Narcissists not all about 'I and Me', claims new study

In a new study, scientists have debunked the common belief about narcissists, saying that use of first-person singular pronouns such as "I" and "me" did not necessarily indicate a narcissistic tendency.

Lead author of the study, Angela Carey, MA, a 3rd year doctoral candidate in psychology at the University of Arizona, said that the is a widely assumed association between I-talk, and narcissism, among laypeople and scientists despite the fact that the empirical support for this relation was surprisingly sparse and generally inconsistent.

Co-author of the study Matthias Mehl, PhD added that narcissists have an unrealistic sense of superiority and self-importance and an overabundance of self-focus. It would therefore be reasonable to assume that narcissists would be more prone to I-talk.

Carey and Mehl teamed with researchers from four other universities in the United States and two in Germany to recruit over 4,800 people for the study (67 percent female, mostly undergraduate students). Participants were asked to engage in one of 6 communications tasks in which they wrote or talked about themselves or an unrelated topic. Researchers also scored the participants for narcissism using five different narcissism measures, including the common 40-item Narcissistic Personality Inventory.

The researchers could find no association between pronoun use and narcissism. When they analyzed data by gender, they found men had a slightly higher correlation than women but neither was statistically significant nor practically meaningful.

Mehl said that the most interesting finding was that the results did not vary much across two different countries, multiple labs, 5 different narcissism measures and 12 different samples.

Identifying narcissists was important because over time their grandiosity, self-focus and self-importance could become socially toxic and have negative consequences on relationships, said Carey.

The research is published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.