Key Points
People high in narcissism get angry when they lose a competition.
A new way to study aggression in the lab shows how vicious narcissists can be when faced with failure.
The best way to protect yourself from an angry narcissist is not to let their punitive tendencies affect your well-being.
A narcissist’s rage at you can be scary and upsetting. Without realizing it, you’ve angered this person who is now descending into a stream of venom. Worse, you wonder whether you deserved this attack on your sense of self-worth and dignity.
Maybe you posted a photo on social media where you ventured out, in your new post-pandemic life, with a group of your closest friends. You were surprised when a pre-pandemic acquaintance texted you a text full of angry insults, accusing you of disloyalty and hypocrisy. This is someone you’ve come to dislike because of their ongoing pattern of self-centered, attention-seeking behavior. In effect, the pandemic has given you a kind of excuse to cut ties. Unfortunately, this person doesn’t see things the same way. You’ve been called a traitor and an ingrate, and while you’re trying not to take it personally, it’s hard not to feel like some of that anger is justified by your behavior.
Easily angered narcissists can also make your life miserable in environments that lack the voluntary nature of friendships and other personal relationships. These individuals could be your boss, a coworker, a client, or a customer. You might have a supervisor who makes outlandish demands, loading you up on more and more projects no matter how much work each one entails. In the latest round, your boss asks you to stop going to staff meetings so you 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’re not invited is that you pose some threat by being there, either because of your appearance or the bright ideas you contribute, which makes your boss look even worse.
What causes narcissistic rage and how can it be measured in the lab?
A well-established body of literature on narcissism distinguishes between so-called “vulnerable” and “grandiose” subtypes, whose behaviors fit very closely with the name of each subtype. People high in narcissism may also exhibit psychopathic and exploitative tendencies, or the so-called “dark triad.” An integral part of these characterizations is the tendency of selfish individuals to explode in anger when someone gets in their way. Researchers attempting to study narcissistic aggression in the laboratory face several distinct challenges. In real-life situations, it is all too easy to watch someone’s aggression unfold, but creating an experimental simulation means that researchers must devise a task that mimics real life but is still tightly controlled. Furthermore, studying aggressive behavior requires that no one gets hurt.
To get to the question of what causes narcissistic anger, it is first necessary to find out how it can be measured experimentally and methodologically. To this end, Jill Lobstael and colleagues from Maastricht University (2021) decided to evaluate a measure of behavioral aggression that they believed had the potential to achieve both goals. They also designed the measure so that other researchers could freely use it for this very important goal of scientific research, which is to test the results of a study for replication.
The essence of current measures of behavioral aggression, according to the Dutch authors, is that they put 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 known to be able to achieve this goal stands out: it creates a situation in which participants can invoke some kind of negative consequence on an imaginary opponent in an experimentally designed and controlled game.
This experimental approach, known as the competitive reaction time task, pits participants against fake opponents who appear to be real people but whom 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 playing aversive white noise. Participants control the aversiveness of this punishment in terms of its magnitude and duration. To make the game seem more convincing if participants lose the experiment, they are the ones who receive the aversive stimulus. The entire game is controlled by the experimenter, who sets the winnings and losses schedule according to the details of the research design. As useful as the competitive reaction time task may be for measuring anger in measurable doses, it has a mixed history of use in psychological science because it is not consistently structured from experiment to experiment. As Lopestel and her colleagues point out, even after experimenters collect data, they do not have a consistent set of instructions that 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 Maastricht University study was to provide a computerized algorithm freely available to researchers around the world that could produce consistent results from one study to the next.
Narcissistic Violent Response to Loss
Apart from this standardization procedure, Lopestel and her colleagues sought to establish the validity of the CRTT by comparing scores from their new measure to performance on personality tests that the authors theoretically believe are relevant. Because narcissists hate losing, they should feel particularly frustrated when their supposed opponent proves to be superior to them. If the research team can demonstrate a relationship between the amount of punishment imposed during the CRTT and narcissism, they will have strong evidence that the CRTT measures what it is supposed to measure.
Related : 10 Tips for Co-Parenting with a Narcissist
The measure used to assess narcissism, the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI), has four distinct subscales for leadership/authority, self-absorption/self-management, superiority/arrogance, and exploitativeness/entitlement. The primary use of this test is to identify people who tend toward the grandiose rather than the weak dimension of this 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 6 years on clinical and non-clinical samples (423 non-clinical patients and 84 forensic patients), the authors used CRTT studies involving the following procedure. Participants believed that they would compete against an opponent whom they had to defeat by clicking a mouse on a rectangle that changed color from red to yellow. In reality, the timing of the color change was preprogrammed (ranging from one to two seconds), as was the response of the simulated opponent. Although participants were free to manage whatever noise level and duration they wanted for their imaginary opponent, the responses they received from this opponent were predetermined by the experimenters. Now, turning to the results, much of the study’s contribution was related to the measurement properties of the CRTT scoring method, which yielded indications of both provocative (after a loss) and nonprovocative (before a loss) tendencies to inflict pain on the participant’s opponent. The findings regarding narcissism provided the validation information the authors sought to establish. As the authors predicted, people with high exploitative/entitlement scores on the NPI were more punitive when the opponent appeared to have won the trial. But even before they were punished, highly exploitative/entitled individuals were more punitive toward those they perceived as their losing opponents. Individuals who scored higher on the aggression questionnaire also showed these more aggressive tendencies. Now that the scale appears to be working as expected, the authors speculate that the CRTT may have important real-world applications in areas such as criminal and antisocial behavior. In addition to being relatively short (it only takes 30 trials to produce valid results), the CRTT also benefits from its behavioral validity, which means it is relatively impervious to self-report bias, by which people try to hide their antisocial or narcissistic tendencies.
Managing the Losing Narcissist
Since the Maastricht University study was about methodology rather than interventions, few recommendations naturally flow from the study’s findings. However, there are lessons to be gained from understanding the apparent vengeance that people high in narcissism displayed in the CRTT competitive scenario.
Based on their willingness to inflict pain even before losing a trial, narcissists appear to enter a competition fully prepared to pick a fight with their opponents. Once they lose, their anger becomes even more pronounced and they are ready to inflict pain the next time they have the opportunity to do so. Their wounded egos lead them to be overwhelmed by a vicious need for revenge even if the loss was fair and just.
Now, think back to the examples of the friend or boss who summarily dismissed you from staff meetings. It seems that your best bet in responding to their anger at being outdone is to brace yourself for the inevitable blow. You will be attacked, criticized, insulted, and threatened with the loss of something you value. However, as annoying as their verbal behavior may be, there’s no need to give in just to let them save face. These are situations that meet the “it’s not me, it’s you” test.
In short, the anger that may come from a narcissist’s sense of failure can impact your well-being if you accept their attempt to make you feel like a loser. Instead, take comfort in knowing that their accusations and criticisms are meant to make them feel better, but they shouldn’t define your feelings of self-esteem.
