The truth about narcissism

You know that friend who refers to herself a lot, dropping “I” and “me” like there’s no tomorrow?

You know how you always suspected she might be a narcissist, meaning she believes she’s so much better than everyone else?

Well she may not be a narcissist, after all. In a new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers were unable to find an association between frequent use of first-person singular pronouns and the personality trait.

Related: How baby names affect future behavior

“There is a widely assumed association between use of first-person singular pronouns, what we call I-talk, and narcissism, among laypeople and scientists despite the fact that the empirical support for this relation is surprisingly sparse and generally inconsistent,“ says lead study author Angela Carey, a third-year doctoral candidate in psychology at the University of Arizona.

The initial idea that “I-talk” is associated with narcissism comes from a study of 48 people conducted in 1988 at the University of California, Berkeley.

Because that study was so small, researchers from a number of universities, including the University of Arizona, Stanford University, and Texas A&M University, among others, recruited 4,800 people (mostly college students) to investigate the association.

The study participants engaged in several tasks where they had to talk about themselves or write about themselves, or talk or write about something unrelated.

All of the study participants also took a 40-item test to measure their narcissism levels.

Then, researchers compared use of first-person singular pronouns (”I” and “me”) with the scores on the narcissism test. There was no association found.

When the researchers looked at men alone and women alone, they found a slightly higher correlation between first-person singular pronoun use and narcissism for men, but it was not statistically significant.

So how can you pick a narcissist out in a crowd? According to psychotherapist Sam Lopez De Victoria, it has to do with how he or she treats you. “A narcissist will always turn tables on you and reverse accusations by shaming and attacking your credibility.”

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