Narcissistic Acts in Everyday Life

ABSTRACT This article presents a series of studies on narcissism, a personality syndrome receiving increasing theoretical and practical attention. Four empirical studies were carried out to ( a ) identify narcissistic acts in everyday life, ( b ) identify the acts subsumed by dispositions that are seen as central components of narcissism, ( c ) identify which acts and which dispositions are most and least central to narcissism, ( d ) test the hypothesis that the conceptually specified component dispositions of the narcissistic personality disorder indeed covary sufficiently to merit the designation of narcissism as a syndrome, ( e ) identify sex differences in the acts through which narcissism is manifested, ( f ) validate the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (a major personality instrument developed to assess narcissism), and ( g ) locate narcissistic act performance within each of three major taxonomies of personality psychology.