Validating Power Makes Communal Narcissists Less Communal

Abstract

What motivates communal self-enhancement? Paulhus and John [1998. Egoistic and moralistic biases in self-perception: The interplay of self-deceptive styles with basic traits and motives. Journal of Personality, 66, 1025–1060] posit that agentic and communal self-enhancement biases are independently motivated by needs for power and approval, respectively. In contrast, the agency-communion model of narcissism [Gebauer, J. E., Sedikides, C., Verplanken, B., & Maio, G. R. (2012). Communal narcissism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103, 854–878] posits that communal narcissists’ communal self-enhancement is driven by the need for power. We examined whether validating a sense of power affects the communal behavior and self-perceptions of communal narcissists. We observed that communal narcissists behaved less communally (Study 1) and displayed less communal self-enhancement (Study 2) when their need for power is validated rather than threatened. Consistent with the agency-communion model of narcissism, these results suggest communal narcissists are indeed motivated by the need to validate power.

Keywords::

• Narcissism
• Communal Narcissism
• Power
• Self-enhancement
• Agency
• Communion

Notes

^1. We focus on grandiose narcissism as a subclinical personality dimension, rather than Narcissistic Personality Disorder or pathological narcissism (Wink, 1991; Pincus et al., 2009). We study narcissism as a continuous variable; although we occasionally refer to “narcissists,” we use this as shorthand to denote individuals high in either communal or agentic narcissism.

^2. These questionnaires were: the NPI, CNI, a self-interest scale (Gerbasi & Prentice, 2013), and a zero-sum beliefs measure (Crocker & Canevello, 2008). Though we have observed context-dependent variability in the NPI in past research (Giacomin & Jordan, 2014), the manipulation in Study 1 did not affect NPI scores. Neither did it affect CNI scores. These null results give some assurance that our manipulation did not affect the individual differences of primary interest to our hypotheses. The manipulation also did not affect self-interests or zero-sum beliefs.

^3. These questionnaires were the Ten-Item Personality Inventory (Gosling, Rentfrow, & Swann, 2003) and the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988), the Rosenberg Self-esteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1965), NPI, CNI, the State-Trait Grandiosity Scale (Rosenthal, Hooley, & Steshenko, 2003), and the Psychological Entitlement Scale (Campbell, Bonacci, Shelton, Exline, & Bushman, 2004). The power manipulation did not significantly affect scores on any of these measures.

^4. The extent to which two of these items (emotional stability and sense of humor) are agentic rather than communal is debatable. The results were not appreciably affected by dropping these two items from our analyses and so we report analyses with them included.

^5. The interaction between condition and communal narcissism on communal better-than-average ratings is nonsignificant, B = − .12, t(159) = − 1.67, p = .100, if communal trait importance is not controlled.