Aren’t People Who Think They’re Right So Annoying To Those of Us Who Really Are?

After I noticed my sister reading it (thanks, Deb), I picked up The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement, by Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, two psychologists.

While I thought the authors had many intriguing points, and of course it was worth the read to get their perspective, I wasn’t entirely convinced of their main thesis: that there is an epidemic of pathological narcissism affecting approximately 1 in 6 people in the USA (and rapidly spreading worldwide) to which many of our current evils can be traced, and that immediate action must be taken to arrest its growth.

This isn’t to say that they had no good points or persuasive arguments — for instance, I thought one idea of theirs that seemed to have been treated particularly unfairly by the reviewers they mentioned was that we should stop telling children they’re special for no good reason.

(Well, part of the uproar seems to be a failure to acknowledge that many meanings of “special” are conflated in the “you’re special” stuff we often tell children. Twenge and Campbell are right to point out that, no, it’s a bad idea to tell kids they’re special in the sense of “for an indeterminate reason, you are somehow better than everybody else”. But it’s not a bad idea to tell kids they’re special in the sense of “special to me and/or your other loved ones — deserving of love and irreplaceable to those who love you”, because they are. Clearly, parents need some philosophy training to teach them to define their terms.)

However, although I found the overall argument to be an interesting and potentially useful idea to consider, it left me unconvinced. And here are a few reasons why.

1. Methodology. I’m sceptical of drawing extensive conclusions from self-reporting, particularly from college and university students. I know research psychologists have a lot of experience and training in interpreting this data, and I’m not trying to say it’s useless. Sometimes, Campbell and Twenge carefully point out that the results of these studies are valid regardless of what one feels about their content. Cool: self reports can certainly show correlation between giving certain answers and performing certain behaviours in “real life.”

The reason I’m so wary of drawing stronger conclusions from self-reporting — like discovering motivations or distinguishing causes for effects — is because I have often been one of those college students filling out a questionnaire or getting interviewed by a psych grad student. And you know what? Sometimes spotting the “right” answer is so easy that the ethics-review-forced “reveal” at the end of the experiment when they tell you what they were really testing for is as disappointing as the end of an M. Night Shyamalan movie. (We’re talking The Village here.) Other times, your answer is different based on what happened in the ten minutes before you kept your appointment. Other times, there are reasonable interpretations of the study that don’t necessarily match the intentions of the researchers.

For example, Twenge and Campbell cite a study in which people who measured high on the narcissism index were more likely to take more candy offered from a bucket marked as though it came from a children’s project at another university institution. They hint that this can be interpreted as narcissists being more comfortable taking candy from others, even if those others are children. However, that assumes that you can rule out the possibilities of 1) the subjects noticing the label on the bucket being “subtly” presented and mentally eye-rolling at the obviousness of the “experiment” (because, c’mon, who the hell tells you to take as much candy as “you deserve” if they aren’t psychologists doing an experiment?); and 2) the subjects assuming that the bucket was borrowed from another department (as so many things in university settings tend to be), or that the candy wouldn’t be going back to the children anyhow (that’s not taking candy from children, that’s taking candy from the klepto researchers who are going to eat it anyway when they experiment is over), etc.

2. Nostalgia/Bad History. I appreciate that direct comparisons of tests done a few decades ago with tests done now on similat groups can help us to learn about the differences between the past and the present. However, I’m not sure I can buy the simplistic historical argument that those differences stem from narcissism or even mainly from narcissism. For instance, is it the case that undergraduate students of today are made up of a significantly different demographic than those of fifty years ago? Might the popular understandings of particular terms have changed? Or the social acceptability of expressing certain ideas about oneself (e.g., maybe if you felt entitled in the 1950s, you still knew it was detrimental to your popularity to say so on a test, whereas today it’s more acceptable)? What about social, historical, cultural, political, intellectual… etc. causes?

And it seems like the authors paint a somewhat selective view of the past. So… the Great Generation helped to liberate Europe from the Nazis, and that demonstrates how selfless and non-narcissistic they could be. Fine. But (even supposing that we’re only dealing with Americans here and accept that every soldier’s actions in the war were his or her own choice) then what does it say about them that they were complicit in segregation? How come that kind of generational selfishness isn’t indicative of a psychological epidemic? Why is the first demonstrative of psychological qualities but the latter just an indication of historical truths? Both show psychological qualities; both were affected by social and historical contingencies.

Last, as a historian of technology, I find it kind of funny every time I read about how a new technology is completely destroying/eroding/hurting existing social practice. It’s difficult not to: you see similar arguments crop up every time something major changes the technological landscape, whether it’s the Internet today or the printing press centuries ago. To say, “Facebook makes people have shallower social relationships!” shows a misunderstanding of all the complex ways in which users and technologies interact within the larger cultural context, and often, although not always, these criticisms boil down to, “People should use and/or want to use technologies in the exact same way as me!”*

3. Logical fallacy. A lot of the arguments in this book are presented in the following form. “If people are narcissists, they exhibit behaviour X, Y, and Z. Here are some studies, anecdotes, and/or statistics demonstrating that lots of people do X, Y, or Z. Implied: lots of people are narcissists.” While this is entertaining — and while this type of psychology doesn’t exactly lend itself to, say, double-blind experiments that might allow researchers to make stronger claims — it’s what’s known as “affirming the consequent.” Campbell and Twenge are to be applauded for including the information, as it’s both healthy documentation of where their theories come from and evidence of an intellectually sound attempt to disprove as well as support their hypotheses. (After all, if lots of people weren’t doing X, Y, and Z, that would be evidence against their conclusion.)

However, although arguments of this form are intuitively appealing (a made-up example:  “Narcissists are self-indulgent. In 199X, 40% of teens spent more money on clothes for themselves than on food” does  make you feel like  lots of teens must be narcissists), they require further evidence to support the stated conclusions. If it’s raining, I take out my umbrella. I take out my umbrella — but that doesn’t mean it’s raining.

4. Interpretation of meaning. Because Campbell and Twenge are discussing popular phenomena, they often have to explain their understanding of these phenomena within their arguments to show how some feed narcissism and others do not. Which just leads me to recognize the variability of interpretations of the meaning of most art forms and social practices.

Example: Twenge and Campbell praise the Harry Potter series as a popular franchise lauding virtues that are the opposite of narcissism — bravery, friendship, love, etc. Fair interpretation. However, it’s just as easy to make an argument for the opposite, that the Harry Potter series is a narcissistic fantasy in which Harry really is special, not because he works at it but because he was just born a Quidditch star and hero. People can and do argue that his relationships with his friends are all about himself, that he and his classmates are materialistic compared to fantasy heroes of generations past, etc. The only reason Harry doesn’t come across as narcissistic, you might suggest, is because his world has been set up so that all the things that in real life are symptoms of an inflated self-concept are actually true: he really is the centre of the universe.

Now, I’m not trying to argue that either interpretation is correct, but the point is, multiple interpretations exist, and researchers can’t assume that one supercedes the other. And it’s not just with books and movies: interpretations of actions on new Internet-based social media like Facebook and MySpace vary wildly between generations and users. For instance, there’s a subtle social etiquette to Facebook that would be very easy for casual users to miss. You can tell a user’s rough age by the sorts of things they feel are appropriate to put in their status, and the sorts of responses they give to others’ posts. Many of my peers know what I mean if I explain someone is “a mom on Facebook” — doesn’t mean they’re actually a mother, it just means that this person is older than us and uses Facebook differently. So how can researchers who don’t seem to use Facebook much themselves make an informed choice between these different interpretations?

5. Usefulness of terminology. Personally, I don’t find it useful to ask myself,  “Am I a narcissist?” (or… a racist? A feminist? Good? Bad? Kind? etc.) IMPORTANT: This isn’t to say psychological diagnoses are useless — if I were having serious problems to the extent that I couldn’t function through ordinary life, then, yeah, it does help for a psychologist to be able to view my behaviour through a framework put in place by studying people with similar problems to mine (or in some cases, to pinpoint physiological contributing causes). But that’s not what I’m talking about.

Part of Twenge and Campbell’s argument seems to be that this kind of conversation on narcissism is important for improving one’s status as an ethical being. But for me, the important questions are, “What did I do today? What should I have done today? What can I do different tomorrow?” Not, “Am I a narcissist?” or  even “Did I behave in a narcissistic fashion?”, but, “Did I hurt a friend’s feelings today? Did I lose my temper? When? How? What do I have to do to avoid repeating this action?”

Discussion of narcissism is useful in drawing attention to certain kinds of bad behaviour and bringing it up as a topic of conversation. And certainly those with a pathological personality disorders need their psychologists or psychotherapists to be able to count on a bank of relevant and easily found research.  But I question the usefulness of giving everyone else a label to put on certain constellations of vices — to me, this gives some a back door out of the arena (“I’m not a narcissist, so I don’t have to worry about the times when I occasionally behave like one”) and directs others’ focus inappropriately (“Oh no, I do some of the things that narcissists do! I’d better watch out for all the other ones they do, too, even though those aren’t things I usually do!”).

In the end, while I recommend The Narcissism Epidemic as a thoughtful and interesting read, and while I think Twenge and Campbell have important topics to bring up, I can’t say I’m a convert. I can, however, say that this blog entry went on way too long. So until next week.

* Don’t get me started on criticisms of Internet-based communications technologies. Personally, I have no interest in using, say, Twitter. But that doesn’t mean it’s contributing to the downfall of society or ruining social interaction. To each their own, and, haters, consider: even if “friending” people on Facebook or posting boring blogs is antisocial and trivial, what does it say about your own social practices that people would rather do it than talk to you?