Narcissism (16-item version)

The scientific study of narcism (also known as "narcissism") goes way back to the 19th century, and it is a well studied concept in psychiatry. Here is the DSM (3rd edition) description of narcism (as quoted from Raskin and Terry, 1988):

"" the narcissistic personality is defined by the following clinical criteria: a grandiose sense of selfimportance or uniqueness; a preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love; exhibitionism; an inability to tolerate criticism, the indifference of others, or defeat; entitlement or the expectation of special favors without assuming reciprocal responsibilities; interpersonal exploitativeness, relationships that alternate between extremes of overidealization and devaluation; and a lack of empathy. ""

Since before the second world war, a number of psychological scales of narcism have been developed (Raskin and Terry, 1988, give an overview).

According to the Web of Science database, the Raskin and Terry (1988) is the most cited research article about narcism. It uses Raskin and Hall’s 1979 first publication of the widely used Narcissistic Personality Inventory.

The original Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) has 40 items. There is a brief version called the 16 item NPI, which uses items of the 40-item questionnaire. The demo shows the 16-item version. The NPI-16 does not capture all aspects of the NPI-40, but can be justified when limited testing time is available. Unlike the NPI-40, the NPI-16 is unidimensional, that is there are no subscales. The underlying factor structure of narcissism is still a matter of debate, so it would be hard to argue that there is one true measure.

In the Ames et al (2006) study, there were 5 different studies with slightly different groups. Here is a short description of the group and the means, so that you can compare yourself. Narcissists have a score over .5.

The scores run from 0 to 1, from low to high on narcism.

You can use the published scale, but you need to acknowledge and cite the original research (Ames, Rose, and Anderson, 2006) and Raskin and Terry (1988).

This questionnaire does not use the typical Likert scales, but instead uses the "multiradio" element to show two choices for each item. The score is the mean score (one item of each pair is scored 0 and one 1).

In the line t: multiradio 2, the number 2 indicates that we use two lines for each item. In principle, you can also use triplets (you would use the number 3) or more. That said, typically, this type of questionniare item typically uses pairs of items, like here.

Note that the in the list of items in the survey code, half the pairs are indented one space. That is done purely and only for human readability (otherwise, it is more difficult to know which lines follow pairs). The computer ignores this, and this is thus not a PsyToolkit requirement.