Am I the narcissist?
Someone threw the word at you in a fight and it has stuck with you since. What the disorder looks like, and what you can watch for in yourself.
The short answer
Probably not. The disorder is rare, about 1 in 80 adults, and one fight can’t settle it. People who really are very full of themselves usually say so when you ask them straight out. So your own honest answer counts for something, and so does the view of a friend who has known you for years.
The fight is over, or at least quiet. It was the third big one this month, and it ended with one sentence: “You’re such a narcissist.” Now you’re lying in bed next to someone who’s asleep, or pretending to be, typing the words that have been going round your head for hours: am I a narcissist?
Probably not. The disorder is rare, and one fight can’t settle it. You may also have heard that real narcissists never wonder whether they are one. That isn’t quite right: people with a lot of the trait often say so when you ask them straight out.1
Researchers tried exactly that. They asked thousands of adults how well the sentence “I am a narcissist” fit them, from 1 (not very true of me) to 7 (very true of me). The word was explained as meaning full of yourself, self-focused and vain. People who gave themselves a high number also scored high on the long questionnaires normally used.1
In one big group of ordinary adults, how many picked the very bottom of the scale, ‘not very true of me’?
Take a guess first.
Either way, your own honest answer counts for something. And worrying about the word doesn’t prove you’re free of it: the people who gave themselves high marks weren’t carefree either. They felt more shame, guilt and fear than others did.1
Am I the narcissist or the victim?
You can be both at once. When a relationship has been going badly for months, two people can both hurt each other. Whoever shouts loudest isn’t automatically the one in the wrong, and whoever uses the word first isn’t automatically the one who was wronged.
People with a lot of the trait do lash out more often on average, most of all right after they feel insulted or criticised. The link is small, though: it can’t tell you what any one person will do.2 Either way, a partner who explodes at criticism is still responsible for what they say and do then. So are you, if you’re that partner.
To see what’s going on between you, write down how your last three arguments ended: who said sorry first, who gave in, and whether either of you paid later for having been angry.
Who can I ask instead of an online test?
Two or three people who have known you for years and aren’t afraid to disagree with you.
That works better than you might think. People with a lot of the trait usually know that others think less of them than they think of themselves, and that their strong first impression wears off. They will even call themselves arrogant. What they tend to do is wave it away: the others are jealous, or don’t get it. That last part is the researchers’ guess; they didn’t measure it.3
Pick people who have seen you at work, with friends and at home, and leave out the person you just fought with. Skip “Am I a narcissist?”, which tends to get you either comfort or an attack. Ask something you can check, such as “When do I stop listening?” or “What do I do when I’m wrong?” Then comes the hard part: say nothing for ten seconds. If you catch yourself explaining why they’re wrong, that’s the waving away.
Am I a narcissist or just insecure?
Often it’s mostly insecurity. The one word covers two quite different things. One is loud and sure of itself, like the colleague who takes over every meeting. The other is touchy and easily hurt: someone who keeps feeling overlooked and holds it against people. Both give the people around them a hard time, but otherwise they have little in common.
The touchy kind turns out to be mostly ordinary personality: a lot of worry and getting upset easily, plus a bit of being hard to get along with.4 What’s left is mainly a suspicious streak and a private sense of being special. Those two deserve an honest look, even if nerves explain the rest.
If the hunger for praise is what you recognise most, and the sting when it doesn’t come, the self-esteem test looks at how you feel about yourself in general. That’s a different question from narcissism.
How rare is the disorder?
Rare: about 1 in 80 adults, going by studies from Western countries put together, several of them in Europe.5 So the word gets used far more often than the disorder turns up.
To make the diagnosis, a psychiatrist looks for a pattern that has lasted for years, at work, with friends and in love, and that causes real trouble for the person or the people around them. Three fights don’t show that.
Is there a test that shows if I’m a narcissist?
No online test can tell you whether you have the disorder. That takes a trained expert asking questions, ideally about years of your life. A quiz can only show where you sit on the everyday trait next to other people, and it only describes the person who answered, never your partner, your mother or your ex.
How you want to come across also seeps into the answers: people who care a lot about making a good impression give themselves lower scores.1 And most of what is known here comes from US students and adults filling in surveys online, not from people with the disorder.
If you’d still like to start with your own answers, the four-part selfishness test takes about 7 minutes. It scores buttering people up, bending rules, wanting more and showing off separately, because putting yourself first comes in more than one form.
Can a narcissist change?
The everyday trait usually softens with age. In one group of US students followed from 18 to 41, the group as a whole became clearly less self-focused, and the feeling of deserving special treatment dropped the most. Those who started out higher than their classmates mostly stayed a bit higher, but everyone had come down.7
People whose relationships kept starting and ending lost less of their vanity, though nobody knows which caused which. These were ordinary students, so it says nothing about treatment for the disorder. It does show the trait can move.7
Why did they call me a narcissist?
Sometimes because part of it fits. Often because, in a fight that’s going badly, it’s one of the sharpest words within reach.
When it’s aimed at you, it might stand for “you never listen”, “I always come second” or “I don’t know how else to win this”. Those are very different complaints. It’s fair to ask which one they meant, ideally once you’ve both calmed down. If some of it is true, that will sting, but at least you’ll know which habit to work on.
And if the word is on the tip of your own tongue, say what happened instead, such as “You laughed at me in front of your friends.” That gives the other person something to answer: they can say sorry, explain what they meant, or tell you they remember it differently. Try it with one moment from the past week, what was done and how it felt, and see whether the talk goes somewhere new.
Sources (6)
- Konrath, S., Meier, B. P., and Bushman, B. J. (2014). Development and validation of the Single Item Narcissism Scale (SINS). PLoS One, 9(8), e103469. journals.plos.org Back to the text
- Kjaervik, S. L., and Bushman, B. J. (2021). The link between narcissism and aggression: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 147(5), 477-503. Read the study Back to the text
- Carlson, E. N., Vazire, S., and Oltmanns, T. F. (2011). You probably think this paper’s about you: narcissists’ perceptions of their personality and reputation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(1), 185-201. Read the study Back to the text
- Miller, J. D., Lynam, D. R., Vize, C., Crowe, M., Sleep, C., Maples-Keller, J. L., Few, L. R., and Campbell, W. K. (2018). Vulnerable narcissism is (mostly) a disorder of neuroticism. Journal of Personality, 86(2), 186-199. Read the study Back to the text
- Volkert, J., Gablonski, T. C., and Rabung, S. (2018). Prevalence of personality disorders in the general adult population in Western countries: systematic review and meta-analysis. British Journal of Psychiatry, 213(6), 709-715. Read the study Back to the text
- Wetzel, E., Grijalva, E., Robins, R. W., and Roberts, B. W. (2020). You’re still so vain: Changes in narcissism from young adulthood to middle age. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 119(2), 479-496. Read the study Back to the text
