In Ovid’s story of Echo and Narcissus, people who have strong feelings of entitlement and self-importance are often called narcissists. From a personality psychology perspective, all people can be placed on a continuum representing the degree to which a person exhibits narcissistic tendencies in general (in addition, some people may be diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder).

The concept of narcissism has attracted much attention from researchers and the general public alike. Surprisingly, however, people associate narcissists with different—and even contradictory—characteristics.

For example, some narcissists have been described as charming, self-confident, well-liked by others, and prone to being the center of attention. In contrast, other narcissists have been described as arrogant, manipulative, and somewhat aggressive in general.

Within these (contradictory) descriptions, researchers have long recognized that narcissists can exhibit very different characteristics. However, it was not until recently that they had accumulated comprehensive empirical evidence about clearly distinguishable manifestations of narcissism.

Recent evidence on the different facets of narcissism

In one such recent study, Michael Crow and colleagues collected more than 300 items from 46 subscales and a scientific measure of narcissism and asked nearly 600 people to complete this battery of items. Across various analyses, the researchers found support for distinguishing between three different facets of narcissism that they called agentic extraversion, egocentric hostility, and narcissistic neuroticism.

What makes these findings interesting is not only the fact that the researchers based their decision about which facets of narcissism to distinguish on the results of a study that included items from many existing narcissism questionnaires (and thus, not on the results of a study that included items from just a few pre-selected measures). It is worth noting that their results largely mirror other recent investigations across workgroups and countries. Mitja Back (and others) have proposed briefly calling the three facets agentic narcissism, hostile narcissism, and neurotic narcissism.

Agent Narcissism, Hostile Narcissism, and Neurotic Narcissism

Roughly speaking, agentic narcissism primarily refers to a view of oneself as grandiose, hostile narcissism refers to one’s willingness to exploit others for personal gain, and neurotic narcissism primarily refers to one’s need for positive feedback from others. Importantly, all three still share strong feelings of entitlement and superiority over others, although agentic narcissism, hostile narcissism, and neurotic narcissism come with different attitudes, cognitions, and behaviors. They overlap in the way narcissistic people think about themselves first and feel entitled to do so.

Given the different manifestations of narcissism, the question is what determines which manifestation a person with high narcissism will develop. In this regard, more comprehensive and long-term research is needed—in light of the knowledge now available about the different manifestations of narcissism. Despite this, previous studies do suggest that some genetic and environmental factors are shared among people with high levels of narcissism, while other factors appear to influence whether a person displays active, hostile, or neurotic narcissistic tendencies.

So, are there all narcissists everywhere?

As noted above, personality psychologists consider subclinical narcissism to be a trait in which people can generally have lower, average, or higher levels, with only a minority of people showing extremely high levels. Furthermore, contrary to some popular claims, recent research (led by Unik Wetzel) comparing three large student groups suggests that narcissistic tendencies have declined over the years. But what the findings described here tell us is that narcissists can come in very different forms, from being charming to being extremely aggressive to being weak. Thus, it can sometimes be difficult to detect when a person’s feelings and behavior are an expression of a strong underlying sense that they are worth more than others and therefore strongly put their interests above others.