Is there an Easy Way to Detect Narcissism? | Core of Narcissistic Personality

welcome to my scientifically informed insider look at mental health topics if you find this video to be interesting or helpful please like it and subscribe to my channel hello this is dr. grande today I want to answer a question I received about narcissism actually I received a few different questions and I've seen a lot of questions where people are asking is there some simple way to detect either trade narcissism or narcissistic personality sorter that's the disorder and the s/m that has different narcissistic characteristics well the short answer is no these constructs are fairly complex and a lot of different characteristics have to line up to lead to somebody having trade narcissism or to have the disorder but there are some different elements I think indicate narcissism more strongly than others so I guess you could say this video is really about what's the core of narcissism in my opinion so I thought I'll answer this question it's not going to be a perfect answer but it's gonna open up a lot of opportunity for discussion that's the plus side now a lot of times what happens here is people look at the symptom criteria in the DSM because again there's some similarity of course between NPD the disorder and narcissism and they'll say well the the best indicator is that first symptom criterion a grandiose sense of self-importance but my challenge to that would be how is that observable how do we know that somebody has a grandiose sense of self-importance now there are may be a lot of ways but a lot of those examples of what points to that grandiosity are actually are the symptom criteria in the definition of NPD a sense of entitlement feeling special jealousy arrogance lack of empathy if we take these things together and somebody met all those symptom criteria oftentimes we would say well those mean that we have a grandiose sense of self-importance so I'm not really happy with that symptom criterion as something that's easy to spot but it does point strongly a narcissus the problem is is a higher-level construct it's a construct made up of other characteristics well then I hear the argument about sense of entitlement well if somebody believes they deserve more than somebody else they deserve admiration that's also a symptom criterion then that makes sense as a clear indicator of narcissism right that deserving something if somebody clearly doesn't deserve does seem like it's very tied in with the core of narcissism I've also heard the same argument about jealousy and arrogance especially the condescending component and lack of empathy and manipulation but I view lack of empathy and manipulation more as something that happens because somebody is narcissistic rather than being at the core of narcissism now one of the lesser-known or lesson mentioned symptom criterion is fantasies of success wealth power and the ideal love and I've always thought this is actually a fairly good indicator of narcissism not perfect though and not always easy to detect although sometimes it can be so I was reading this article not that long ago about the dark triad it was written by Jones and paws-up with the reference to article in this video description and I was reading this article is about the dark triad of course narcissism is one of the dark triad traits so is psychopathy and Machiavellianism and one of the studies in the article or the experiments was dealing with deception and narcissism so it got me thinking about my two favorite indicators of narcissism which we the fantasies of success and power and a sense of entitlement what do they have in common so I came to this conclusion just my opinion of course that the core of narcissism if I'm going to really simplify things here is self-deception if somebody can deceive others that's one type of deception we see that with psychopathy and and really a lot of different traits we see that with but to lie and to start to believe the lie yourself is really highly consistent with a sense of entitlement again deserving something that other people don't deserve it's not logical or reasonable and it's particularly strongly tied to fantasy a lot of times people fantasize they have to at least a small level a small degree believe that the fantasy can be true or could come true and this is form of self-deception I'll use this example I like sci-fi movies and I like pretty much all the Star Wars movies so if you go into watch of Star Wars movie you do it to be entertained and the people that make the movie they know that the movies not true and when you go in to see the movie you know it's not true you don't believe that they're really people fighting in outer space with lightsabers but you go in and you suspend your disbelief this is really of course a core concept in terms of enjoying movies so to some degree the people that make the movie and you enter into this agreement where you're going to suspend disbelief you're going to tell yourself a lie and then start to believe it just for the purposes of being entertained I think when this same construct is taken to an extreme this really points to narcissism this is the self-deception that would rise to a narcissistic level and lead to fantasies that people are much more invested in if you think about the fantasies that narcissists have again at some level they really believe that it could happen they may know it probably won't happen but I think they need to believe it can happen so for the second part of this test in terms of narcissistic or is self-deception even if it is at the core of narcissism is it observable can you tell when somebody's lying to you and they're believing the lie as well well this is a fairly good challenge the answer is I don't know I think most people if they have a lot of time with somebody can probably tell when self-deception is going it does have a different feel to it than just deception for some sort of instrumental purpose like if somebody is trying to lie to you to get money from you or to get something else material from you that's usually transparent we would help right we would hope we could detect that and say no I'm not gonna allow you to take my money or whatever but if somebody's talking about something more narcissistic more grandiose like they're inflating their grades that they got when they are in school so they say they're a straight-a student but you happen to know that they were a straight C student well how does this hurt you how are they trying to get something from you it's not really clear they're looking for admiration but that's not really the same as that other type of lying I was talking about they're telling the lie so you'll believe it and that'll put them on a pedestal but they're also talking to lie of some level so they will believe it over time I really do believe that narcissistic lies at least to the narcissist why perceived is true again these are all matters of degrees right they don't hundred percent believe it necessarily although sometimes I think it does rise to that delusional level and of course that would be narcissism comorbid with something else which brings me to an important point even though I've pointed out that in my opinion self-deception seems to be at the core of narcissism or at least it's a good symptom of narcissism it's a good way to detect it potentially it could also point to a number of other disorders I mentioned antisocial personality sorter of course borderline personality disorder it could be indicative of some sort of delusion like we might see with schizophrenia or mania so it's not so simple to say well if you see self-deception you have found narcissism it's just something that could point to narcissism whenever we take complex constructs and we try to reduce them of course we get inaccuracy there's no simple way to detect all these complex constructs I mentioned this earlier in the video so this is just my idea something I thought was interesting as I looked at the literature and looked at my experience and thought maybe maybe self-deception is playing a part here now I know there's a lot of different opinions and sometimes strong opinions about narcissism I would really look forward to reading comments about this if you would make a comment in that section this video and start a dialogue about narcissism and how its detected everybody has a different experience of narcissism because every narcissist is different and everybody has a different ability in terms of detecting narcissism some people are really good at detecting narcissism and other people can't see it no matter what happens so I'd be interested to see what I imagine will be a wide variety a lot of diversity of opinion I hope you found this description of narcissism and what may indicate narcissism to be interesting thanks for watching

Channel: Dr. Todd Grande

Views: 66,833

Keywords: detecting Narcissism, core of Narcissism, signs, symptoms, Narcissism, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, grandiose sense of self-importance, fantasies about wealth and power, special or unique, excessive admiration, sense of entitlement, exploiting other people interpersonally, lack of empathy, envy, arrogance, pathological narcissism, grandiose narcissism, vulnerable narcissism, dark triad, psychopathy, Machiavellianism

Id: al1077dL8Es

Length: 9min 45sec (585 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 06 2018