the main points
Rejection is a painful experience for anyone, but it can be disastrous for some types of narcissists.
According to the mask model of narcissism, the inflated type of narcissist covers up inner feelings of weakness.
New research shows that the arrogant narcissistic type manages to find a way to avoid being hurt by rejection, challenging the mask model.

Think about the last time you felt rejected by the people around you. Maybe you’ve arrived at your sister-in-law’s house ready for a fun, socially distanced afternoon stroll. When you entered the backyard, no one seemed to notice your arrival. A few kids are playing ball, your older relatives are talking, and your sister-in-law is having a deep conversation with her sister. After 15 agonizing minutes of wondering what you were doing there, someone finally greeted you but you still felt left out from being ignored for so long.

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

When a person experiencing rejection is high in a particular form of narcissism, the scenario may unfold very differently. According to Michel Weiss and Jonathan Hubert of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2021), the grandiose narcissistic type is known to respond to rejection by “self-enhancing, belittling, and devaluing the source of the threat” (p. 2). In contrast, those high in vulnerable narcissism respond to rejection with self-deprecation and feelings of victimization.

“The mask model of narcissism” and responses to rejection

The theoretical question running through decades of scholarly work on narcissism is whether grandiose narcissism is actually an elaborate cover-up for feelings of inadequacy. This means that those high in grandiose narcissism are, in essence, hiding high levels of vulnerable narcissism. Internally, those high in grandiose narcissism will respond to rejection with the same levels of pain and suffering as those high in vulnerable narcissism, even if their external behavior suggests otherwise.

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

To look behind the mask of those high in grandiose narcissism, the Israeli research team compared their external (explicit) and internal (implicit) reactions (called “interpretation bias” or “IB”) to experimentally induced situations involving social rejection. If the mask model is supported, people high in grandiose narcissism would show the same implicit IB as those high in vulnerable narcissism after an experience involving rejection. Hiding implicit IB would be tantamount to explicit IB, as arrogant narcissistic individuals brush off those negative experiences.

Testing the mask model in the laboratory

From an initial sample of 1,105 university participants, the research team selected 120 individuals, who were randomly assigned to two conditions, based on how they scored on a standard measure of narcissism. The sample’s ages ranged between 17 and 34 years, and 65% of them were female.

The main measure of explicit IB asked participants to indicate how they would respond to each of 16 ambiguous situations. Each situation was resolved in a positive or negative way, and participants were asked to rate the extent to which they thought the decision would apply to them. For example, consider your answer to this sample item, with its two possible meanings: “Someone looks at you standing in the elevator because they think you look attractive/exotic.” Your score will consist of your ratings of the “attractive” option versus the “weird” option in this example.

As you can see, then, the explicit IB scale taps into your conscious response to a situation because you are clearly aware of how you have rated yourself. To access participants’ implicit IB, the authors used another tool that relied not on self-report exactly, but on the length of time participants took to respond to sentences that conveyed self-relevant information but varied in whether they were passive or negative. positive.

To make this more concrete, here is one example of an implicit IB measure. You are listening to a sentence through headphones that describes a social situation. The sentence is missing the final word, such as, “As you pass by a group of people, you hear them laughing as they discuss…”

Related : Are You Dealing With a Malignant Narcissist?

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

If you are someone whose implicit IB leans toward the negative, it should take you longer to make up your mind about the grammatical correctness of the final word when that word is positive. As with other implicit bias measures, the assumption is that if you are prepared to see yourself in a negative light, you will have to stop and think for that extra second when the situation appears positive.

Now, add on top of that the manipulation that Weiss and Hubbert used to lead participants into experiencing rejection. In what is known as “Cyberball,” social psychologists have developed a method that can be simulated entirely in the laboratory. Imagine that you think you are playing a video game that involves throwing a ball with two other people. However, out of the 50 layups, only four of them give you a chance to throw the ball back, while the remaining 46 involve layups between the other two people. In the control state, you will see the game being played between three other participants and you are simply asked to count the number of throws.

Are Arrogant Narcissists Secretly Hurt by Rejection?

Results from the control condition indicate that those high in grandiose narcissism and those high in vulnerable narcissism responded to rejection as you might expect. Results on the self-report test indicated that grandiose narcissistic participants had positive evaluations and vulnerable narcissistic participants had negative explicit self-evaluations and there was no difference between the two types of narcissists on the implicit IB scale.