If you watch TV, read popular books or even study research articles, you may walk away believing narcissism is a uniquely United States-based characteristic, whether most common in American young adults, professionals in law, business or entertainment, or politicians.
But a recent study from researchers at Michigan State University’s Department of Psychology found that narcissism is a universal trait with consistent patterns across cultures. Interestingly, their findings indicate the U.S. is not even in the top five countries with the highest levels of narcissism — and that rates are higher among young adults and men.
Narcissism, which is a psychological trait that involves excessively high self-esteem but relatively low empathy, also involves an excessive positive focus on the self and a low regard for others.
The study, published in Self and Identity, included over 45,000 people from 53 countries who provided survey data on how narcissistic they were. This data set used one of the largest and most culturally diverse data collections on psychological characteristics available.
The researchers examined how age, gender and perceived status differences in narcissism manifested across countries, including examining the roles of individualism/collectivism values and each country’s gross domestic product, or GDP.
The study found that the five countries with the highest overall narcissism scores didn’t include the United States—which came in at 16 on the list. Rather, the top five countries were Germany, Iraq, China, Nepal and South Korea, with the five countries with the lowest narcissism scores being Serbia, Ireland, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Denmark.
The researchers also found consistently across cultures that young adults were more narcissistic than older adults and that men were more narcissistic than women.
“We found that there were differences across cultures, including that people from higher GDP countries were more narcissistic, but the degree to which younger adults were narcissistic compared to older adults didn’t matter much on what country you were from,” said William Chopik, co-author of the study and associate professor in the Department of Psychology.
Previous research has shown that cultures play a significant role in shaping one’s personality and the lived experiences of people from different demographic backgrounds, but this study suggests that there are aspects of cultures that might not exert as strong of an influence.
“Being young nearly everywhere involves focusing on yourself and thinking you’re better than you are,” Chopik said. “But life can be a humbling experience, and it seems to humble people in a similar way across cultures.”
The researchers were also surprised to find that people from highly collectivistic, or group-oriented countries had similar patterns to more individualistic-thinking countries.
“Even cultures we may consider to be group-oriented don’t necessarily suppress self-focused behaviors,” said Macy Miscikowski, co-author and research associate. “Insights like these encourage us to think about the balance between cultural and biological influences on personality. It also suggests exciting avenues for studies on how life experiences, societal expectations and economic contexts interact to shape the expression of narcissistic traits across one’s lifespan.”
