Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. Is Covert Narcissism Rising Among Young?

1. 00:02 Today I would like to discuss the question whether narcissism is rising among the young. So I’m going to analyze two studies. One dated 2008. It’s a
2. 00:15 seminal study and one recent study 2025. And by doing this I will also be demonstrating to you I believe why psychology will never be a science.
3. 00:28 One of the main reasons is the replication crisis. The inability to replicate the outcomes or results of
4. 00:36 studies in psychology. And the replication crisis in psychology is much worse than in other branches of of
5. 00:44 learning. It’s about 80% of all studies cannot be replicated. There are good reasons for this. The subject matter is malleable and mutable. There’s an undergeneration of hypothesis. I will not go into it all into all of it right now, but comparing these two studies is
6. 01:03 going to tell us a lot about the way psychologists think and how all the statistics in the world cannot help them to extricate themselves from the simple fact that psychology is descriptive. It’s a form of literature. It’s not and
7. 01:19 will never ever be a science. I know what I’m talking about. I have a PhD in physics and physics is a science. My name is Sam Vakny and I’m the author of
8. 01:30 malignant self- loveve narcissism revisited and a professor of psychology and today we’re going to study this rare specimen
9. 01:41 getting rarer by the day the young. So I’m going to compare two studies. The
10. 01:47 first one is the famous study by tweening Conrath Foster Keith Campbell Bushman and others published in 2008.
11. 01:54 The study was titled egos inflating over time a cross-temporal metaanalysis of
12. 02:01 the narcissistic personality inventory. It was published in the journal of personality. And the second study was co-authored by Oberiter and Pitching. The I I believe that Pichnik, I’m sorry. I believe that they’re all from Austria. Was published
13. 02:19 in 2025 and it’s titled Farewell to the Narcissism Epidemic, a cross-temporal
14. 02:25 metaanalysis of global NPI scores, 1982 2003. You can find both articles in the
15. 02:33 literature and have a field day, have fun, enjoy yourself. I’m going to
16. 02:39 compare both of them in this video. So first of all
17. 02:45 over the past few decades um and definitely over the past two decades there has been a rising
18. 02:53 sentiment that narcissism especially grandiosity
19. 02:59 is on the increase among young people. Now a very important caveat.
20. 03:06 Narcissistic personality inventory. This tool, this instrument does not measure
21. 03:13 pathological narcissism. It cannot be used to diagnose narcissistic personality disorder. Narcissistic personality inventory measures various dimensions and aspects
22. 03:25 of of narcissism. But narcissism is a trait, probably hereditary, genetic.
23. 03:32 It is not a pathology in itself. Okay. So there have been several studies
24. 03:39 and the idea was to test whether there is crossgenerational or cross-stemporal
25. 03:45 or intergenerational change in narcissism. I’m talking now about the trait and especially the aspect of narcissism known as grandiosity which is
26. 03:56 a cognitive distortion a personality. Uh so the the emphasis was on traits personality traits. So we
27. 04:03 had studies by as I mentioned twing and Campbell starting in 2001. We had um
28. 04:10 others O’Brien and Singh uh Karen and he uh Hamamura Johnson and Stankovich and
29. 04:17 and so on so forth. quite a few scholars have dedicated their work and output to to this question and they came up with a
30. 04:26 conclusion um that there is evidence for
31. 04:32 substantial cross-temporal narcissism increases. The problem was that their cohort, their
32. 04:41 population, the population that they studied was very very special US college
33. 04:47 students. This kind of sample is self- selecting, highly limited, cannot be
34. 04:54 generalized to other types of populations and very problematic because of the
35. 05:01 relationships between the population and the examiner or the population and the scholar. In other words, the members of
36. 05:09 the population might wish to please the scholar even unconsciously. top. It’s a
37. 05:16 contaminated and in many ways non-representative sample and yet it was the exclusive
38. 05:23 sample in twang studies in 2008. Be that as it may, this sample of college students was compared to previous samples of college students and
39. 05:36 the idea was to provide a cross-temporal meta analysis uh which would demonstrate an increase
40. 05:44 in mean self-reported scores on the narcissistic personality inventory among
41. 05:50 US college students between 1982 and 2006. So what Tweni and Campbell have
42. 05:57 done, they’ve aggregated 85 independent samples, a total of almost 17,000
43. 06:06 students. Immediately when the study was published in 2008, as far as my memory goes, it was partially retracted, but I’m not sure. Anyhow, when it was published in 2008, it generated a lot of controversy.
44. 06:22 There were counter studies by Arnett, by chisenfski,
45. 06:29 by Donan by by and by Tuena herself in 2013. She defended her study but she
46. 06:36 modified some of the conclusion. So it generated a lot of talk, a lot of uh controversy and of course a lot of media coverage, the MI me generation and and
47. 06:47 so on so forth. And many many scholars in various localities embarked on an
48. 06:53 effort to replicate the results of the study or at the very least to replicate
49. 06:59 the trend which the study implied that exists among the young. So there were further empirical studies and there were studies by gentile again tween campell
50. 07:12 meets and so on so forth and it all coalesed around two memes generation me
51. 07:20 and the narcissism pandemic now or narcissism epidemic now I have coined
52. 07:27 the phrase narcissism epidemic in the mid 1990s it’s been appropriated by Campbell later uh without due credit I must add but
53. 07:39 that’s not the main issue of course the main issue that there were these perceptions that there is an epidemic
54. 07:45 that narcissism is a kind of virus that is spreading among the population of the
55. 07:51 young suggested that subclinical narcissism self-absorbed people
56. 07:58 egotistical people with narcissistic behaviors they increasingly they’re becoming increasingly characteristic of young adults. That’s what Tuen said in 2013. And that these changes
57. 08:14 were probably the outcomes of increasing individualism in western societies.
58. 08:20 There is excellent metas-sychological work, work involving psychology and
59. 08:26 philosophy by Bianke, Greenfield, Gman, Varnum, many others. So they said that the culture and civilization and society was changing, becoming more narcissistic and encouraging increasing individualism among the young especially in western
60. 08:42 societies and they they came close to my concept of malignant individualism.
61. 08:48 Um other other purported or proposed causes have been cross-temporal
62. 08:54 increases in self-esteem. Gentile twang and Campbell suggested as much in 2010
63. 09:01 um or even in 2001 actually uh decreases in empathy Conra Brian and Singh in 2011
64. 09:09 or decreases in trust in the community and in religious institutions to Campbell and Carter in 2014.
65. 09:17 So everyone was scrambling about trying to make sense of the rising tide of
66. 09:24 alleged rising tide of narcissistic traits and some extent
67. 09:31 narcissistic behaviors among young people. Mind you, I repeat the disclaimer. Narcissistic personality
68. 09:38 disorder which has been used in all these studies cannot diagnose narcissistic person narcissistic
69. 09:44 personality inventory. I’m sorry, which is the test used in all these studies, cannot diagnose narcissistic personality
70. 09:51 disorder. So, we are not talking about NPD. We’re talking about the rise in what what Lens Perry would have called
71. 09:58 narcissistic style. And so scrambling for an answer, various
72. 10:06 methodological issues were noted uh regarding the observed positive time
73. 10:13 trends in narcissistic traits of students. Um one of the proposed solution was that
74. 10:21 the narcissism self-report values of women may have cross-temporary
75. 10:27 approached those of men. something I’ve been saying for decades as well. Women are becoming more narcissistic. As women emulate men, as they become more
76. 10:38 masculine in their self-perception at least, uh they also become more narcissistic or
77. 10:45 they tend to attribute to themselves narcissistic traits and characteristics. Typically, women self-report lower
78. 10:52 narcissism values than men. as uh Galva and others explained in 2015. But there
79. 11:00 has been an increase among women and the the suggestion was that women were
80. 11:06 driving this rise in narcissism. Men remained stable across the generations.
81. 11:13 But previous cross-temporal metaanalytical evidence indicated that NPI scores of women have increased over time while those of men have not.
82. 11:24 Actually, to be fair to Twangi and Campbell, they mentioned it in their own study in 2008, this study that is now
83. 11:31 much criticized. Decreasing narcissism, sex differences over time uh have been suggested to be
84. 11:38 attributable to an increase in agentic traits and assertiveness in women due to societal change which in turn affects self-reported narcissism
85. 11:49 that is twang and twang twang has foreseen this trend as early as 1997.
86. 11:58 So the increases of narcissism in women but not men would be expected to lead to
87. 12:04 a general increase in narcissism self-reporting among the young. And so that’s one very plausible in my view and very reasonable explanation.
88. 12:15 So the idea of changes in narcissism, sex differences uh was there banded
89. 12:21 about everyone was very excited about it. But then there was another meta analysis galva the aforementioned galva
90. 12:31 and according to this meta analysis there was no evidence for the convergence of scores of men and women.
91. 12:37 So now we had two bodies two bodies of studies. One body of studies coupled with
92. 12:44 philosophy or metasychology coupled with speculations coupled with common common
93. 12:50 sense assertions. You know, in other words, a weaker body of evidence suggested that the scores of women
94. 12:58 on NPI, the narcissism scores of women are increasing. And another meta analysis by Galva in
95. 13:06 2015 that showed that this is not happening and it was a stalemate. It was
96. 13:13 a mess. In addition to all this, there was a failure to replicate positive US-based
97. 13:20 college student narcissism self-reports court trajectories. In other words, when
98. 13:26 other scholars tried to replicate the results of Twain and others and so they failed. They constantly failed. And the
99. 13:32 failures were uh egregious. The failures were massive. They were repeated. they were it was like re replication crisis
100. 13:43 and it’s been suggested that narcissism changes may have followed a nonlinear trajectory. So to explain
101. 13:51 how come in 2008 there was one result and then it couldn’t be replicated ever after the the new explanation was that
102. 13:58 narcissism for some mysterious reason has peaked among the young in 2008
103. 14:04 reached its apex in 2008 and then collapsed again. And that raised the question what has happened in 2008 and of course what has happened in 2008 was a global financial crisis.
104. 14:16 And so, Tuena herself suggested in 2021 that the global finan financial crisis
105. 14:24 has driven uh young people um I mean prior to the global financial
106. 14:30 c crisis narcissism was on the rise among young people and then the global financial crisis put a stop to it
107. 14:37 somehow lo the young people didn’t have any job prospects uh there was a bleak
108. 14:43 economic outlook young people didn’t have In other words, it was difficult for young people to sustain or maintain
109. 14:50 an inflated fantastic grandiose self-concept or self-image uh because reality pushed back. It was an environment within which grandiosity was constantly challenged and undermined
110. 15:02 and finally was discarded by young people. Again, we’re talking about young people who do not have when not
111. 15:10 diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder. They were just a bit narcissistic. they had a narcissistic
112. 15:16 style. Um, and so maybe the global financial crisis was a wakeup call and
113. 15:22 these young people woke up and realized that they’re not as god as godlike as they thought they were, especially for
114. 15:28 example in the finance sector and later on in the IT sector, information technology sector. Um, also earlier the
115. 15:37 dotcom crisis in 1999. So all these crisis generated
116. 15:43 um um feeling of malaise which is not very conducive to grandiosity.
117. 15:50 One cannot convince oneself that one is omnipotent and omnisient and a genius when one doesn’t have money to move away
118. 15:56 from one’s parent parental home. Yeah. So the in the United States narcissism
119. 16:04 scores were impacted. Youth after the global financial crisis
120. 16:10 presented with declining narcissism scores and when you enter when they entered adulthood during the financial
121. 16:17 recession and they were much less likely to develop a narcissistic personality
122. 16:23 according to Bianke. And so such an effect could emerge could have been it
123. 16:30 this could have been true but we would expect it to emerge most prominently in young adults where the global financial crisis had the maximal impact. For example in Greece or in the United States uh where the havoc and the mayhem and
124. 16:47 the tumult and the destruction of the global financial crisis were at a maximum. we would expect a decline in
125. 16:53 narcissism scores among the young in these locations. And at least one idea,
126. 16:59 one study supports this idea. Um it seems to show the study by Twi in 2021.
127. 17:07 It seems to show the a nonlinear trajectory and a shift in observed narcissism among US college students after the financial crisis.
128. 17:18 So by 2020 the beginning of the pandemic
129. 17:24 the the debate was in a mess. There were studies for there were studies against
130. 17:30 and there were studies against the studies for and studies for against the studies against and dusk. It was a
131. 17:37 bloody mess. No one knew what the hell is happening and where things stand.
132. 17:43 It seems unclear whether the suspected narcissism epidemic has at all taken place and
133. 17:50 people like scholars like Rubs and Riley suggested in 2018 that it was all a
134. 17:57 mistake, a misreading of the data or a bleep of some kind or um not a trend. In
135. 18:04 any case, it’s unclear if previously observed patterns or findings represent
136. 18:10 trends that are still ongoing, whether we can generalize them to non US
137. 18:16 samples and to non college samples, whether they represent a genuine cross-temporal change in narcissism surf reports not only of college students who are essentially hostages, but of the general population and even among college students and and also So whether
138. 18:35 there is nonlinearity of changes because of uh external shocks and isolated
139. 18:41 events s such as a global financial uh crisis and whether such events can
140. 18:47 change the trajectory of of psychology it of of a psychological artifact a
141. 18:53 psychological construct to to that extent that is a very interesting idea
142. 18:59 that when external shocks happen such as recession or depression or or a pandemic
143. 19:05 or I don’t know change in gender roles or when there are external shocks it impacts not only the population of the psychology of populations and cohorts
144. 19:16 but the psychology of the individuals within the populations and cohorts. That’s a pretty revolutionary uh claim
145. 19:23 that there is large scale impact on personality traits in general population
146. 19:29 or even in selective sample populations. And so this is where the trio of I think
147. 19:37 Austrian uh scholars came in and they
148. 19:43 um made a very thorough study which they published in 2025. They embarked on a cross-temporal metaanalysis to assess global NPI based
149. 19:55 narcissism changes from 1982 to 2023. quite a grandiose undertaking
150. 20:02 and they investigated vast numbers of young people from around the world and they were very surprised and shocked by the results which I’m about to share with you and they go into all this um
151. 20:17 historical background how the Roman poet ovid in metamorphosis uh home zeroed in
152. 20:24 on Nissus this self-infatuated youngster and so on. And they were they were trying to say basically that um the young have always been accused of
153. 20:36 narcissism and everyone always believed um that the young are more narcissistic
154. 20:43 by the generation like every generation of young is more narcissistic than the previous one Aristotle himself said as
155. 20:50 much and um anecdotally people were pointing at
156. 21:01 idolizing, pedestalizing parents, parents who call their children princes or champion or whatever. An education
157. 21:08 system which always elevates the child and always rewards the child regardless
158. 21:15 of real life accomplishments, incommenurate with accomplishments and and generally there’s a machinery that
159. 21:23 creates overconfident children who are divorced from reality. basically and coupled with
160. 21:33 uh social media, vanity posting, uh selfies,
161. 21:39 other self-centered occupations. It would seem it would stand to reason
162. 21:46 make sense that this would increase narcissistic traits and behaviors and aspects of personality in in the young. And so maybe Aristotle was right all
163. 22:00 along in the 4th century before Christ when he said the youth have exalted
164. 22:06 notions because they have not yet been humbled by life or learned its necessary limitations. Moreover, their hopeful disposition makes them think themselves equal to great things. That is the grandiosity of adolescence which is essentially healthy. Narcissism and
165. 22:23 adolescence is healthy. motivates you to take on the world. Similarly, narcissism
166. 22:29 in between the ages of two and three years old is very healthy because it’s the it’s a grandiosity incumbent
167. 22:36 incumbent in narcissism grandiosity that pushes the child to abandon mother and
168. 22:42 explore the world separation individuation. So, but at least on, you know, on the surface, it looks like there are good grounds to assume that narcissism is inculcated and
169. 22:55 nurtured and foed on children and the children are encouraged to be narcissists and that narcissism is rewarded and is a positive adaptation and that entire institutions and systems
170. 23:07 are there to cater to narcissistic defenses and needs and beliefs and and even delusions and so in such
171. 23:16 And invariably uh in such an environment infused with narcissism, invariably children are likely to end up more narcissistic than previous generations interacting on
172. 23:29 social networking or social media sites especially from a young age is bound to inflate one’s metaphorical ego. Young people grow up
173. 23:41 uh convinced that their personal uh experiences are of interest to the
174. 23:47 entire world. Um and so they post it online um immortalizing themselves and there are plenty of opportunities to lie, to deceive, to embellish uh everyday lives to paint a perfect picture of themselves that doesn’t match
175. 24:05 lived reality, but rather is a form of delusional fantasy. And then gradually
176. 24:11 these young people begin to confuse the fantasy with reality which is a major clinical feature of pathological narcissism. So creating such idealized
177. 24:22 self-im images involves a danger of sliding imperceptibly and glacially into the
178. 24:30 terrain of pathological narcissism. Everything I’ve just said is speculation. Everything I’ve just said is common sense. Everything I’ve just said is anecdotal. Nothing I’ve just
179. 24:41 said is science. And that’s the main problem. In psychology, there’s a lot of
180. 24:49 speculation, a lot many narratives, very little science. Actually,
181. 24:56 the term narcissism is not well defined. Everyone is accusing everyone of being a narcissist. scholars who should know better and definitely self-styled experts with
182. 25:08 and without and with academic degrees. They confuse for example dark personalities which are subclinical with
183. 25:15 narcissism which is clinical. There’s a lot of confusion in the field and in the rush to secure 15 minutes of fame and a
184. 25:24 lot more than $15,000. I mean scholars uh would say anything and to attract media attention they would bend the rules and the truth and reality and the findings of the studies
185. 25:36 just to secure a headline. It’s a really corrupt and contaminated environment by now. The idea that narcissism is on the rise um among the young started in earnest in 2008. TW and
186. 25:54 Campbell are responsible for it because they reported grandiose narcissism has risen significantly among college
187. 26:01 students in the United States from 1982 to 20 2006. This was their study that
188. 26:07 was published in 2008. Grandio narcissism is brash,
189. 26:13 abrasive, attention-seeking, obnoxious form of the trait. Um, and it’s very
190. 26:20 important to make clear right this very second that all these studies focus on
191. 26:27 overt narcissism. Mistakenly called grandio narcissism. Mistakenly because grandiosity is common to both overt and covert narcissism.
192. 26:38 Grandiosity is always there in all types of narcissists. So it’s wrong to call only one subtype grandio but overt. So
193. 26:46 the focus was on the overt narcissist, the in-your-face, the defined, the reckless, a bit antisocial, aggressive,
194. 26:53 envious, exploitative, attention-seeking narcissist. And that was the focus. Those they
195. 27:01 totally ignored vulnerable narcissism or what is called vulnerable narcissism. Again, a misnomer. All narcissists are
196. 27:08 vulnerable. Covert. They ignored covert narcissism. the the kind of narcissist
197. 27:14 that is resentful and bitter, hypervigilant, insecure
198. 27:20 and passive aggressive. This was totally ignored and
199. 27:26 possibly you could say you possibly you could make a a proposition you could make a hypothesis that what is happening
200. 27:33 is not a decline in overt narcissism but a transition to covert narcissism.
201. 27:41 So if we find a declining trend of narcissism among the young, it’s because
202. 27:47 they’re becoming more covert rather than overt. And why are they becoming covert? Because they keep failing. They keep
203. 27:54 collapsing. The environment is not conducive to accomplishments. They can’t buy a home. They can’t have a family. They can’t even have sex. They live with their parents. They’re underpaid, if
204. 28:05 they’re paid at all. They are it’s it’s a mess. Young people’s lives nowadays are dystopian and so they’re all in a
205. 28:12 state or many of them are in a state of narcissistic collapse which is exactly when covert narcissism takes over.
206. 28:22 So the studies focused on overt narcissism and they used a an inventory
207. 28:28 the narcissistic personality inventory that cannot measure actually the more extreme forms of pathological narcissism. And so the focus was on grandiosity. Now all narcissism is grandiose. Overt narcissism, covert narcissism, somatics,
208. 28:46 rib, you name it. All types of narcissists are grandiose. So I’m not going to use grandio narcissism. I’m
209. 28:52 going to use overt narcissism. And
210. 28:58 um what I’ve learned from these studies um in 200
211. 29:06 studies which ended in 2006 and published in 2008 what they’ve learned is that younger people um the younger
212. 29:15 the people the more likely they are to identify grandiosity in themselves using
213. 29:21 the NPI. So people in 2006, young people in 2006 were much more likely to identify grandiosity in themselves than people in 1982. And that established the trend line. And
214. 29:33 immediately there was a media frenzy, generation me. And everything narcissism
215. 29:39 was used to explain everything. Like some psychologist said that the narcissism epidemic is the cause of the global financial crisis. that uh the MI
216. 29:52 generation are lazy entitled narcissists who are living with who still live with their parents. They are reckless. They are uh it’s a plague that is ravishing
217. 30:04 the youth of America. There are serious repercussions. uh narcissistic personality traits of
218. 30:10 younger generation give rise to overconfidence, risky behavior, unsound
219. 30:16 economic decision-making and that is what has led to the crash of the mortgage crisis and the crash of the
220. 30:22 stock markets and the entire financial system. It was all because of narcissism among the young and indeed in the
221. 30:28 finance sector most people are young. And so it was all very cozy and snuggly
222. 30:35 fitting because you know here the young young people narcissism is rising. They behave narcissistically. They have a narcissistic style and they destroy everything and everyone
223. 30:47 around them because that’s what narcissists do. And it sounded very logical, very plausible, very probable. Overconfident youth, overestimating
224. 30:58 their knowledge, overestimating future earnings because they live in fantasy, carelessly taking out mortgages they could not realistically afford because they’re reckless.
225. 31:10 defying the authorities and their elders with contempt because highly grandios
226. 31:16 and then destroying everything in the subprime mortgage crisis. So it was
227. 31:23 it was catchy. It made sense of the world. It imbued everything that
228. 31:29 happened with meaning direction. It was clear what the problem is and the only
229. 31:35 thing remaining is to somehow find a cure or a solution.
230. 31:43 But within academia, I mean mass media aside, mass media aside, within
231. 31:50 academia, there were many doubts. Immediately when the article was published in 2008,
232. 31:56 there were many doubts. There was no the articles were the
233. 32:02 article was not welcomed in the in academic circles. at least four articles between 2008 and 2013, three different research teams, Jeffrey
234. 32:14 Arnett, uh Brent Roberts, uh Kaye Tjaneki,
235. 32:21 at least three teams published scing criticism of the 2000
236. 32:27 study. They tried to replicate generation generational increases in narcissism and they failed miserably.
237. 32:35 And of course, the media ignored these papers like
238. 32:41 uh like it’s not a headline to say the youth are nice and they’re not narcissists. It’s it is a headline to
239. 32:47 say the youth are narcissists and they are recklessly endangering all of us. So ma the mass media is after sales advertising income and and headlines. So of course Tweni got all the exposure and
240. 33:00 her critics were sidelined and the studies were never reported to the best of my knowledge outside academic
241. 33:06 circles. The advocates of the of the pandemic ID um
242. 33:13 um claimed that the attempts to replicate the the findings were flawed. the methodology of the replication process was was flawed
243. 33:24 because for example they focused on students from other university campuses at other times. I find it unconvincing
244. 33:31 and that is a British understatement of the year. Okay. To this very day if you talk to
245. 33:38 people actually if you watch my channel everyone is saying that there is an
246. 33:44 epidemic of pandemic actually of narcissism among young people. This is the public perception and this to a
247. 33:52 large extent is still the academic perception and because the scholarly debates are
248. 33:59 unresolved and you can pick and choose. You can be very picky and choosy the studies that support your view, you know, confirmation bias and the studies that don’t support your view, you
249. 34:09 criticize, you discard or you ignore, which is a very common practice regrettably in psychology.
250. 34:16 Um and so these three Austrians tried to replicate the original study using the very same methodological approach but based on a substantially
251. 34:27 larger database and time frame.
252. 34:33 They analyzed and they studied an incredible 8,000 studies. They like
253. 34:40 metaanalyzed 8,000 studies from numerous
254. 34:46 literature databases. They evaluated more than 4,000 of these studies in
255. 34:52 detail like the text, the full text and and so on. And finally, they put together a database of 540,000
256. 35:00 participants. The average age was 27. And they hailed from 55 countries all
257. 35:06 over the world. And they were these people were administered the narcissistic personality inventory
258. 35:12 between 1982 and 2023. It’s a much larger data set than was available to
259. 35:20 Tuen who used to remind you 17,000 students.
260. 35:26 Based on this exponentially larger, more thorough, more culturally
261. 35:33 representative and more time spread database based on this data set. The authors claim, the Austrian authors claim in this recent
262. 35:44 article published in 2025, they claimed that they have found no evidence for any increasing trends in grandio narcissism across time. This is a quote.
263. 35:56 Not in the USA, not in college students, let alone on a global scale. In fact,
264. 36:02 say the authors, the only discernable time trend in narcissism scores across all investigated countries and
265. 36:09 populations was a negative one, meaning that narcissism scores have actually been decreasing, not increasing. That’s pretty shocking.
266. 36:21 How can one explain I mean it’s easy to explain an increase in narcissism enabling technologies this
267. 36:29 that but how does one explain a decrease in narcissism
268. 36:35 modern life modern contemporary civilization is boosts narcissism encourages
269. 36:41 narcissism rewards narcissism why would people become less narcissistic in such an environment
270. 36:50 First of all, the intuitive idea that social media encourages, accelerates,
271. 36:58 engenders, enhances pathological narcissism is is just that it’s an idea. There are
272. 37:05 no rigorous studies that support this or at least no studies that have been replicated that support this. I’ve
273. 37:12 always maintained that social media is the outcome of nar are the outcomes of narcissism, not the engine of
274. 37:19 narcissism. The authors say that the omnipresent necessity for a social media user to compare their imperfect self with people
275. 37:30 bo with people boasting seemingly flawless lives. Uh this need to compare oneself, it’s
276. 37:38 called relative positioning. They need to compare yourself to people who claim to have flawless lives. They have the
277. 37:45 looks, their appearance is amazing and so on. This, as the authors say, can have a negative effect on self-confidence and well-being, especially in young people. This means that social media is more likely
278. 37:57 lowering instead of increasing grandio narcissism. This is where I completely disagree.
279. 38:03 I think relative positioning when you compare yourself unfavorably to other
280. 38:09 people online, it doesn’t reduce your narcissism. It converts your narcissism from overt to
281. 38:16 covert. Your grandiosity becomes covert rather than overt.
282. 38:23 I think the fact that all these studies ignore covert narcissism
283. 38:30 is a ginormous mythological flaw because there are good grounds to
284. 38:37 speculate that covert narcissism may be the dominant form of narcissism nowadays.
285. 38:44 It’s compensatory. And in an in an environment where people are rendered helpless and hopeless
286. 38:51 increasingly more so by the day, they would tend to become covert rather than overt. And to ignore that is ignorant or
287. 39:02 at the very least methodologically flaw. So the claim that social media reduce
288. 39:08 narcissism because they confront you with images of other people who are superior to you or
289. 39:15 claim to be superior to you. It’s a ridiculous uh claim, a ridiculous idea because that would drive you to become a covert narcissist rather than an overt
290. 39:26 one. It would not reduce your narcissism. If you are prone to narcissism, you would simply go covert
291. 39:32 because you would have experienced a sense of collapse. The authors say
292. 39:40 uh what’s more, far from displaying greater entitlement, it appears pro-social behavior has been on the rise among young people over the past decades. For instance, large-scale
293. 39:53 national surveys of incoming college students in the United States found that recent participation in volunteer work increased from 66% in 1990 to 84% in
294. 40:04 2008 alongside an increased desire to help others and participate in community
295. 40:10 action. Young people are also more tolerant of diversity, including differences in sexual orientations or in
296. 40:17 identities. and young evangelicals increasingly endorse environmental stewardship. Consistent with these
297. 40:24 observations, antisocial behaviors have dropped in many countries.
298. 40:30 This is also a very flawed argument. While I’m very impressed with the data
299. 40:36 set that these Austrian scholars have assembled and intrigued by their conclusions regarding the rising or
300. 40:44 declining trend of narcissism among the young, their explanations suck. I’m
301. 40:50 sorry to say young people are not becoming more tolerant. Young people are voting for the far
302. 40:57 right. They’re engaged much more in hate in hate speech. The young people are well way more aggressive in um the aggression could be
303. 41:08 intergender aggression, could be political violence. And yes, young people are more mobilized, but they are mobilized to support political goals or political aims
304. 41:21 which are intolerant and violent and aggressive. It’s like saying that being a member of the Hitler Yugand was a positive thing
305. 41:32 because it implied community service or mobilization. That’s a ridiculous claim. It’s a
306. 41:39 ridiculous claim. I I don’t see any sign for example uh in the United States in the past two years young men have gravitated to the
307. 41:51 far right in huge numbers far outweighing young women and uh
308. 41:59 uh there is an exponential explosion not even increase but explosion in the
309. 42:06 manosphere and toxic masculinities and toxic femininities is there’s intergender aggression on both sides.
310. 42:13 There’s I don’t see any hint of what these people are saying. I’m sorry to say. I don’t know where they got the data and how on earth could they interpret it this way. That’s a young man leaves his home in order to
311. 42:26 participate in a rally or to work in his community doesn’t mean that his goals
312. 42:32 are pure. Doesn’t mean that he’s more communitarian. volunteering to do something doesn’t
313. 42:39 imply that you’re more tolerant or more positive or less narcissistic. So I
314. 42:46 completely discard this kind of argument. The authors continue to say external factors may also have played a role in changing traits in beneficial ways in the younger generations as in most western countries psychosocial care
315. 43:01 and health services have become more accessible. Decreasing stigmatization of
316. 43:07 seeking professional help and increased state subsidized assistance in most in more recent decades have led to more people seeking psych psycho psychological treatments
317. 43:18 because narcissism is known to be associated with anxiety and depression especially when someone feels criticized
318. 43:24 or humiliated. Perhaps it makes sense that better awareness of mental health issues and access to treatments has
319. 43:32 helped to amilarate narcissistic tendencies. All of the above trends are consistent with the downwards trajectory of narcissism that we observed over the past 40 plus years.
320. 43:47 In summary, say the authors, there is no indication that young people nowadays are any more narcissistic than young
321. 43:54 people some decades ago. In fact, the concerns about an increasingly egotistical, self-absorbed, and arrogant youth that will continue to endanger the economy appear to be unfounded and
322. 44:06 overly pessimistic. On the contrary, we have good reason to assume that young people nowadays are more ready to help,
323. 44:13 more tolerant, and more pro-social in general, thus promising positive outlook for a future. I think this is complete
324. 44:21 unmitigated counterfactual nonsense. I’m sorry to say in the absence of studies of covert narcissism there’s nothing we can say
325. 44:33 about the trend of narcissism among the young period. They may simply be transitioning from overt narcissism to covert narcissism because they are in a constant state of collapse. And the alleged pro-social and communal trends among the young is
326. 44:52 exactly like saying that the young people who were members of the Hitler Yugand or the Comol in Soviet Russia
327. 45:00 were pro-social and communal. That’s complete nonsense.
328. 45:06 volunteering and leaving home a living uh home to participate in activities and
329. 45:12 becoming a member of an ingroup doesn’t teach us anything about the nature of the activity and definitely does not indicate a rising tolerance and so on. It’s completely negated by all the
330. 45:23 facts. There is the only thing we can say it is
331. 45:29 that the rising trend of overt narcissism,
332. 45:35 the rising tend of delusional grandiosity among the young may have may
333. 45:41 have plateaued, may have stabilized and may even be declining.
334. 45:47 But we don’t know why definitely. And we don’t know whether
335. 45:53 this overt narcissism has not been replaced by covert narcissism because no studies bother to check this bother to
336. 46:02 investigate this. And all the reasons that these Austrian authors are giving are easily
337. 46:08 debunkable. They’re they’re complete complete nonsense. I’m sorry to say
338. 46:15 there they should be commended for putting together the data set. It should this database should serve should be of good service to future scholars
339. 46:27 and their finding their negative finding that they couldn’t find an increase in is
340. 46:34 intriguing and it means we have to study covert narcissism. Now we have to check for covert narcissism among the young and only then we will have the full
341. 46:45 answer.