the main points
People high in narcissism get angry when they lose in competition.
A new way to study aggression in the laboratory shows how spiteful narcissists can become when they are forced to confront failure.
The best way to protect yourself from an angry narcissist is to not let their punitive tendencies affect your health.

Having a narcissist get angry with you can be both scary and upsetting. Without realizing it, you have dismissed this person who is now descending into a torrent of poison. Worse still, you wonder if you really deserve this attack on your sense of self-worth and dignity.

You may have posted a photo on social media in which you ventured into your new post-pandemic life with a group of your close friends. Much to your surprise, a pre-pandemic acquaintance sent you a text in all caps filled with angry insults, accusing you of disloyalty and hypocrisy. This is a person who has never really liked you because of this person’s constant pattern of self-aggrandizing and attention-seeking behaviors. The pandemic has actually given you somewhat of an excuse to cut things short. Unfortunately, this person doesn’t see things the same way. You’ve been labeled a traitor and an ungrateful person, and even though you try not to take it personally, it’s hard not to feel that a small part of that anger is justified by your behavior.

Narcissistic people who get angry easily can make your life miserable in places that lack the voluntary nature of friendships and other personal relationships. These individuals could be your boss, a co-worker, a client, or a customer. You may have a supervisor who makes strange demands, piling on more and more projects regardless of how much work each one requires. In the final round, your manager asks you to stop going to staff meetings to have time to work on those projects, even though going to those meetings provides you with vital information you need to do your job. You start to wonder if the real reason you weren’t invited is because you’re somehow a threat by being there, either because of your appearance or the clever ideas you contribute, which makes your boss look that much worse.

What are the causes of narcissistic anger and how can it be measured in the laboratory?

There is a well-established body of literature on narcissism that distinguishes between so-called “vulnerable” and “amplified” subtypes, the behavior of which corresponds very clearly to the name of each subtype. People with a high degree of narcissism may also display psychopathic and exploitative tendencies, the so-called “Dark Triad.” Embedded in these descriptions is the tendency of narcissistic individuals to explode in anger when someone gets in their way.

Researchers trying to study narcissistic aggression in the laboratory face several distinct challenges. In real-life situations, it’s all too easy to watch someone’s aggression unfold, but creating an experimental simulation means that researchers have to devise a task that mimics real life but can still be strictly controlled. Furthermore, studying aggressive behavior requires that no one be harmed.

To arrive at the question of what causes narcissistic anger, it is first necessary to know how it can be measured empirically and systematically. To this end, Jill Lobstal and colleagues from Maastricht University (2021) decided to evaluate a measure of behavioral aggression that they believe has the potential to achieve both goals. They also designed this measure so that other researchers can freely use it for the purpose of this critical goal of scientific research: putting the results of a single study to the test.

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The essence of current behavioral aggression measures, according to the Dutch authors, is that they place participants in the position of being able to negatively influence an imaginary opponent through some form of punishment. Among the available laboratory tactics reviewed by the authors, one well-known approach stands out as having the potential to achieve this goal, setting up the situation such that participants can elicit some type of negative consequence on an imaginary opponent in an experimentally designed experiment. A controlled game.

This experimental approach, known as the Competitive Reaction Time Task (CRTT), pits participants against simulated opponents that appear to be real people but that the participant never sees. At the end of each round of play, the participant has the opportunity to “punish” their opponent for incorrect answers by emitting unpleasant white noise. Participants control the degree of aversion to this punishment in terms of its size and duration. Making the game seem more convincing, if participants lose the trial, they are the ones who receive the aversive stimulus. In fact, the entire game is controlled by the experimenter, who sets the schedule of wins and losses according to the details of the research design.

Although the CRTT is useful for measuring anger in measurable doses, it has a varied history of use in psychological science because it is not consistently structured from experiment to experiment. As Lobstal and her colleagues point out, even after experimenters collect data, they don’t have a consistent set of instructions they can use to score. In fact, after reviewing the published literature, the Dutch authors found no fewer than 157 different analytic strategies, which is hardly an ideal basis for comparing results across studies. The purpose of the U. Maastrict study was to provide a computerized algorithm freely available to researchers worldwide that could yield consistent results from one study to another.

The narcissist’s radical reaction to loss

Aside from this standardization procedure, Lobstal and her colleagues sought to establish the validity of the CRTT by comparing scores derived from their new measure with performance on personality tests that the authors believe are relevant from a theoretical point of view. Since narcissists hate losing, they must feel especially frustrated when their supposed opponent proves superior to them. If the research team can establish a relationship between the amount of punishment administered during the CRTT and narcissism, they will have strong evidence that the CRTT measures what it is supposed to measure.

The measure used to assess narcissism, the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI), has four distinct subscales: Leadership/Power, Self-Absorption/Self-Management, Superiority/Arrogance, and Exploitation/Entitlement. Its primary use is to identify people who lean toward the stately dimension rather than the weak dimension of the trait. As a control, in addition to completing the NPI, participants also responded to a questionnaire measuring their typical levels of aggression.

Drawing on data collected over a 6-year period on clinical and non-clinical samples (423 non-clinical and 84 forensic patients), the authors used CRTT studies involving the following procedure. Participants thought they would be competing against an opponent who they had to overcome by clicking with the mouse on a rectangle as it changed color from red to yellow. But in reality, the timing of the color change was pre-programmed (ranging from 1 to 2 seconds), as was the response of the simulated opponent. Although participants were free to administer the outcomes they wanted in terms of noise level and duration to their imaginary opponent, the feedback they received from this opponent was predetermined by the experimenters.

Turning now to the results, much of the study’s contributions relate to the measurement properties of the CRTT scoring method, which yielded indications of both provocative (post-loss) and unprovoked (pre-loss) tendencies to inflict pain on the participant’s opponent. The findings regarding narcissism yielded the validation information that the authors sought to establish. As the authors predicted, people high in the exploitation/entitlement factor of the NPI were more likely to punish when the challenger appeared to have won the trial. However, even before they were punished, exploitative/highly entitled individuals imposed further punishment on what they believed to be their losing opponents. Individuals who scored higher on the aggression questionnaire also showed more aggressive tendencies.

Now that the procedure appears to work as expected, the authors expect that CRTT could have important real-world applications in areas such as criminal and antisocial behavior. In addition to being relatively brief (only 30 trials are needed to reach valid results), the CRTT also benefits from its behavioral quality, which means that it is relatively impermeable to the self-reporting bias by which people try to hide their antisocial or narcissistic tendencies. .

Managing the narcissist who loses

Given that the Maastricht University study was about methodology and not about interventions, there are a few recommendations that naturally flow from the study findings. However, there are lessons to be gained from understanding the apparent vindictiveness exhibited by people high in narcissism in the CRTT competitive scenario.

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Based on their willingness to inflict pain even before losing a trial, narcissists appear to be competitive and quite willing to do battle with their opponents. Once they lose, their anger becomes more pronounced and they are willing to inflict pain the next time they have the opportunity to do so. Their wounded ego leads them to be filled with a spiteful need for revenge even if the loss is fair.

Now go back to the examples of the friend or manager who unceremoniously kicked you out of staff meetings. It seems that your best bet in responding to their anger at being ahead is to prepare for the inevitable blow. You will be attacked, criticized, belittled, and threatened to lose something you value. Although their behavior is verbally obnoxious, there is no need for you to give in just to let them save face. These situations clearly meet the “it’s not me, it’s you” test.

Bottom line, the anger that can spill over from a narcissist’s sense of failure can affect your well-being if you accept his attempt to make you feel like a loser. Instead, comfort yourself with the knowledge that their accusations and criticisms are meant to make them feel better, but should not define your own feelings of self-worth.