Thoughts on Narcissism Scales
Wherein I poke fun at the NPI, extol the PNI, and lament confusing anagrams
Pathological Narcissism Inventory
Dr. Mark Ettensohn really likes the Pathological Narcissism Inventory. It’s well-correlated with actual pathological narcissism (PN) and actual impaired functioning, has interesting subscales, and comes in different forms, including a newer, slightly shorter version (B-PNI), and a super short version that is less precise (SB-PNI).
Compared to a general population average, I score average on grandiosity (tragically unspecial!) and almost at −1 standard deviations on vulnerability. About ⅔rds of the items are from vulnerability related subscales, so they have a greater aggregate weight in the PNI total score.
But I get the feeling that “grandiosity” in this context refers to a kind of intersection between overt and covert grandiosity, because intuitively I would classify “grandiose fantasy” as a vulnerable subscale. That’s useful to keep in mind when interpreting the results.
But in a way it makes sense because the PNI is optimized to be useful to get the right treatments for the people who actually seek treatment rather than to hypothetically know what treatments would help people who won’t accept them or who you’ll never meet in the first place as a therapist.
Woot! The PNI is actually correlated with interpersonal problems whereas the NPI is correlated with pretty much just one type of interpersonal problem.
Narcissistic Personality Inventory
This is the scale that no one seems to like. I love how NPI is an anagram of PNI. Not confusing as hell at all. But since the NPI was first, it’s not to blame for that at least.
My autism is particularly annoyed by the difficulty I have answering almost all of the questions.
“The thought of ruling the world frightens the hell out of me” or “If I ruled the world it would be a better place.” Well, both of course, along the lines of the “Do it scared” philosophy! The second is strictly true in expectation according to my values because I could delegate to all the existing leaders and structures by default and just swap out all the awful dictators.
“Being an authority doesn't mean that much to me” or “People always seem to recognize my authority.” But what about the majority of people who would like to be great at something but are still learning?
“I am more capable than other people” or “There is a lot that I can learn from other people.” I imagine there is hardly a single person in the world who is worse than everyone else in every possible field and can take this test? A newborn? Someone in a coma? And virtually everyone can learn something from others too.
“I am much like everybody else” or “I am an extraordinary person.” Ah, right, I don’t have face-blindness, rather I’m just surrounded by people who are much like everybody else. Big Agent Smith vibes.
But more importantly, the scale is accurately named in that it doesn’t measure pathological narcissism so much as a mix of healthy and pathological traits.
In Rethinking Narcissism by Dr. Craig Malkin explains that the so-called “narcissism epidemic” is likely an artifact of educational efforts to teach children healthy assertiveness, self-esteem, trust in their abilities, and all kinds of other healthy and empowering qualities – which caused them to score higher on this silly scale.
The first two chapters of Rethinking Narcissism are a rant about the abysmal state of the research into pathological narcissism in the couple of decades before 2009 or so, when the PNI was developed. See the circle above for how weakly correlated the scale is with all sorts of interpersonal impairments.
Some items where both answers may or may not be correlated with pathological narcissism:
“I expect a great deal from other people” (entitlement) or “I like to do things for other people” (self-sacrificing self-enhancement).
“I am assertive” (someone who is either actually assertive or grandiose about it) or “I wish I were more assertive” (someone who has enough insight to see that neither echoism nor aggression are assertiveness).
“I wish somebody would someday write my biography” (grandiose fantasy) or “I don't like people to pry into my life for any reason” (hiding the self).
“I really like to be the center of attention” (contingent self-esteem) or “It makes me uncomfortable to be the center of attention” (performance anxiety).
“I like to look at myself in the mirror” (not having body dysmorphia) or “I am not particularly interested in looking at myself in the mirror” (self-loathing).
“Compliments embarrass me” (compliments making you feel fake) or “I like to be complimented” (contingent self-esteem or just being a normal person).
I’m smack in the middle of the average range on it. If you score even lower, you could probably benefit for therapy to improve your self-esteem, PN or not. <3
Narcissism Spectrum Scale
I generally really like Rethinking Narcissism by Dr. Craig Malkin, but I'm a bit confused about the Narcissism Spectrum Scale. It’s basically three scales in one, and I feel like it would’ve made much more sense if the three scales were not run together like that.
The first is the echoism scale, measuring pathologically low narcissism, the second measures healthy narcissism, and the third measures “extreme” narcissism all the way up to pathological narcissism. Hence it makes the assumption that there is a right amount of narcissism, and too much and too little are bad.
To me it rather seems that narcissism – the neutral quality, so a desire to feel special, to trust in oneself, to be ambitious, etc. – is a trade-off between contentment and ambition that one needs to make in the context of the social reality one is embedded in. Privilege is freedom to be more ambitious at a low cost to contentment.
Healthy narcissism maxes out that trade-off. It's a range though, so you can still experiment with different values without risking that it becomes unhealthy. Crucially, I think, some people might have what it takes to max out narcissism without any kind of pathology.
But if your contentment is alright but you push your ambition lower and lower with a vengeance, and you create a false self around subservience and not having preferences, and you pretend hard to not care that you're not getting any more content in the process, then that's not pleasant. That's sort of what echoism was like for me. The scale captures that alright.
And if you push your ambition so high that the contentment goes out of the window, then that also sucks, but it can look like a burned-out entrepreneur with low self-compassion, not like pathological narcissism.
You only get pathological narcissism if you also add some subset of:
fragile, unrealistic self-image;
an addiction to outside attention or admiration;
disavowed feelings of emptiness, fragmentation, and toxic shame;
low trust or avoidant/disorganized attachment;
impaired mentalization; and
maybe more externalizing defenses instead of avoidant defenses (because those would move it closer to Avoidant Personality Disorder), but some PNI items make reference to avoidance.
So what makes the difference between healthy and unhealthy is not the degree of narcissism but other factors such as social privilege and the above pathologies.
One could argue that ambition is central to narcissism, and that healthy ambition means wanting to achieve something while putting in the requisite effort, and higher ambition means achieving the same thing while putting in lower effort, but that seems rather overly narrow and forced to me.
That’s my main confusion when it comes to the scale.
I wonder whether there's a way to replace the 10 items of the “extreme narcissism” scale with (say) the SB-PNI, because as it stands only 3 of the items capture narcissistic vulnerability.
The most valuable contributions of this scale are the measurement of echoism and healthy narcissism in isolation. Those are interesting dimensions to minimize and maximize respectively, and it’s also valuable to reassure people with PN that giving up their narcissistic pathology does not mean they have to give up on being ambitious – quite the contrary, they can probably even achieve their ambitions at higher rates.
I’m a 6 on the overall scale, the upper end of healthy narcissism, with above-average echoism, below-average “extreme” narcissism, and a score in the top bracket for healthy narcissism.
Five-Factor Narcissism Inventory
The Five-Factor Narcissism Inventory gives you super detailed results, because contrary to the name, it not only has five factors but one of them is subdivided into another 15 subscales! Turns out I have a lot of shame but no lack of empathy (my most extreme results). Makes sense.
The subscales are:
Vulnerable Narcissism
Grandiose Narcissism
Reactive Anger
Shame Self-consciousness
Indifference
Need for Admiration
Exhibitionism
Authoritativeness
Grandiose Fantasies
Manipulativeness
Exploitativeness
Entitlement
Lack of Empathy
Arrogance
Acclaim Seeking
Thrill Seeking
Distrust
Antagonism
Extraversion
Neuroticism
I want to understand this scale better because it’s at the basis of the important result that grandiosity and vulnerability are positively correlated after some threshold. That threshold seems to be just under 3 on the vulnerability and grandiosity subscales.
It seems to be nearly impossible to be highly grandiose without also being highly vulnerable. But the opposite is not the case, which would explain why I know so many people with PN with almost permanently covert grandiosity (and vulnerability that fluctuates between overt and covert).
I can’t find overall norms, but this scatterplot is a good substitute. Looks like I’m safe from collapses at my scores of 2.1 and 2.0 for vulnerability and grandiosity respectively. My overall score is also 2.0 for what it’s worth.
Hypersensitive Narcissism Scale
I don’t know much about the Hypersensitive Narcissism Scale either, but it seemed sensible enough, albeit short, and it comes with norms! It was published in 1997 and took inspiration from scales from 1938 and 1978. It’s a bit of a time capsule from before people decided to become dumb about narcissism.
I score only 24 on it (despite my devaluing remark in the previous sentence), which is close to the lower end of the average range and very reminiscent of my PNI vulnerability score.
Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Questionnaire
Unless some of the authors have PN, this one has a bit of a distasteful name. It’s cited by Aaron Pincus as one of the newer scales that capture vulnerable narcissism, but looking at the items, it follows a narrow conception of that.
Some of the grandiose or admiration-seeking items actually strike me as sufficiently labored to not just be healthy self-esteem, and about half of the items show vulnerability, but it’s just this particular “rivalry” type, a bit like devaluation of others, and so misses out on most of the gamut of the PNI. Maybe it was never meant to capture all of PN but rather just the aspects from its name.
I couldn’t find any norms for it (the paper is paywalled), but for what it’s worth, I score 39 on it.