Narcissists tend to feel entitled, have inflated views of themselves, and have low levels of empathy.
The “traditional” way to formally determine whether someone has a narcissistic personality has been to administer a 40-question questionnaire known as the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. (You can try it for yourself here .) The inventory measures narcissism in general and its component traits, but it’s time-consuming to complete (as you’ll find if you try it yourself). This can be problematic for researchers, especially when they’re only interested in a general measure of someone’s narcissism. Part of the challenge is that participants get bored and distracted, and then drop out of studies.
But researchers have recently found that if you just want a general overview of narcissism, you can replace the 40-question inventory with a single-question assessment: “How narcissistic are you?”
The basic idea behind this approach is that people with narcissism aren’t ashamed of it, so they don’t hesitate to say so. Non-narcissists, on the other hand, are ashamed to be seen as such, so they tend to rate themselves low on the scale.
“People who are narcissistic are almost proud of it,” says study co-author Brad Bushman. “You can ask them directly because they don’t see narcissism as a negative trait—they think they’re superior to others and they don’t mind saying it out loud.” [1]
The development of the single-item narcissism scale wasn’t based on just one study: The researchers conducted 11 different studies with more than 2,200 people to reach their conclusions. You can read the full study at PLOS ONE [2].
Why is this particularly interesting to people like me, who study social media? We want to learn how to tell if someone is narcissistic by analyzing their social media profiles—or rather, we want to do it without asking any questions. To develop computer models to help us, we need a lot of “real” data—that is, data points that tell us what people’s online profiles contain and how narcissistic they actually are.
To do that, we need volunteers to take a survey about narcissism.
But while it’s hard to get people to take a long survey, it’s fairly easy to get them to answer a single question. My colleagues and I are running a study right now to see if we can analyze the text of people’s Twitter posts and use that to determine whether they’re narcissists. This single question about narcissism has made our job much easier; something that used to take 15 minutes now takes 30 seconds.
