (e.g., ‘‘I can live my life anyway I want to’’) or the nonnarcissistic response (e.g., ‘‘People can’t always live their lives in terms of what they want’’). The 40 items are summed together. Higher scores indicate higher levels of narcissism...."
LIMITATIONS
"The present study provides the most comprehensive examination to date of generational change in narcissistic personality traits. Even so, it is not without its limitations. Any analysis of self-report data is potentially limited by socially desirable responding. However, the NPI is not significantly correlated with social desirability (Watson et al., 1984). In addition, there have not been concomitant changes in socially desirable responding, which did not change during this time period (Twenge & Im, 2007). This makes it very unlikely that changes in socially desirable responding account for the present results.
"This study also limits its conclusions to American society and generations, partially because there is not much data available over time from other countries. Americans score higher on narcissism than people from other world regions (Foster et al., 2003). Future analyses might determine if narcissism is also increasing in other cultures or if this cultural trend is limited to the United States.
"The data are also limited to college student populations; future research might examine shifts in narcissism among other populations—for example, children or younger adolescents. However, the NPI is rarely given to noncollege samples; thus these data on college students are, as far as we know, the best available to study change in narcissism over the generations among nonclinical samples.
"This study also cannot determine whether the change in narcissism is a purely generational effect or a time-period effect. As with any time-lag study including people of only one age group, we cannot know if those in other age groups also changed. It is possible that both younger and older Americans became more narcissistic from the 1980s to the 2000s. It is also possible that older Americans did not change at all or even became less narcissistic. Given the relative stability of social dominance after young adulthood (e.g., Roberts et al., 2006), as well as cross-sectional research showing lower narcissism scores in older adults (Foster et al., 2003), it seems likely that much of the shift is a generational rather than a time-period effect."
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