Picture a narcissist. Who comes to mind? Your narcissistic boss, the mean girls from high school, the parent who wears yoga pants to drop off their kids, a political candidate, a frenemy outside your circle, or one of your child’s classmates? When you picture the image in your mind, you can’t help but think, Oh my, who would this person be friends with? That’s the question of a research paper in the March issue of Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin. Seriously, what kind of person would be a close friend to a narcissist?
It’s an interesting question for many reasons, one of which is the fact that members of a friend circle don’t tend to share their personalities. Previous research has shown that best friends tend to be different from each other and a randomly selected stranger. “The reasons people form friendships are many,” the research says, and many of these reasons lead to best friends who are introverts and extroverts, crazy and optimistic or some other seemingly incompatible combination of personalities.
Is this true even when narcissists have friends?
To find out, researchers from Humboldt University in Germany gathered 290 pairs of best friends and gave them personality tests—a widely used test of the Big Five personality traits (extraversion, conscientiousness, openness, agreeableness, and neuroticism) and also a popular test of the so-called “dark triad” of personality traits, namely narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism (the latter being a person’s tendency to use cunning to control others). From this large mix of numbers, the researchers were able to ask whether personalities—good and bad—tend to cluster together among best friends.
Of course, there were pairs with very similar personalities, but there were also pairs in which the friends were very different from each other, so it was almost even: The personalities of the best friends were only slightly more similar to each other than they were to a randomly selected stranger. (This goes against my intuition… and maybe yours?)
Now let’s take a look at narcissists. Unlike randomly selected people from this sample, the Big Five personality traits of someone who scored high on narcissism were likely to be very similar to those of their best friend. This was about twice as true when both best friends scored high on narcissism. In the (beautiful…) case of the narcissist paired with a narcissist, the Big Five personality traits tended to be very similar; the higher up the scale the narcissist pairings were, the more similar their personalities were.
Yes, narcissists are friends who have copies of themselves. And when both friends are narcissists, the pull of shared personality is strong. (This was true whether the pairings consisted of a female, male, or female/male best friend.)
My first thought was that the reason for this similarity must be that narcissists see themselves as perfect and therefore seek out “perfect” friends who share their “perfect” personality. But that’s not the only explanation. Perhaps, the authors suggest, the reason narcissists end up being friends with people like themselves is because those friends with the same personality are the only ones they can tolerate.
The authors write that “there is evidence that narcissists are more tolerant of narcissistic traits in others (e.g., aggressively controlling, arrogant, selfish) when they possess these characteristics… based on their positive self-image and their tendency to be less averse to narcissistic traits.”
I can’t think of anything more terrifying than a power couple of two narcissists who are compatible in personality. But perhaps in addition to fearing the power of their close narcissists, we can also find some compassion. Narcissists may not be looking out for themselves, but they can’t help but get stuck with themselves.
