Zan Boag: I read in the preface to the paperback edition of your book The Narcissism Epidemic that you had written the book before Twitter had got going. It’s quite easy to have a look at the current environment and talk about narcissism online, but you were writing about it before social media had really started to take hold. In referring to it as an epidemic, a word that’s top of mind at the moment, you made a comparison to obesity and to disease in general. Why did you see it, and do you continue to see it, like a ‘disease’?
W. Keith Campbell: When comparing narcissism to obesity, we were just trying to look at comparative social phenomena in terms of effect size. And that’s where obesity came from. And also, there’s probably some social dynamics with fast food and narcissism that line up pretty well.
Could you define narcissistic traits and narcissism and the difference between narcissism, egotism, and arrogance?
Narcissism is tricky because there’s this idea that narcissism’s a trait, a personality trait, which is a characteristic pattern of dealing with the world that people have higher or lower levels of. And in terms of that trait narcissism, which we all have some level of, there are two forms that we get interested in as researchers. So there’s this more grandiose form, which is this combination of a sense of entitlement and selfcentredness, but also extraversion and drive and ambition, and it’s really more approach-oriented and sensation-seeking and attention-seeking and dominant-seeking. And that’s the kind of narcissism most of us talk about when we’re talking about narcissism.
And then there’s this second form, which is this more defensive, thin-skinned kind of fearful, low self-esteem narcissist. You know, I don’t like really myself, but people should pay more attention to my genius and I’m kind of too scared to get out and say anything.That’s the form that’s called ‘vulnerable narcissism’, that ends up in a clinical setting. In terms of the disorder, what happened is people in clinical contents or psychiatric contents started seeing this narcissism come up as an issue back in the ‘60s, and they started diagnosing it as just one of the personality disorders.
Narcissistic personality disorder – NPD – is 50 years old. And it’s a combination of both these things because the people in therapy always had a little bit of that vulnerability or else they wouldn’t be in therapy, they’d be in prison. So the prison research looks at psychopaths while the people looking at those on the couch see more vulnerability. And in
