It turns out Dr. Drew has been administering questionnaires measuring Narcissism to his guests on Loveline. Who knew? In 2006 he reported his results in the Journal of Research in Personality. It turns out **drumroll please** that celebrities are more narcissistic than the control group, MBA students. Even more narcissistic than MBA students!!! (Sorry, I couldn’t help it.)
They also found that some types of celebrities were more narcissistic than others, with reality show stars topping the list and comedians close behind. Musicians, apparently, are the least vulnerable to delusions of grandeur. The image below breaks out each type of celebrity, overall narcissism, and dimensions of narcissism. Yellow means that that group scored the highest on that dimension of narcissism.
Are you narcissistic? Take the quiz and find out. I scored within the normal range, but I think I lied a little bit.
UPDATE: For consideration, in the comments Charles writes:
I’d be wary about drawing any strong conclusions. The NPI mean for the celebrity group was 17.84 (SD = 6.70) while the mean for MBAs was 16.18 (SD = 6.32). Interestingly, the respective score ranges are 1-34 and 3-36. For comparison, the mean NPI score for people in the US (n = 2546) is 15.3 (SD = 6.8). The differences are statistically significant, but not large.
Via Chris Uggen.
Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College and the co-author of Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
