Grandiose narcissism influences the phenomenology of remembered past and imagined future events

ABSTRACT

Little empirical work has examined future thinking in narcissistic grandiosity. We here extend prior work finding that people scoring high in grandiosity have self-bolstering tendencies in remembering past events, and we consider whether these tendencies extend to imagining future events. Across an initial study (N = 112) and replication (N = 169), participants wrote about remembered past events and imagined future events in which they embodied or would embody either positive or negative traits. Participants then rated those events on several subjective measures. We find that people scoring higher in grandiosity remember past events in which they embody positive traits with greater detail and ease than past events in which they embody negative traits. These same effects persist when people scoring high in grandiosity imagine possible events in their future. Those scoring higher in grandiosity endorse thinking about positive events in their past and future more frequently than negative events, and they judge positive future events as more plausible than negative future events. These tendencies did not extend to objective detail provided in their written narratives about these events. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that grandiosity is associated with self-bolstering tendencies in both remembering the past and imagining the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Grandiosity
• narcissism
• memory
• future simulation
• self-enhancement

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badge for Open Data. The data are openly accessible at https://github.com/sekalinowski/simulation-biases-grandiosity .

Acknowledgements

We thank Roni Setton for help with data preparation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available at https://github.com/sekalinowski/simulation-biases-grandiosity.git.

Notes

1 Although it is standard practice in the literature to refer to self-enhancing tendencies as self-enhancing biases, here we will use the term “self-enhancing tendencies” when referring to individuals scoring high in grandiosity both because we lack an objective benchmark for accuracy and to avoid pathologizing this population.

2 Although prior work relating to narcissism and memory has focused on the difference between agentic and communal memories (for review: Jones, 2018), we intentionally included cue words that reflected a range of agency, as we aimed to identify broad, valence-based tendencies in memory and simulation.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Institute on Aging Grant R01-AG008441 (to D.L.S.) and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under Grants Nos. DGE 2140743 and DGE 1745303 (to S.E.K.).