Narcissism and Self-Insight A Review and Meta-Analysis of Narcissists’ Self-Enhancement Tendencies

• Published in: Personality & social psychology bulletin Vol. 42; no. 1; pp. 3 - 24
• Main Authors: Grijalva, Emily, Zhang, Luyao
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01-01-2016; SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
• Subjects: Attractiveness; Characteristics; Five factor model; Humans; Intelligence; Leadership; Likeability; Meta-analysis; Narcissism; Perceptions; Personality; Personality Assessment; Personality Inventory; Personality traits; Self Concept; Self interest; Selfenhancement; Selfinsight; Systematic review; Task performance; meta-analysis; self-enhancement; agency; narcissism; communion
• ISSN: 0146-1672; 1552-7433
• DOI: 10.1177/0146167215611636

The current article reviews the narcissism–self-enhancement literature using a multilevel meta-analytic technique. Specifically, we focus on self-insight self-enhancement (i.e., whether narcissists perceive themselves more positively than they are perceived by others); thus, we only include studies that compare narcissists’ self-reports to observer reports or objective measures. Results from 171 correlations reported in 36 empirical studies (N = 6,423) revealed that the narcissism–self-enhancement relationship corrected for unreliability in narcissism was .21 (95% confidence interval [CI] = [.17, .25]), and that narcissists tend to self-enhance their agentic characteristics more than their communal characteristics. The average corrected relationship between narcissism and self-enhancement for agentic characteristics was .29 (95% CI = [.25, .33]), whereas for communal characteristics it was .05 (95% CI = [−.01, .10]). In addition, we individually summarized narcissists’ self-enhancement for 10 different constructs (i.e., the Big Five, task performance, intelligence, leadership, attractiveness, and likeability).