A new study uncovers intriguing differences in metacognition between grandiose and vulnerable narcissists

A recent study published in Personality and individual differences he discovered that not all narcissists think alike. Specifically, grandiose and vulnerable narcissists differ significantly in their metacognitive abilities.

As a field, we were still trying to figure out how much our personalities might be related to the way we think and process information. On a surface level, I think most people would expect the two to be related. But most of the research evidence so far is mixed, said Shane Littrell (@MetacogniShane), PhD, postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.

We previously published an article looking at which types of thinking styles were associated with the two main types of narcissism. Narcissism is a personality cluster made up of different levels of 3 basic Big Five personality attributes: antagonism (low agreeableness), agentic extraversion and neuroticism. From these, we get two main types of narcissism: grandiose narcissism, the most stereotypical type, where the person is exploitative, domineering and prone to high self-esteem and grandiosity, and vulnerable narcissism characterized by a sense of entitlement, need for admiration , high neuroticism, shame, mistrust and low self-esteem.

In this paper, we found that grandiose narcissism was unrelated to performance on measures of analytical and intuitive thinking, but strongly and positively predicted overconfidence for intellectual performance (i.e., bias metacognitive). On the other hand, vulnerable narcissism predicted worse performance on some of these same thinking measures, but was unrelated to intellectual overconfidence. Thus, in general, we found that grandiose and vulnerable narcissists differ not only in their personality and behavioral tendencies, but also in the way they think and process certain types of information.

This last study was our attempt to see if these differences in cognitive performance (between the two types of narcissism) extend to other types of thought processes, such as memory performance, overconfidence in memory and a type of metacognitive skill called metacognitive discrimination.

A total of 208 participants from the United States and Canada were included in this research. Participants completed the Five-Factor Narcissism Inventory Short Form to assess traits related to grandiose and vulnerable narcissism. They also completed measures of cognitive skills (focusing on numeracy and vocabulary) and metacognitive biases (overconfidence).

We measured memory performance with a word pair recall task; Participants were given 30 pairs of words to memorize, presented one at a time, Littrell explained.

For each word pair, participants were asked to rate how confident they were that they would remember that word pair later (prospective confidence). We also gave everyone an intelligence measure of vocabulary questions and math problems. After completing the intelligence items, we asked them to rate how many they thought they got right (retrospective confidence). From these measures, we calculated judgments of learning (confidence in how well you think you will do at a task), overconfidence bias (confidence in how well you think you just did a task), and ‘discrimination index (how well you can tell when you performed well and when you performed poorly).

The researchers found that grandiose narcissism predicted greater metacognitive bias and less discrimination ability. That is, individuals who were high in grandiose narcissism were significantly more confident overall, both in their judgments of memory learning (prospective overconfidence) and in their intellectual performance (retrospective overconfidence). , Littrell said.

Higher grandiose narcissism was also associated with worse metacognitive discrimination. This means that people with grandiose narcissism are less able to recognize when they have made a mistake. This was reflected in the fact that, on average, they were as confident in their correct answers as in their incorrect answers for certain cognitive tasks.”

“Interestingly, vulnerable narcissism was NOT related to performance on any of these metacognitive measures, even though our previous work shows that vulnerable narcissists are more likely to self-report being mean to them. Both types of narcissism were also negatively associated with intelligence, which supports previous work that has shown that higher narcissism correlates with lower intelligence.

What can we take from this research? Littrell explained: Overall, our results show that, despite sharing some dispositional similarities, grandiose and vulnerable narcissists not only sometimes differ in the way they act, but also differ significantly in the way they think. and process information. This has important implications not only for our general understanding of different types of narcissism at the level of common personality traits, but also for how clinicians might approach designing treatments for people whose narcissism reaches clinically diagnosable levels.

I asked Dr. Littrell if there are any caveats. He replied that it was important to note that, [our] Finding no significant association between vulnerable narcissism and any of our metacognitive measures does not necessarily mean that vulnerable narcissism is not associated with poor metacognition. In contrast, our previous studies found that vulnerable narcissism negatively predicted self-reported insight and understanding of one’s own metacognitive performance.

In other words, although people with more vulnerable narcissism do not perform worse on objective metacognitive tasks, they still tend to think that their metacognitive abilities are worse than they actually are. This is further evidence that the metacognitive deficits associated with vulnerable narcissism are qualitatively different from those associated with grandiose narcissism.

As for future research directions, the author explained that the failure to find a link with memory performance may have more to do with motivation than narcissism.

Honestly, a memory task where you have to memorize 30 pairs of words can be very boring, so poor performance could have been the result of people not being very mentally invested in the task. Future studies should propose memory tasks that are more engaging (if possible).

Furthermore, our memory task focused only on recall and learning judgments. Associations between narcissism and other memory tasks (eg, free recall, recognition) and other types of metacognitive judgments (eg, feelings of knowledge, feelings of correctness) could yield results different from those we report in our paper. Another thing to consider is whether the two types of narcissists differ in overconfidence for non-cognitive physical tasks such as athletic performance.

Relatedly, we often tend to view the overconfidence and self-enhancement aspects of narcissism in a negative light, but there can be situations where narcissism can provide benefits, such as improved performance. There are certain contexts in life (e.g., sports and other competitive activities) that provide opportunities to boost the ego through better performance. It could be the case that one or both types of narcissism can help increase motivation and performance in these situations. It’s an interesting question that I think future research should definitely explore.

The study, The Metacognitive Abilities of Narcissists: Individual Differences Between Grandiose and Vulnerable Subtypes, was written by Shane Littrell, Jonathan A. Fugelsang, and Evan F. Risko.