Key Points

Rejection is a painful experience for anyone, but it can be catastrophic for some types of narcissists.

According to the mask model of narcissism, grandiose narcissists hide their inner feelings of vulnerability.

New research shows that grandiose narcissists find a way to avoid the hurt of rejection, challenging the mask model.

Think about the last time you felt rejected by the people around you. Maybe you arrived at your sister-in-law’s house ready for a fun, socially distanced afternoon outing. When you walked into the backyard, no one noticed you. There were a few kids playing ball, your older relatives were chatting, and your sister-in-law was deep in conversation with her sister. After an agonizing 15 minutes of wondering what you were doing there, someone finally greeted you, but you still felt ignored for having been ignored for so long.

For most people, such experiences create self-doubt as they wonder if anyone cares about them. Eventually, however, the pain and hurt subside, especially if something happens that negates the original rejection experience. Your sister-in-law might apologize for not welcoming you when you arrived, explaining that something else was going on that needed her attention.

However, when the person experiencing rejection is high in a particular form of narcissism, the scenario can unfold quite differently. According to Michal Weiss and Jonathan Hubert of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2021), the grandiose type of narcissist is known to respond to rejection with “self-enhancement, rejection, and devaluation of the source of threat” (p. 2). In contrast, those with vulnerable narcissism respond to rejection with self-deprecation and victimization.

The Mask Model of Narcissism and Responses to Rejection

A theoretical question that has run through decades of scholarly work on narcissism is whether grandiose narcissism is an elaborate cover for feelings of inadequacy. That is, those with high levels of grandiose narcissism are concealing high levels of vulnerable narcissism. On the inside, those with grandiose narcissism will respond to rejection with the same levels of pain and suffering as those with high levels of vulnerable narcissism, even if their outward behavior suggests otherwise.

This line of thinking is behind the so-called “mask model” developed by Jennifer Bosson of the University of South Florida and colleagues (2008). Grandiose narcissism and vulnerable narcissism, in this approach, “may represent two manifestations, or two regulatory strategies, of the same basic feelings of worthlessness and inadequacy” (p. 1).

To look behind the mask of those with interpretation bias, the Israeli research team compared their external (explicit) and internal (implicit) responses (called “interpretation bias” or “IB”) to experimentally induced situations involving social rejection. If the mask model is supported, people with interpretation bias would show the same implicit interpretation bias as those with fragile interpretation bias after an experience involving rejection. Masking this implicit interpretation bias would be an explicit interpretation bias, as narcissistic individuals disguise those negative experiences.

Testing the Mask Model in the Lab

From an initial sample of 1,105 undergraduate participants, the research team selected 120 individuals, who were randomly assigned to two conditions based on their scores on a standard measure of narcissism. The sample ranged in age from 17 to 34, and 65 percent were female.

The main measure of explicit AI asked participants to indicate how they would respond to each of the 16 ambiguous situations. Each situation was resolved positively or negatively, and participants were asked to rate how well they thought the solution would apply to them. For example, consider your response to this sample item, with its two possible meanings: “Someone looks at you while you are standing in an elevator because they think you look attractive/weird.” Your score would be your ratings of the “attractive” versus the “weird” option in this example.

Related : The Tell-Tale Sign of a Narcissist

As you can see, the explicit IB measure taps into your conscious response to a situation, as you are aware of how you evaluated yourself. To get at participants’ implicit IB, the authors used another tool that wasn’t based on self-report exactly, but on the length of time participants took to respond to sentences that conveyed self-relevant information but varied in being negative or positive.

To make this more specific, here’s an example of an implicit IB measure. You listen to a sentence on headphones describing a social situation. The sentence is missing a final word, such as, “As you pass a group of people, you hear them laughing because they are discussing…”

You then see a word on the screen that could complete the sentence but may or may not be grammatically correct. You are then asked to decide whether it is correct or not. In 40 of the situations, the final word has negative connotations, which in the example above would be the word “you.” In 40 of the sentences, the final word is positive (“jokes”). A set of 20 neutral situations had the final word with no implications for self (e.g., “While walking with a friend through the park, I decided to stop and rest on…” with “bench” being the correct grammatical ending. Ungrammatical endings were just variations on the final word, such as “benches” after “a” in the neutral sentence.

If you are someone whose implicit IB is skewed toward negativity, it should take you longer to make your decision about the correctness of the grammatical final word when that word is positive. As with other measures of implicit bias, the assumption is that if you are predisposed to seeing yourself in a negative light, you will have to stop and think for an extra second when presented with a situation that shows you in a positive light.

Now, add to this the manipulation that Weiss and Hoppert used to lead participants to the rejection experiment. In what is known as “Cyberball,” social psychologists have developed a method that can be fully simulated in the lab. Imagine that you think you are playing a video game that involves throwing a ball with two other people. However, out of 50 throws of the ball, only four of them allow you to throw the ball back, with the remaining ball being thrown between the other two people. In the control condition, you see the game being played between three other participants and are simply asked to count the number of throws.

Do Grandiose Narcissists Secretly Hurt by Rejection?

The results from the control condition suggest that both those with grandiose narcissism and those with vulnerable narcissism responded to rejection as you might expect. Scores on a self-report test indicated that grandiose narcissists had positive explicit self-ratings and vulnerable narcissists had negative self-ratings. There was no difference between the two types of narcissists on the implicit self-ratings scale.

After rejection, as expected, participants who scored high on the vulnerable narcissism test showed more implicit negative self-views. Rejection triggered feelings of inferiority in them, even if the rejection was only in the form of a simulation. However, for the grandiose narcissistic participants, the outcome of rejection was exactly the opposite. Instead of showing more negative implicit self-evaluations, they appeared to respond with an increase in their positive implicit self-views. These results were in direct contradiction to the mask model, which would predict that individuals who scored high on the grandiose narcissism test would hide their negative self-evaluations in response to rejection. Faced with this unexpected pattern of results, the authors turned to previous studies not based on the mask model that could explain. One possibility they considered was that those high in grandiose narcissism displayed a “healthy narcissistic display” in that they responded to the threat “with automatic positive self-evaluations that help regulate self-esteem” (p. 8). This automatic response provides, in part, a shut-off valve that allows an individual high in grandiose narcissism to shut out incoming information with potentially negative consequences for the self.

As the authors point out, it is not possible to know what was “really” going on in the unconscious responses of grandiose narcissists. It may be necessary to delve deeper into these implicit biases to see if camouflage is at work after all in the narcissist’s response to rejection. At least at the level of the present analysis, the findings suggest that there is less going on beneath the surface in terms of feelings of vulnerability than theories such as the mask model suggest.