صداهایی مانند یک عاشق: علائم رفتاری خودشیفتگی در زندگی روزمره

Little is known about narcissists’ everyday behavior. The goal of this study was to describe how narcissism is manifested in everyday life. Using the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR), we obtained naturalistic behavior from participants’ everyday lives. The results suggest that the defining characteristics of narcissism that have been established from questionnaire and laboratory-based studies are borne out in narcissists’ day-to-day behaviors. Narcissists do indeed behave in more extraverted and less agreeable ways than non-narcissists, skip class more (among narcissists high in exploitativeness/entitlement only), and use more sexual language. Furthermore, we found that the link between narcissism and disagreeable behavior is strengthened when controlling for self-esteem, thus extending prior questionnaire-based findings (Paulhus, Robins, Trzesniewski, & Tracy, 2004) to observed, real-world behavior.

Narcissists love attention. Lucky for them, they have recently received a considerable amount of it from academic psychologists, especially in laboratory settings (e.g., Back et al., 2010, Bushman and Baumeister, 1998, Campbell et al., 2002 and Miller et al., 2009). This laboratory research has led to several wide-reaching theories about why narcissists do what they do (Holtzman and Strube, 2010a, Morf and Rhodewalt, 2001, Twenge and Campbell, 2009 and Vazire and Funder, 2006). Despite all this attention from researchers, however, we still know little about what narcissists actually do in their everyday lives. The aim of this paper is to help create an empirical basis for a more complete understanding of narcissism by exploring behavioral manifestations of narcissism in everyday life. Thus, we intend to answer a simple, yet largely unanswered question: What do narcissists do on a day-to-day basis? The surge in narcissism research in the last 20 years has led to the development and validation of new instruments to measure narcissism, to landmark experiments, and to lively theoretical debates. However, most of this work has relied on self-reports and laboratory studies. While the existing body of research on narcissism has led to a much better understanding of the intrapsychic and interpersonal processes that define narcissism (Campbell et al., 2002 and Paulhus, 1998), there are several reasons to think that the scientific portrait of narcissists remains incomplete without naturalistic behavioral observation (Baumeister, Vohs, & Funder, 2007). First, laboratory-based studies often involve very brief interactions, which may be unlike most real-life interpersonal interactions. Because research has shown that narcissists tend to make good first impressions that are often fleeting (Paulhus, 1998), it is possible that the impressions narcissists elicit in the laboratory are not representative of the impressions they elicit in their everyday lives. Second, lab studies are ideal for creating controlled conditions, but they may have limited ecological validity. Some common interpersonal situations are difficult or impossible to recreate in laboratories, such as an intimate conversation with a close friend. As a result, little is known about how narcissists interact with their friends, enemies, parents, and romantic partners. Third, laboratory studies minimize opportunities for people to choose situations. A paradigm that allows people to select situations could reveal important behavioral patterns characteristic of narcissists, such as seeking out interactions with potential mates, or skipping class. Finally, most lab studies rely on self-reports, and self-reports by narcissists have an important limitation: narcissists have a penchant for deceiving both themselves and others (Campbell et al., 2002). While we can expect narcissists to freely admit to some behaviors (e.g., pursuing a short-term mating strategy; Reise & Wright, 1996), we cannot expect narcissists to provide entirely honest reports of other daily behaviors. Naturalistic observation of narcissists’ everyday lives can, at least in part, address these limitations as it does not rely on self-reported behavior, it would provide information about interactions beyond first impressions, and it would provide insights into how narcissists behave in their self-selected environments. Here, we examine the habitual, real-world behaviors associated with narcissism by collecting naturalistic, non-reactive measures of everyday behavior using the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR; Mehl, Pennebaker, Crow, Dabbs, & Price, 2001). The EAR allows researchers to unobtrusively record sounds directly from people’s daily lives by asking participants to wear a small, pocket-sized digital audio recorder that periodically records snippets of ambient sounds. The data captured by the EAR is objective (i.e., traceable) and, due to the sampling intervals, it is representative of the ecology of participants’ real-world social situations and behaviors. Thus, the EAR is well-suited to examining behavioral manifestations of narcissism in everyday life. A key question in using the EAR for the naturalistic observation of narcissists’ daily social lives is which behaviors we should examine. Drawing on the large body of previous research, we created four categories of behaviors that we expected to be associated with narcissism: (a) extraverted acts, (b) disagreeable acts, (c) academic disengagement, and (d) sexual language use. Indeed, previous research has shown that narcissism is characterized by a combination of high extraversion and low agreeableness (Bradlee and Emmons, 1992 and Paulhus, 2001). There is particularly strong evidence that narcissists behave in disagreeable ways (e.g., aggressively) in laboratory situations (Twenge & Campbell, 2003). Moreover, the relation between narcissism and disagreeableness increases when self-esteem is taken into account (Paulhus et al., 2004). To test these associations in the naturalistic setting of participants’ daily lives, we examined the association between narcissism and extraverted acts (i.e., talking, being in a group, socializing, and using words about friends) and between narcissism and disagreeable acts (i.e., arguing, using swear words, and using anger words). These acts were selected on the basis of previous research documenting associations between traits and behavior (Mehl et al., 2006 and Ramirez-Esparza et al., 2009) and based on current theories about narcissism. Research has also shown that narcissists are inclined to engage in impulsive behaviors that provide short-term rewards but have long-term costs (Vazire & Funder, 2006). For example, narcissism is associated with positive illusions about academic outcomes, which are associated with higher rates of academic disengagement (Robins & Beer, 2001). To test the role of everyday behavior in this phenomenon, we examined the association between narcissism and attending class. Narcissists’ impulsivity is also manifested in their promiscuous sexual strategies (Reise & Wright, 1996). For example, narcissism is correlated with ex-partners’ reports of relationship infidelity (Campbell et al., 2002). To explore a potential indicator of this overt sexuality, we examined the relationship between narcissism and everyday sexual language use. Based on research examining narcissists’ intrapsychic life and laboratory-based behavior, we predicted that in naturalistic contexts narcissism would be positively correlated with extraverted behavior, disagreeable behavior, academic disengagement, and sexual language use. Thus, the goals of our study were to extend laboratory-based research to naturalistic settings—exploring actual behavior—and to extend our empirical knowledge of narcissism by revealing narcissistic behaviors that are less likely to manifest in laboratories (e.g., the use of taboo sexual words; Jay, 2009).